Parenting Attitudes and Korean Adolescents’ Mobile Phone Dependency: Testing the Mediating Effects of Depression

Abstract

The study aims to analyze the relationship between Korean adolescents’ parenting attitudes and adolescents’ mobile phone dependence and the mediating role of adolescent depression between the two. The study focuses on suggesting a good parenting attitude. This research used the panel data technique to study 2,056 junior students in the 2015 Korean Children and Youth Panel Survey (KCYPS) and was conducted by the Korea Youth Policy Institute. The main variables of the study were parenting attitudes, mobile phone dependency, and depression. Three factors, including supervision, emotion, and rationality interpretation, were analyzed to measure positive parenting attitudes, while three additional factors, including excessive expectations, over-intervention, and incoherence (inconsistency), were measured to measure negative parenting attitudes. It is evident from the results that adolescent depression plays an important mediating role in the relationship between parents' negative parenting attitudes and adolescents' dependence on mobile phones. This study emphasized that depression is a variable that influences adolescents’ dependence on mobile phones. The higher the parent’s negative parenting attitude, the higher the adolescent’s dependence on the mobile phone, and thus greater the possibility of excessive use of the mobile phone. Negative parenting attitudes may also affect adolescents' mobile phone dependency through affecting depression. Additionally, studies also show that positive parenting attitudes have no effect on mobile phone dependency.