Predicting Parental Mediation Behaviors: The Direct and Indirect Influence of Parents’ Critical Thinking About Media and Attitudes about Parent-Child Interactions

Many parents fail to interact with their children regularly about media content and past research has identified few predictors of parents’ engagement in parental mediation behaviors. The present study explored the relationship between parents’ critical thinking about media and parents’ provision of both active and restrictive mediation of television content. Results revealed that parents’ critical thinking about media is positively associated with both active and restrictive mediation, relationships mediated by parents’ attitudes toward parent-child interactions about media. These findings suggest that media literacy programs aimed at improving parents’ critical thinking about media may be an effective way to alter children’s responses to media exposure and that these media literacy programs should promote positive attitudes toward parental mediation

Influencer Marketing Between Mothers: The Impact of Disclosure and Visual Brand Promotion

Mothers are among the original social media influencers and their social media content plays a vital role in supporting and sustaining motherhood through relationships of social exchange while simultaneously supporting brand marketing efforts. This study, then, uses a within-subjects, repeated-measure experimental design to examine how increasing the overtness in the promotional explicitness through the text and images of mother influencers’ (Insta-Moms) Instagram posts disrupts mother consumers’ affective responses toward the messages either directly or indirectly, through perceptions of manipulative intent. Findings indicate adverse response when promotional disclosure was present but brand promotion was less overtly explicit, but when brands were both textually and visually promoted, it assuaged feelings of manipulative intent and enhanced affective response to the posts

Sharenting and the Extended Self: Self-Representation in Parents’ Instagram Presentations of Their Children

The sharenting practice, or the sharing of one’s parenting and children online, has become a popular topic of critical focus that decries it as an exploitative disregard for children’s privacy and rights. The practice is performed, however, by a population (i.e., parents) that is generally inclined to protect its children, raising the present research question of whether sharenting could be alternatively guided by self-presentational goals. Guided by the theoretical notion of the extended self, the present study qualitatively examines parents’ Instagram posts using constant comparative analysis to identify how parents self-present in their sharenting posts. The results identify three self-presentational categories that illustrate how parents’ social media posts that depict a parent–child relational identity may actually be intended representations of the parent’s self. Implications for theory are discussed, as well as practical implications for the appropriate management of parents’ identities in a manner that respects children’s rights and privacy