Abstract

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THE EFFECT OF PARENTING STYLES ON TEENAGERS’ SOCIAL INTERACTION WITHIN SOCIAL MEDIA IN CHINA

Xuemeng Li, Ann Zedginidze


As information technology develops with a formidable speed in China, social media such as QQ and Wechat are becoming more widespread than ever and are comparable with the dominance of Facebook and Twitter in other countries. With teenagers usually being the majority of users, there are parents worrying about the negative effects of social media. Many parents posed restrictions on their children’s use of social media which lead to conflicts that undermined parent-child relationship. Addressing this increasingly urgent problem, this study discusses the effect of different parenting styles on teenagers’ social interaction within social media in a Chinese context. The parenting styles were mainly measured by Parental Authority Questionnaire (PAQ); teenagers’ social interactions within social media were measured by the number of “close friends” they have in social media accounts. Surveys were distributed in a six-year system high school in Northeastern China, in the city of Shenyang. There were 131 participants in the survey with ages ranging from 11 to 18. The results confirmed that more Authoritarian parents posed more restrictions on children’s use of social media, but rejected the hypothesis that teenagers with more authoritative parents have more close friend online. Instead, it is found that participants with more permissive parents have significantly more close friends online. It is also found that female participants were generally more satisfied with their parent-child relationships, and that there were generally more Permissive fathers than Permissive mothers. Possible causes are the influence of traditional Chinese values(e.g. gender roles, pedagogy) and the collision of traditional values and westernized thoughts, which is characteristic of contemporary China.