Predictors of young children’s problematic screen media use in Aotearoa New Zealand: Testing the interactional theory of childhood problematic media use model

The Interactional Theory of Childhood Problematic Media Use (IT-CPU) outlines distal, proximal, and maintaining factors that can directly and indirectly influence children’s development of problematic media use (PMU). However, our understanding of the interplay across these factors remains limited due to the scarcity of studies explicitly testing the full IT-CPU. To address this gap, we employed hierarchical linear regression to explore the relationships among distal (parental PMU and socioeconomic status), proximal (general and media-specific parenting practices, parental self-efficacy, and parental burnout), and maintaining (parent-child closeness and conflict) parenting factors in relation to preschool children’s PMU. Participants included 138 parents (Mage = 34.34 years, SD = 6.01, 90% mothers) of preschool-age (2–5 years) children (Mage = 46.08 months, SD = 10.37, 47.1% girls) who completed parenting and media use questionnaires. Results showed that parents’ own PMU was the strongest predictor of child PMU across all models, and general parenting factors were stronger predictors of child PMU than media-specific strategies. Unexpectedly, media-specific proximal parenting behaviors did not significantly predict child PMU after accounting for general parenting behaviors. We discuss these findings in light of recent parenting advice on children’s media use that prioritizes media-specific parenting rather than broader parenting practices and relationship quality.