Parenting young children: family media ecology, stress, and parenting styles

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on parenting young children, articulating family media ecology, parental stress, and parenting styles. It is organized into three chapters. Chapter 1 provides the conceptual foundation by showing that screen time alone offers only a partial view of children’s media experiences, while parental mediation, technoference, interaction quality, parenting, and structural conditions are central to understanding media use in early childhood. Chapter 2 analyzed data from 108 Brazilian caregivers of children aged 6 to 36 months and showed that indicators of family media ecology helped distinguish caregivers with high parental stress. The most informative variables involved digital media use to calm or occupy the child, child regulatory media use, non-digital play time, and video co-viewing. Chapter 3 analyzed data from 96 caregivers of children in the same age range through the development and initial evaluation of the Parenting Attitudes and Behaviors Questionnaire for Young Children (QACP-CP). Findings supported the instrument’s content validity and showed that the relationship between parental attitudes and reported behaviors varied across domains, with clearer alignment in the authoritative and permissive domains than in the authoritarian and disengaged domains. Across the empirical chapters, the dissertation follows a related analytical pipeline that combines regression-based interpretation with prediction-oriented machine-learning procedures, while adapting this logic to different outcomes, measures, and modeling demands in each study. Overall, it offers an integrated account of caregiving contexts in the first years of life and, from a methodological standpoint, highlights the value of combining inferential and predictive approaches in psychological research.