The effect of parents' intention to provide their young children with smartphones and the place where the children use smartphones on media overdependence

This study was conducted by reanalyzing the results of the questionnaire used in “JeongWon Lee, Wonsoon Park, Jiwon Eom (2021) A Study on Policy Measures to Optimize the Media Use of Infants and Young Children, Korea Institute of Child Care and Education.” Through this study, the researchers analyzed the impact of parents' intention to provide smartphones and the places where infants and young children use smartphones on media use time and media overdependence. This study classified parents' intentions to provide smartphones for their young children into four categories: limited provision, child initiative, parent initiative, and overall provision groups. In addition, smartphone use by location could be divided into three categories: low use, high use, and residential use groups. Overall, young children spent more time using smartphones on weekends than on weekdays. The time spent using smartphones was generally higher in the group that provides smartphones according to parents' intention to provide smartphones, the group that parents determine the need for themselves, the cluster that children demand, and the cluster that provides smartphones in a limited manner. In terms of usage by location, the clusters were generally high usage, residential usage, and low usage. In the classification of smartphone overdependence by intention to provide, it was found that the group of child initiative group had a lower tendency to be smartphone overdependent than the limited provision group, which had less usage time than the group of child initiative group.