Date of Conferral

2019

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Psychology

Advisor

Charles Diebold

Abstract

Research is limited on the differences between mothers and fathers on traditional and Internet parenting styles, particularly fathers' Internet parenting styles. Baumrind's parenting styles typology guided this quantitative, cross-sectional assessment of mothers and fathers of children age 6-13 years old on 4 dimensions of the Parenting Style Scale; 6 subscales of the Internet Parenting Style Instrument, hours a child spent on the Internet for school versus entertainment, and several key demographics to examine canonical correlation dimensions relating traditional and Internet parenting styles and to examine differences in styles between mothers and fathers. A convenience sample (N =129) was collected from Amazon Mechanical Turk workers via SurveyMonkey. On the first canonical root, participants who had high authoritative and high indulgent scores tended to stop unsuitable websites and tended to have high scores on supervision, rules, support, and communication. A second significant root indicated those who had low neglectful scores, lower levels of education, were older, whose child was older, and whose child spent more entertainment Internet hours tended to not stop Internet chatting and to have low scores on rules and supervision. Mothers scored significantly higher than males on Internet communication, supervision, rules, and stopping unsuitable websites. Positive social change can result in improved parent-child communication as fathers engage in an authoritative parenting style of their children's usage of the Internet. Children's behavior can change from the active involvement of fathers to provide supervision and rules for time limits and content limits for the online activities of children age 6-13 years old.

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