As the world evolves into a media saturated environment, the focus of many studies have been the negative effects of media on children and adolescents. For at least the past two decades, researchers have explored how parental involvement in their child's media consumption can influence child outcomes. Parental mediation of media includes restrictive mediation, active mediation, and co-viewing. Three meta-analyses, one for each type of mediation, reviewed a total of 69 studies. Each analysis assessed the effectiveness of parental mediation of media on five pertinent child outcomes: media use, aggression, substance use, sexual behavior, and negative health outcomes. The overall results indicated small, but significant relationships between child outcomes and restrictive mediation (r+ = .07), active mediation (r+ = .01), and co-viewing (r+ = .09). Effects on certain child outcomes were stronger than others. Parents have the ability to mitigate some of the adverse effects through parental mediation of media by creating rules for media use: discussing character's choices and central themes and consuming media together. Finally, several gaps in the existing literature were identified and discussed.

This thesis investigates what parental mediation strategies parents of children under twouse and what factors are involved that influence their decisions. To find that out, it isalso of interest to this work how these parents integrate media in daily routines withtheir children and for what purposes they turn to digital devices. To find out about theirmediation strategies, six families kept a media diary and ten first-time parents wereinterviewed as follow-up to the diaries. The results of both methods showed that parentsof children under two mainly used restrictive mediation, active mediation and distantmediation. Restrictions regarded time, content, devices, and location. However, theserestrictions were no clear formulated rules yet but affiliate to the high awareness that theparticipants stated regarding media use with their children, probably also influenced bymoral panics. The same applies to distant mediation: even though media was used inmoments when parents needed to do e.g. housework, most parents refrained fromreferring to media as a ‘babysitter’. The most intriguing finding is that first-time parentsrestrict their own media use so that their child’s screen time is as little as possible.Acting as role models, parents would hide their devices when their child becomes awareor look at it somewhere where their child cannot see it. Factors that influencedmediation strategy decisions were high awareness also due to official recommendations,concerns of parents, positive notions towards media use, tendency to show more aschild grows, and negative emotions connected to media. With these findings, this thesiscontributes to contemporary research on mediation strategies of parents under twowhich is still scarce now but needs to be considered in further research as this studyproves.