Scholars have advocated for examining parents' media use through a family system lens, highlighting the importance of understanding how parental media use is related to -being of families and individual members (Coyne et al., 2017; Barr et al., 2020, 2024). Research has consistently found that parental media use may be linked with child behavioral problems through less responsive parent-child interactions (Kirkorian et al., 2009; McDaniel and Radesky, 2018). As such, parental media use has emerged as a promising target for interventions, being a modifiable aspect of parenting behavior aimed at enhancing parenting practices, and further, improving child development outcomes.

Parents of young children often turn to screen media as a means of managing their own emotional responses. Studies have indicated that when parents use media to avoid or escape from their own emotional responses, such parental media use may have negative effects on parenting practices (Torres et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2022). Specifically, parents who engage with media use as an escape from their immediate parental responsibilities with preschool-aged children reported higher levels of parenting stress and guilt compared to those who leverage media to seek out social support or parenting information (Torres et al., 2021). This suggests that while media use can offer a convenient and immediate way for parents to unwind, the potential long-term impact depends on the underlying reasons and contexts of use.

Yet, not all parental media use has negative effects on parent-child interactions. Parents engage with media for various beneficial reasons, such as staying connected with the world outside their home or keeping in touch with loved ones during the challenging early days of parenting (Radesky et al., 2016a; Wolfers, 2021; Coyne et al., 2022; Linder et al., 2022). Moreover, qualitative research has demonstrated that parents with children younger than 7 years old often utilize media to seek out information and social support when dealing with stress (Wolfers, 2021). Such findings suggest that parental media use can even enhance parent-child interactions and overall family wellbeing, highlighting the complexities of parental media use.

Parents also use media to regulate their young children's emotional responses and behaviors in several ways. Media can serve as a calming tool, allowing parents to manage their child's emotional responses (Zimmerman et al., 2007; De Decker et al., 2012; Bentley et al., 2016; Radesky et al., 2016b; Nikken, 2019). For instance, it can be used as a distractor during new or stressful situations, such as a doctor's appointment. Such media use not only helps to regulate the child's emotional responses and behavior but also provides the parents with temporary relief or time for themselves (Nabi and Krcmar, 2016). Additionally, child media use can control child behavior by keeping them entertained in public places, such as at restaurants (Radesky et al., 2014; Floegel et al., 2021). As such, parents use media for their young children with regulatory purposes across a variety of settings and contexts.

Several cross-sectional studies have found a link between using media to regulate child emotions and the child's development, including worse self-regulation (Radesky et al., 2016b) and problematic media use (Coyne et al., 2021). A study with preschoolers revealed that using media to calm children was associated with their weaker executive functioning (Danet et al., 2022). However, studies have not clarified whether or how regulatory media use for children is causally related to their socio-emotional development. It could be equally possible that weak child self-regulation leads to more regulatory media use for managing children's emotional responses and behavior, and that regulatory media use causes lower self-regulation by displacing opportunities for children to practice self-regulatory skills. To address this issue, Radesky et al. (2023) explored the bidirectional, longitudinal associations between mobile device use and development in preschoolers. They found that higher emotional reactivity and lower executive functioning in preschoolers predicted a greater likelihood of using mobile devices to calm them at baseline. However, only emotional reactivity was associated bidirectionally and longitudinally with device use for calming at 3- and 6-month follow-ups. These associations were found to be stronger in boys and children with higher levels of surgency defined as higher impulsivity, activity level and reward seeking. Such findings suggest that there may be concurrent and longitudinal relationships between regulatory media use and child socio-emotional development.

Mixed findings around regulatory media use may be due to differences in how it is measured and interpreted. Prior research has primarily investigated parental media use in a qualitative way, either through interviews about parents' motivations for media use (Torres et al., 2021; Wolfers, 2021) or by observing moment-to-moment parental media use in public (Radesky et al., 2014; Linder et al., 2022), exploring various reasons for parental media use in daily parenting. These qualitative studies have provided rich data to develop quantitative scales to test hypotheses and the generalizability of findings, such as associations between regulatory media use and parent-child dynamics and child development in large representative studies. Based on these qualitative findings, researchers have adopted a nuanced approach by conceptualizing regulatory media use as a set of distinct activities based on specific purposes or aspects of use, rather than treating it as a single, overarching construct (Zhang et al., 2022). Some researchers have sought to expand on prior work by testing more comprehensive measures of the context of parent and child media use (Lunkenheimer et al., 2023). This work involved examining how parents manage, perceive, and regulate both their own and their children's screen media use. These findings highlight the importance of developing a comprehensive scale to measure and differentiate the various aspects of parental media use.

Similarly, previous studies on child regulatory use have relied on relatively simple measures that capture limited variability between and within families. To date, child regulatory media use has been assessed with a single question alongside other media-related reasons (e.g., Cingel and Krcmar, 2013; Nabi and Krcmar, 2016; Nikken, 2019). A few studies focused on child regulatory media use also used a single situation to assess media use for regulatory purposes (e.g., Radesky et al., 2016b, 2023; Coyne et al., 2021; Danet et al., 2022). However, using a simple checkbox or single question could mask variability in regulatory use of media between participants and obscure the association between regulatory media use and child outcomes including behavioral/emotional development. Moreover, there may be various ways or contexts in which parents use media to regulate their child's emotional responses and behavior that have different implications for child development (e.g., occupying children during a daily routine vs. using media to soothe a distressed child). For example, reasons for using media with children may differ across different types of media such that videos are commonly used to keep children occupied, whereas books are used for educational purposes and less frequently for occupying (Kucker et al., 2024). Thus, it is crucial to consider child regulatory media use as potentially multifaceted. Recently, some researchers have attempted to measure child regulatory media use across multiple situations (e.g., Coyne et al., 2021), but psychometric value and usefulness of these measures for assessing child regulatory media use have yet to be examined.

In the current study, we developed and tested two scales, one for parent regulatory use and one for child regulatory use to characterize different aspects of regulatory media use for parents and children. In the current paper, we evaluated these scales in an aggregate sample of 791 parents drawn from three subsamples of parents with children of different ages: Subsample 1: 15–25 months (n = 251); Subsample 2: 2–5 years (n = 227); Subsample 3: 5–10 years (n = 313). We first identified the internal consistency and factor structure of each scale (parent, child) via exploratory factor analysis using the aggregate sample. Then, we conducted confirmatory factor analysis within each subsample to test if the same factor structure exists in each child age group. Finally, we examined associations between the regulatory media use scales, parenting stress and child screen time, as a means of assessing predictive validity.

The aggregate sample for this study included 791 parents of children 1–10 years old drawn from three larger studies. We describe the subsamples and recruitment methods for each subsample next.

First, we computed Cronbach's alpha to assess the internal consistency across all items and the overall homogeneity (Tavakol and Dennick, 2011) for the parent scale and the child scale. A higher alpha score indicates greater homogeneity, suggesting that the scale items more consistently measure the same underlying concept.

Next, we examined the overall parent and child scale scores as a function of child age. Given media use is sometimes found to vary non-linearly across age (Anand and Krosnick, 2005), we included both linear and quadratic terms for child age. We also included demographic characteristics as covariates if they (1) differed significantly by subsample as a proxy for child age (Table 1 and Supplementary Table 3), and (2) were significantly correlated with the dependent variable (Supplementary Tables 4, 5).

Third, we conducted an exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to identify the underlying factor structure of each scale, employing data from the aggregated sample across the three subsamples. We used the principal axis factoring approach with direct oblimin (oblique) rotation. In line with previous research finding that the popular Kaiser criterion (i.e., eigenvalue > 1.0) alone is insufficient (Velicer and Jackson, 1990), we also examined the scree plot to determine the optimal number of factors (see Supplementary Figures 1, 2). We followed recommendations by Howard (2016) to exclude items with low factor loadings (below 0.40 on the primary factor) or with cross-loading (loadings above 0.30 on other factors or a difference of < 0.20 between the primary factor and other factors).

Subsequently, we conducted confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) using data drawn from each of the three subsamples. Thus, CFA was used to test whether the factor structure of the aggregated sample that was identified through EFA remained consistent in each child age group. We employed multiple fit indices alongside Chi-Square statistics to evaluate the model, as Chi-Square statistics can be influenced by sample size (Hu and Bentler, 1999). The additional fit indices considered were the Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA), the Comparative Fit Index (CFI), and the Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI). Acceptable and good fit were indicated by CFI and TLI values >0.90 and 0.95, respectively, combined with RMSEA values < 0.08 (Hu and Bentler, 1999).

Lastly, we assessed predictive validity by testing associations between each factor in both parent and child scales and other relevant variables. First, we calculated each factor score by averaging the items included in the factors identified in the exploratory factor analysis. Then, for the parent scale, we examined associations with parenting stress. For the child scale, we explored associations with parenting stress as well as child screen time. A similar process was used to identify demographic covariate, but with the overall score of each scale (i.e., 16 items for the parent scale, 12 items for the child scale). In addition, we calculated correlations between factors within each scale (parent and child scale) and across the two scales.

The mean score for the parent scale across all 16 items and subsamples was 3.08 (SD = 0.63) out of 5, roughly equivalent to “Sometimes.” The original scale with all 16 items demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency overall (α = 0.82) and within each subsample (Subsample 1: α = 0.82; Subsample 2: α = 0.83; Subsample 3: α = 0.81). However, there was substantial variability among the 16 items and across the three subsamples, as illustrated in Figure 1.

The mean score for the child scale across all 12 items and subsamples was 2.20 (SD = 0.71), roughly equivalent to “Rarely.” Similar to the findings in the parent scale, internal consistency for all 12 items in the child scale was satisfactory (α = 0.87). This consistency was also found within each subsample (Subsample 1: α = 0.87; Subsample 2: α = 0.89; Subsample 3: α = 0.79). Again, however, there was substantial variability across the 12 items and the three subsamples, as shown in Figure 3.

Correlations among the factors in the parent and child scales are presented in Table 11. Notably, most of the factors within each scale were significantly correlated (parent: r = 0.24 to 0.31; child: r = 0.13 to 0.56). The only exception was the correlation between the factors in the parent scale for reducing boredom and using calming media [r₍₇₆₅₎ = 0.02, p = 0.67]. In addition, most of the correlations between the parent and child factors were significant. Specifically, the more parents used media to escape from their own family stress, the more they allowed their child to use media to regulate their child's emotional responses and behaviors, occupy their child, and help their child sleep [Regulate: r₍₇₆₅₎ = 0.41, p < 0.001; Occupy: r₍₇₆₅₎ = 0.27, p < 0.001, Sleep: r₍₇₆₅₎ = 0.22, p < 0.001]. The frequency with which parents use media to reduce their own boredom was also correlated with the frequency with which they allowed their children to use media to regulate their children's emotional responses and behaviors and occupy their children [Regulate: r₍₇₆₅₎ = 0.12, p < 0.001; Occupy: r₍₇₆₅₎ = 0.22, p < 0.001]. In addition, the more parents used calming media for themselves, the more they allowed their child to use media to regulate their child's emotional responses and behaviors, occupy their child, and help their child sleep [Regulate: r₍₇₆₅₎ = 0.40, p < 0.001; Occupy: r₍₇₆₅₎ = 0.09, p = 0.02, Sleep: r₍₇₆₅₎ = 0.35, p < 0.001].

The scale developed to measure parents' regulatory media use demonstrated reliable psychometric properties, as indicated by its overall reliability of α = 0.82 for the full set of 16 items. This high reliability indicates a robust internal consistency within the scale, highlighting its effectiveness in assessing how parents use media for regulatory purposes in their everyday life. However, there was substantial variability among the individual items in the scale, as well as across the three subsamples. Such variability indicates that the extent to which parents use media for regulatory purposes may vary by specific situational contexts, varying ages of their children, or other demographic differences that vary across subsamples. These nuances led to further exploration of the scale's associations with demographics, as well as potential distinct factors within the scale.

We examined whether demographics significantly predict parents' overall regulatory media use. Child age did not emerge as a significant predictor. This finding suggests that the developmental stage of children may not greatly impact how parents use media themselves for their own regulatory purposes. Instead, our analysis revealed that both parent race and parent age were significant predictors of parents' regulatory media use. Specifically, Black/African American parents reported using media more frequently for their own regulatory purposes compared to White parents. However, it is worth noting that our subsequent analyses did not find a significant association between race and overall parenting stress. This could indicate that media serves as a more commonly used resource for Black/African American parents compared to White parents, not necessarily driven by underlying group differences in wellbeing. Nevertheless, it is necessary to delve deeper into the underlying reasons for these differences in the future research. Such an exploration can include determining whether these differences are associated with attitudinal variations, higher need for emotion regulation support due to systemic discrimination, or differences in media content and design features (e.g., use of targeted, engagement-prolonging digital design), to name a few. Additionally, our results showed a decrease in the overall score on the parent scale with increasing parent age. This suggests that younger parents are more likely to use media as a regulatory tool for themselves, possibly due to greater familiarity with or reliance on digital technologies. Overall, these findings highlight the complex ways in which parents use media for regulatory purposes. The associations with demographic factors such as parent race and age highlight the nuanced nature of media use in parenting, necessitating a more detailed exploration of these dynamics in future studies.

The EFA of the parent scale identified a three-factor structure: using media to escape from family stress, to entertain themselves, and to calm themselves. The first factor highlights the role of media use as a respite from the pressures and challenges of family life. This aligns with previous findings that suggest media can serve as a temporary escape providing parents with a chance to recover and take some rest (Radesky et al., 2016a; Torres et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2022; Lunkenheimer et al., 2023). The second factor for the current study indicates that media is also used as a tool for entertainment, motivated by intentional or habitual pleasure-seeking or boredom reduction. The third factor captures the deliberate choice of media content that provides soothing or relaxation. This represents a strategic use of media to manage one's emotional state, particularly in seeking tranquility or reducing anxiety.

The results of the CFA in this study largely supported the EFA findings on the parent scale, particularly in terms of its structural consistency across three distinct age groups of children. However, the findings were not as robust in the infant subsample. This discrepancy may be due to the unique challenges faced by parents of infants, such as greater variability in their work schedules and access to and use of out-of-home childcare (Corkin et al., 2018). Despite these differences, the consistent factor structure within each age group suggests that the ways in which parents use media to regulate themselves (i.e., to escape family stress, reduce boredom, and utilize calming media) are common experiences among parents of young children, regardless of the specific age of their children. This pattern indicates that parents' regulatory use of media is an integral part of their daily lives (Livingstone, 2007), possibly serving as coping mechanisms for themselves. That is, the frequent reliance on media for regulatory purposes may reflect the persistent stressors or challenges parents encounter during the early years of their child's life. Despite relatively low consistency in the factor structures with the infant subsample, there was still high internal consistency among the original set of 16 items in the infant sample. This finding may suggest that while the overall scale is useful, it may reflect a more general tendency toward regulatory media use in this group rather than a constellation of distinct motivations. Future research should aim to replicate these findings and refine the scale, with a particular focus on items that capture meaningful variation among parents of young children.

Additionally, the overall parent scale score predicted parenting stress, particularly through one of its factors focusing on media use as an escape from family stress. This finding provides predictive validity, indicating parents who report more parenting stress overall are indeed more likely to report using media to self-regulate, and in particular to escape from family stress. Additional analyses found that parents with younger children reported frequent media use for themselves to escape from household stress. Moreover, this finding aligns with recent research showing that parent stress is positively associated with parental media use to regulate their own emotions and to ease the burden of caregiving (Lunkenheimer et al., 2023). This group of parents often use media as a means to momentarily distance themselves from the immediate demands and stress of managing a household with young children (Torres et al., 2021). Therefore, the parent scale (and particularly its escape factor) effectively captures the extent to which parents, especially those with younger children, use media and the reasons for their media use.

The scale developed to assess regulatory media use for children also demonstrated reliable psychometric properties, as indicated by its overall reliability of α = 0.87 across 12 items. Similar to the parent scale, there was substantial variability both across the items and across the three age groups. This variability suggests potential patterns in how parents utilize media to regulate their children, particularly in specific contexts and across different child age ranges. These nuances led to an additional investigation into its correlations with demographic variables and the possibility of unique factors within the scale.

In our analysis examining demographic predictors of the overall score of child regulatory media use, we found that child age was a significant predictor. There were both linear and quadratic associations between child age and the overall score on the child scale. This finding suggests that parents' use of media as a regulatory tool does not uniformly increase or decrease with a child's age. Rather, this type of media use increases during infancy and toddlerhood and reaches its peak during early childhood, an age range where behavior management can be the most challenging. This pattern can be linked with developmental changes in negative emotionality and self-regulation. Young children's negative emotionality begins to develop during their first 2 years of life (Rothbart and Bates, 2006; Lipscomb et al., 2011; Brauchli et al., 2024), and it peaks around early childhood. High levels of negative emotionality in childhood are linked to various behavioral problems, including internalizing (Ghassabian et al., 2014; Rodrigues et al., 2022) and externalizing behavior problems (Lipscomb et al., 2012; White et al., 2013; Perry et al., 2018). While it is an important developmental task for young children to master their emotional and behavior responses, young children often depend on external support to acquire those skills (Kopp, 1989; Coyne et al., 2021). A recent longitudinal study showed that there was a bidirectional relationship between 1 and 3-year-old children's screen time and their negative affect (Brauchli et al., 2024), suggesting that parents were using media to regulate their young children's negative emotions. Subsequently, there tends to be a decrease in the frequency and intensity of negative emotionality and externalizing behavior from preschool to late elementary school (Murphy et al., 1999; Sallquist et al., 2009), likely due to development of language skills (Skibbe et al., 2011, 2019; Vallotton and Ayoub, 2011), impulse inhibition (Fujita, 2011; Hofmann et al., 2012), and other contributors to self-regulation facilitated by prefrontal cortex development (Gillespie et al., 2018; Jadhav and Boutrel, 2019). Within early childhood, different aspects of self-regulation develop at varying times and rates; typically, emotional regulation develops before behavioral self-regulation (Howse et al., 2003). As self-regulation develops during early childhood, parents may find themselves using media less frequently to manage their children's emotional responses and behaviors than before.

Additionally, parent race and parent education were also significant predictors of the overall child scale score. This finding implies that structural factors may play an important role in shaping parental attitudes and practices regarding media use with children. These attitudes and practices may include many different aspects, from how appropriate and effective parents perceive media to be for their children (Rideout and Robb, 2020), to their access to various media devices, their familiarity with different types of media content, and their access to other parenting resources that may influence parental stress and burnout, such as affordable childcare (e.g., Kroshus et al., 2023). Prior studies have demonstrated that the lack of parent resources, including money, time, and energy, find it difficult to limit their children's media use (Evans et al., 2011; Minges et al., 2015; Nikken and Opree, 2018). Therefore, it is likely that parents who lack other means to provide alternative activities due to financial or other life pressure may be more likely to use media to regulate their children's emotions and behaviors. Overall, these findings highlight the complexity of structural factors associated with how parents use media with their children. This complexity underscores the need for future research to extend its focus beyond simply representative samples. Therefore, it is essential to examine diverse populations, acknowledging the varied socioeconomic, cultural, and individual contexts that shape family media use. Such an approach will ensure that findings are more universally applicable as well as be sensitive to the needs of different family dynamics.

The EFA identified a three-factor structure within this scale: using media to regulate children, to occupy children, and to help children sleep. The first factor reflects the strategic use of media to manage a child's emotional state or behavior. This strategic use captures how parents employ media as a tool to manage their child's emotional responses and behaviors, and is consistent with previous literature (Bentley et al., 2016; Radesky et al., 2016b). In addition, this factor may be associated with young children's socio-emotional development. Existing literature has found that the concurrent and longitudinal associations between using media to calm down young children and their socio-emotional development, including socio-emotional difficulties (Radesky et al., 2016a), as well as executive functioning and emotional reactivity (Radesky et al., 2023). In our scale development study, we did not examine the potential associations between this “Regulate” factor and children's socio-emotional development because appropriate measures of the latter were not available in each cohort. Future work should explore these associations and their implications for child development.

The second factor demonstrates media use for keeping the child occupied when parents need to be physically absent or are busy with other tasks. This type of media use has been described as a “babysitter” in previous studies (De Decker et al., 2012; Knowles et al., 2015; Bentley et al., 2016; Nikken, 2019). Within the context of parent-child dynamics, this type of media use fulfills the parents' practical needs and goals at specific times of day, while the first factor, to regulate a child's emotional responses and behaviors, is more related to the child's in-the-moment needs (Nikken, 2019).

The third factor captures media use in establishing or supporting a child's sleep routines. While previous research has found that media use either before or in the middle of the night to help children fall back to sleep when they wake up may be associated with lower quality sleep (Garrison et al., 2011; Hisler et al., 2020), this factor demonstrates that parents do use media to some extent to regulate their children's sleep. Future research should examine whether such regulatory media use is associated with sleep onset, quality, and duration. Together, these three factors in the child scale highlights the multifaceted role that media plays in the lives of young children.

The CFA in our study found an acceptable fit of the three-factor structure within each age group on at least one metric of model fit. This consistency suggests that the child scale effectively captures different aspects of regulatory media use for children with a wide range of ages. The child scale is consistent with prior research but advances the field that has predominantly relied on single item measurement. The development of a more sensitive and reliable child scale in the present study will improve measurement of child regulatory media and allow researchers to better predict child outcomes.

We further tested the predictive validity by examining associations between identified factors in the child scale and both parenting stress and child screen time. First, parents who reported higher parenting stress reported more frequent media use to regulate their child's emotional responses and behaviors, as well as to occupy them. This finding aligns with the previous research (Elias and Sulkin, 2019), which shows that parents often use media to fulfill their own needs. It suggests that parents experiencing parenting-related stress might rely more heavily on media as a regulatory tool for their children, possibly due to heightened reactivity to child behavior or a lack of alternative resources or coping strategies (Shin et al., 2021). Additionally, greater parent-reported child media use to regulate a child's emotional responses and behaviors was the only factor that predicted an increase in overall child screen time. Parents, particularly of young children, are gatekeepers of their child's media use, initiating and terminating it. Hence, parents who frequently use media to regulate their child are more likely to allow extended child screen time, such as watching TV/video or playing apps/games. In contrast to the intentional use of media to occupy children, this may be due to the on-demand nature of media use as a tool for emotion regulation, to which children may become habituated and keep expecting when they feel distressed. The findings may also suggest that using media for children at predictable times of the day might be a strategy for limiting overall child screen time, whereas using media to regulate children's emotional responses or behaviors could potentially lead to increased screen time. The overarching implication of these findings is that significant associations exist between parenting stress, child screen time, and the two factors (regulate and occupy), indicating that the child scale effectively captures the dynamics of parents using media for regulating their child's emotional responses and behaviors and for occupying them.

There were significant correlations between parent and child factors. The high level of internal consistency across all items in each scale (parent: 16 items, child: 12 items), combined with significant correlations between factors, suggest that there are consistent patterns in how parents use the response scale. Significant correlations between factors in the parent and child scales could indicate consistent patterns in each family's regulatory media use for all members in the household. That is, this consistency might demonstrate shared attitudes or role modeling of behaviors related to media use within the family context, highlighting how parents' media habits may be closely linked to those of their children. However, it may also simply reflect common method variance given both scales were completed by the same person within a single online survey.

Despite high correlations among the parent and child factors, EFA/CFA and predictive validity results for the two scales suggest there is some heterogeneity in the reasons a given parent uses media for themselves or their child that differentially predict factors such as parenting stress and child screen time. Overall, the parent and child scales provide novel insights into the varied regulatory roles of media in families with young children. It highlights the importance of understanding the reasons behind parent and children's media use and their potential associations with their development and daily routines.

The current work represents an initial step in developing a valid, reliable measure that captures a range of regulatory uses of media for parents and children across a wide age range. Our results illustrate the possible utility of such a measure among parents of infants, young children, and school-age children. The results also capture more variability than past work regarding the frequency and nature of regulatory media use. These contributions notwithstanding, future work should seek to overcome some limitations in the current study. First, the reliance on parent-reported data for all measures, while practical, may introduce biases or inaccuracies in reporting. Future work should incorporate objective measures to complement and validate the self-reported data. For example, predictivity validity could be established using direct observations of parents' and children's media use.

Another limitation is that we did not collect data on parent and child gender. It is possible that fathers and mothers different in the extent to which they use media to regulate their child's emotional responses and behaviors. In addition, child gender may be associated with parental regulatory media use for their children, based on gender differences in self-regulation (Weinberg et al., 1999; Veijalainen et al., 2021) and emotion socialization (Root and Rubin, 2010; Chen et al., 2020). Future work should examine whether the extent to which parents use media for regulatory purposes with and around their young children differ by parent or child gender.

Other limitations arise from the limited scope and generalizability of this research. For example, the three studies included in the current paper were limited in the types of measures available for predictive validity. For example, future research could include measures other than parenting stress, such as other measures of parent wellbeing as well as child behavior and family dynamics. Such research would help to test the degree to which parent-reported reasons for using media with and around their children has value above and beyond global estimates of children's amount of media use. Moreover, future work should seek to establish the generalizability of the measure, such as testing reliability and validity within subpopulations in the US and cross-culturally.

A final set of limitations reflect the complexity of media use within the family system. While our scales capture variability in the frequency and nature of regulatory uses of media, they do not capture other perceived functions of media use, such as helping families bond through shared media use or educating parents and children through the use of educational/informative media (but see Koch et al., under review). There is some evidence to suggest regulatory use of media may be especially problematic, particularly for infants and young children (Radesky et al., 2016a, 2023; Coyne et al., 2021). Meanwhile, using media to get parenting support and advice may be more beneficial (Torres et al., 2021). A more comprehensive picture of the motivations driving parents' media use with and around young children will help to contextualize such media use and inform guidance aimed at encouraging healthy media practices. Similarly, we were not able to examine the types of media content and design features used, particularly for children. The potential impact of media use on children depends in part on the types of content and design (Radesky et al., 2014; Radesky and Hiniker, 2022). Thus, it will be important for future research to examine the degree to which different media motivations (including regulatory media use) result in use of different media content and design features.

Although not a limitation per se, another future direction involves refining and establishing generalizability of the scales. For example, only six out of a full set of 16 items were included in the three identified factors of the parent scale. It implies that several items within the parent scale captured behaviors or attitudes that did not align with other items in the scale. For the child scale, all the items in the child scale were included in the three identified factors of the child scale. Moving forward, our ongoing and future work will seek to refine these scales to maximize reliability and validity while minimizing participant burden. This process involves making adjustments or removing some items in the scales as necessary to better capture and focus on regulatory media use for parents and children.