Exploring Family Supervision Effects on Adolescents’ Internet Usage and Anxiety

ABSTRACT

Parental responses to concerns about excessive internet use often involve monitoring online activity. Drawing on developmental psychology, we theorize that such monitoring, perceived as control, increases adolescent anxiety. Attachment theory informs our exploration of elder siblings’ influence. We collected quantitative data through a survey of 387 adolescents studying in grade 9 and 11. The results of our model showed that parental monitoring, while associated with reduced online time spent by adolescents, is also linked to higher internet anxiety. Further, the presence of an elder sibling amplifies the direct effect of parental monitoring on online time spent. Additionally, even in the absence of parental monitoring, the involved elder sibling enhances the internet anxiety in adolescents. Overall, this work provides evidence for the adverse outcomes of both parental monitoring and sibling involvement, along with the amplifying effect of sibling presence on the relationship between parental monitoring and online time spent.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet adoption
• adolescent
• parental monitoring
• sibling
• internet anxiety

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the organizers of the IFIP WG8.6 2024 conference, especially the general co-chairs, for providing a platform in India to present our work. We are particularly grateful to Professor Bandi for chairing the panel where we presented an earlier version of this work and for guiding us towards a niche empirical focus. We would also like to thank Professor Vijay Sherry Chand for his friendly and helpful reviews on earlier drafts of this manuscript. Finally, we extend our sincere appreciation to the editor and reviewers of the Journal of Computer Information Systems whose valuable feedback undoubtedly improved our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).