Social Media: Current Trends Among Children and Their Parents and Implications Regarding Interpersonal Communication

Abstract

Social media is an ever-evolving form of technological communication that affects different generations in different ways. As modern children have grown up with social technologies integrated into their daily lives, parents have been left in the midst of a generational gap. Recent studies have shown that older generations are now greatly increasing their social media use, in an effort to, among other reasons, connect with their “digitized” children. Children’s current social media trends indicate slightly slowing growth of new social media users among youth. Both parents and children view modern social media as having both positive and negative consequences, and largely maintain that face-to-face communication is more desirable than communicating through social media. This study examines social media and parent-child communication in the context of Instructional-Affective Communication Theory and Media Richness theory, and presents findings of an originally conducted survey to examine the trends in social media use among children and their parents and what these trends imply regarding interpersonal communication.