Adolescent problematic gaming and its association with maternal behaviors: A dyadic study focusing on the relational-emotional correlates

Problematic Gaming (PG) is an ever-growing phenomenon, and its most dysfunctional manifestations have been officially recognized as gaming disorder (World Health Organization WHO, 2019, Reed et al., 2022). Because studies have reported a higher risk for developing PG in adolescence (Colasante et al., 2022, Stevens et al., 2021), it is important to identify the associated risk and protective factors in this phase of life. Among these factors, the literature has highlighted the role of parental behaviors (Bussone et al., 2020). Along with parental mediation practices regulating gaming activities, research evidenced associations between the relational-emotional correlates of parenting and adolescent PG (Nielsen et al., 2020). To date, however, most studies examining the link between the parent-adolescent relationship and PG have relied exclusively on adolescent reports, with only a few studies involving dyads, mainly carried out in the Eastern countries (Lam and Cheng, 2022, Li et al., 2018, Mun and Lee, 2021). This study adds to the literature by exploring the associations between maternal behaviors and adolescent PG using a multi-informant approach within the European context.

To operationalize the associations, the parental acceptance and rejection theory (Rohner et al., 2012) can be helpful. According to this theory, the quality of parenting can foster or hinder adolescent adjustment. While parental acceptance, expressed through parental warmth, is generally positively associated with adaptive offspring development, parental rejection can involve a variety of expressions potentially associated with negative outcomes. Among these expressions, parental indifference was specifically selected for this study, in line with a cross-cultural meta-analysis pinpointing it as a major risk factor for adolescent maladjustment (Khaleque, 2015). In the field of adolescent gaming, two studies (Chen et al., 2020, Kim and Kim, 2015) provided initial evidence for the protective effect of parental warmth against PG, while other research revealed that the different expressions of parental rejection were positively associated with adolescent PG (Throuvala et al., 2019, Xie et al., 2021, Zhu and Chen, 2021). An important limitation of these studies, however, is that they collected information only from adolescents, without considering parental perceptions.

Given the interdependence of the parent-adolescent relationship, investigating the family domain by involving both adolescents and parents as sources of information is recommended to increase the accuracy of assessment (Laursen et al., 2008). Concerning adolescent PG, taking the parental perspective into account is fundamental, since parents are often the ones who recognize gaming-related problems and report them to professionals, acting as proxy informants for their offspring (Wartberg et al., 2019).

Thus, capitalizing on a self-selected sample of mother-adolescent dyads, we aimed to: (a) examine multiple informants’ reports of adolescent PG and maternal behaviors (i.e. warmth and indifference) and (b) disentangle the associations between the behaviors shared by mothers and adolescents from those that are unique to each member.

Regarding mother-adolescent ratings of PG, we did not advance a definite hypothesis, as current evidence is mixed (Wartberg et al., 2019, Yazdi et al., 2021). Concerning maternal behaviors, we expected that mothers would provide higher estimates of warmth and lower estimates of indifference than adolescents would (Rohner et al., 2005). Finally, we expected a negative association between maternal warmth and adolescent PG and a positive association between maternal indifference and adolescent PG from the reports of both informants, with low to moderate levels of agreement (Ledermann & Kenny, 2012).

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