Parent Training Increased Active Mediation of Adolescents’ Smartphone Use

In a recent trial, parents who completed a training program reported higher levels of active mediation of adolescents’ smartphone use than a no-intervention control group, and the difference was reported as maintained at a two-month follow-up. The experiment enrolled parents of adolescents described as having problematic smartphone use and compared training participation with continuing routine activities in a six-session parent training trial. Outcomes were assessed at pretest, posttest, and a two-month follow-up within the reported design.

The authors describe a controlled experiment using a 2 (group: experimental vs. control) × 3 (time: pretest, posttest, follow-up) mixed factorial design to evaluate change over time between conditions. Participants were recruited through a middle school in Hubei Province, China; eligibility required having a child in grades 7–8 (ages 12–15) who met the study’s criteria for problematic smartphone use based on the Mobile Phone Addiction Scale (Hong et al., 2012), as well as no prior participation in parent training. Sixty-two parents initially consented and were randomly assigned to experimental (n=31) and control (n=31) groups; two experimental-group participants withdrew due to work commitments, leaving 29 completers, while the control group had no attrition. The design allowed comparison of within-person change across timepoints and between-group differences in those changes.

Training was delivered as weekly, two-hour Saturday-morning group sessions led by two licensed psychologists (a senior clinician with more than 10 years of family-therapy experience and a doctoral-level psychologist) who had completed a 40-hour Parent Effectiveness Training (P.E.T.) workshop; facilitators followed a standardized manual to support consistency. The program incorporated skill practice and role-play, and structured homework was assigned after each session and reviewed at the start of the next meeting, as described by the authors. The primary outcome was parental active mediation measured with the 4-item Active Mediation Subscale of Smartphone Use adapted from Nikken and Jansz (2014) for smartphone context, rated on a 5-point Likert scale; Cronbach’s α was reported as 0.82 (pretest), 0.85 (posttest), and 0.87 (follow-up). Measures were repeated at all three timepoints to capture immediate change and short-term maintenance.

For inference testing, the authors report a Greenhouse–Geisser–corrected repeated-measures ANOVA after Mauchly’s test indicated a sphericity violation (W=0.89, p=0.042). In the repeated-measures ANOVA results, main effects were reported for group (F(1,58)=4.64, p<0.05, partial η2=0.074) and time (F(2,57)=22.70, p<0.001, partial η2=0.44), along with a group×time interaction (F(2,57)=28.15, p<0.001, partial η2=0.50). Simple effects analyses were described as showing no between-group difference at pretest, followed by a posttest difference (F(1,58)=5.75, p<0.05, partial η2=0.09) and a larger difference at the two-month follow-up (F(1,58)=40.03, p<0.001, partial η2=0.41). Overall, the reported pattern was higher active mediation in the training group at later assessments relative to the control group.

The discussion notes several constraints on interpretation, including reliance on parents’ self-report for evaluating change and the possibility of social desirability bias; the authors also describe the sample as self-selected and strongly motivated to address adolescents’ smartphone-related concerns. They report a gender imbalance in participation (predominantly mothers), which they state may limit how well the findings generalize across parents, and they caution about generalizability given self-selection and the study’s urban sampling frame. The authors also point to the relatively short follow-up interval and to the control group receiving no intervention during the study window (with training offered after follow-up), as described in the methods. Within these boundaries, the article frames the results as observed, time-limited changes in this controlled, school-recruited sample.

Key Takeaways:

• A controlled 2×3 (group×time) experiment in parents of adolescents meeting Mobile Phone Addiction Scale criteria compared parent training with a no-intervention control across pretest, posttest, and two-month follow-up.
• The reported analyses described a group-by-time pattern in which active mediation diverged between conditions after baseline and remained higher in the training group at later assessments.
• Author-noted limitations included self-reported outcomes, a predominantly maternal and self-selected urban sample, and a short follow-up window with a no-intervention control during the study period.