Impact of Facebook on the Parent-Child Relationship

Absztrakt (kivonat)

The rise of the Internet has brought about massive changes in our world. It has also had a profound impact on our communicative landscape. These changes have been accelerated due to the rise of social media. Facebook is the most widely used social media platform with over 2 billion users all over the globe. Due to the rise in popularity of mobile phones and other portable devices and the ease of access to the Internet, the use of social media platforms like Facebook has increased drastically. This has led to a situation where parents as well as their children in many families are users of Facebook. This use of Facebook by both parents and children has had an impact on the nature of parent-child relationships. This paper aims to study the impact of the use of Facebook on parent-child relationships to determine whether the use of Facebook has led to positive or negative changes in this most crucial of human relationships. In order to determine this, a descriptive questionnaire was used to collect data from people who were between the ages of 15-45 years who had an account on Facebook and who had at least one or both parents who also possessed a Facebook account. After collecting the data from the sample and analysing the same it was found that Facebook has had either a positive impact or a neutral effect on the parent-child relationship for the majority of the participants in the sample. Most of the children claimed that they did not feel that their parents’ presence on Facebook was an invasion of their privacy and also assisted them in setting up a Facebook account. They also claimed the use of Facebook has helped their parents stay in touch with modern times. However, a small minority of participants reported that they have been at some point embarrassed by content that their parents posted on Facebook and also that their parents had confronted them with regard to certain content that they posted on Facebook which their parents deemed unacceptable. Furthermore, in order to isolate the role of gender, cultural background and other factors it would be beneficial to carry out studies with proportionate number of people of each gender and of different nationalities and cultural backgrounds. As the present study only takes into account the perspective of the children, a study that examines the issue from the parents’ perspective would aid in fortifying the findings of the present study.