NEGOTIATING DIGITAL AUTHORITY IN INDONESIAN FAMILIES WITH GENERATION ALPHA CHILDREN: PARENTAL MEDIATION, EMOTION REGULATION, AND CONFLICT
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Scholarship on digital parental mediation typically evaluates restrictive, active, co-use, monitoring, and enabling strategies as ways to reduce media risk. In contrast, family emotion-regulation research foregrounds parental modeling, responses to children’s emotions, and relational climate. The separation leaves a mechanistic problem unresolved. Similar digital rules may foster self-regulation in some children yet provoke conflict, covert use, or reliance on media for emotional soothing in others. Drawing on a critical integrative review and contextual secondary analysis of 26 verified academic and institutional sources, with particular attention to recent evidence on Indonesian families and Generation Alpha children, the article identifies relational conditions that shape mediation outcomes. The synthesis indicates that the effects of digital mediation are not inherent in the degree of restriction. Outcomes depend on rule consistency, explanatory quality, parental digital modeling, child participation, conflict-resolution climate, and the availability of emotional co-regulation. The article develops relational legitimacy in digital mediation as the extent to which technology rules are experienced as comprehensible, proportionate, reciprocal, and credible because parents also submit to the norms they impose. High relational legitimacy lets restriction serve as scaffolding for self-regulation, whereas low legitimacy turns restriction into a contest over authority. Indonesian evidence extends global scholarship by foregrounding norm implementation, negotiated hierarchy, and the gap between rule presence and compliance. The central contribution shifts analysis from strategy typologies to the relational mechanisms that determine whether digital mediation becomes regulatory learning or recurrent conflict.
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