Mediating Effects of Children’s Time of Electronic Media Use on Relationships between the CRISIS of Marital Conflict and the Problem Behavior of Those Children in Their Early Stage of School Age

The purpose of this study was to examine how the crisis of marital conflict between parents influences children’s problem behaviors through meditation by time that those children spend in the use of electronic media. For this purpose, the study investigated data about 1,354 participants of the 8th-Year Panel Study of Korean Children(2015). The findings of this study can be summarized as follows. First, mother’s recognition of marital conflict directly affects children’s time of electronic media use and their problem behavior. In other words, the higher mother is in such recognition, the higher or more children are in the time of electronic media Second, mother’s recognition of marital conflict has a direct influence on children’s problem behavior via their time of electronic media use. In contrast, however, father’s recognition of marital conflict has no effect on children’s time of electronic media use and problem behavior. This study is so meaningful in that it provided some empirical information useful for parent education, parent counseling or child-parenting environment by determining direct or indirect relationships between mother’s psychological negativeness, especially in regard to marital conflict, and early school-age children’s problem behavior and their time of electronic media use or, in other words, effects of that negativeness on such behavioral problem and time spent in the use of electronic media. The authors of this study hope that its findings could be used as basic data for parent education or child counseling, consequently contributing to parents’ more psychological soundness and better domestic environment.