The influence of parents’ depression on children’s online gaming addiction: testing the mediating effects of intrusive parenting and social motivation on children’s online gaming behavior

This study examines the impact of parents’ depression on their children’s online gaming addiction and investigates the mediating roles of intrusive parenting and children’s social motivation for playing online games on this relationship. The data for this study were derived from the Game Use Panel Fifth Year Research conducted by the Korea Creative Content Agency in the first half of 2018. We narrowed the sample down to parent-child dyads of children who were online game players and their parents (both N = 356). We tested the relationships between the variables via hierarchical regression analysis and Hayes’s (2013) model PROCESS macro. The results indicated that there is a significant positive relationship between parents’ depression and their children’s online gaming addiction (B =.33, SE =.11, p <.01). Moreover, the findings showed that the relationship between parents’ depression and children’s online gaming addiction was significantly mediated by intrusive parenting (B =.06, Boot SE =.03, 95% Boot CI =.007,.15) and children’s social motivation for playing online games (B =.12, Boot SE =.05, 95% Boot CI =.014,.24). The results imply that parents’ mental health and parenting behavior and children’s motivations for playing online games should be considered when evaluating children’s online game addiction and devising preventative interventions.