Digital parenting awareness status of kindergarten parents: The case of Adiyaman province

The purpose of this study Covid-19 pandemic increased use of information technologies in the process of 3-6 age group children, parents live in the path of dealing with cyber-attacks followed, and were informed about their child's use of information technology is pursuing a strategy of ICT in daily life is to giving you a place to study. The research was conducted in a total of nine official kindergartens in three districts of the central district of Adıyaman province in the spring semester of the 2021-2022 academic year. The research is in mixed methods design and consists of two parts. The first part is causal-comparative research, the second part is in the experimental research and is in the quasi-experimental design with a control group. In the first part, the scale given to the parents of students studying at 9 kindergartens in the central district of Adıyaman province in the form of a printed form determined the level of information technology use of parents and the current level of awareness of digital parenting. The data were analysed though descriptive statistics such as frequency and inferential statistics like independent-sample t-test, and ANOVA. In the second part, in the school with the highest participation, the classes were randomly divided into two for each age group as a control and experimental group, and it was ensured that the control group was not aware of the experimental group, and the experimental group was not aware of the control group. Then, kindergarten teachers were asked to communicate regularly with parents through whichever channel they provide, to call for participation in the study to the control and experimental groups from that channel and to deliver the pre-test online. Then, education (3 videos prepared by the researcher including the concept of Digital Parenting, Google Family Link and YouTube Kids) was started. The teachers were asked to share the access link of the three videos only with the experimental group. One week later, in order to determine the effect of the training on parents, teachers were asked to provide post-test sharing to the experimental and control groups, that is, to refill the digital parenting awareness scale. The data were analyzed with independent groups Mann Whitney U test. According to the results, parents' digital parenting awareness levels are high. Some significant relationships were found between the sub-dimensions of digital parenting awareness and the gender of the parents, educational status, income status, number of children, computer usage history. The education given in the second part does not significantly increase the sub-dimension scores, but contributes to the awareness of the parents on these issues.