The effect of "My Parent, My Digital Game Guide" family education Program on children's digital game addictions and digital game parental guidance strategies

Playing games has an indispensable importance throughout life, especially in childhood. It is known that the tendency to play digital games is increasing due to reasons such as technological developments, increased urbanization, and decrease in playgrounds. In this context, it is thought that it is important for families to gain awareness about children's digital game preferences and game playing processes. The purpose of this research is to examine the effect of the training program prepared for parents with preschool-aged children on digital game parental guidance strategies. The relational survey model, one of the quantitative research types, was used in the research. The study group of the research consists of 200 parents selected from the parents of preschool children in the central district of Ankara province in the 2022-2023 academic year. Parents were determined using the convenience sampling technique. As data collection tools for this research, three data collection tools are "Digital Game Addiction Tendency (DOBE)", "Digital Game Parental Guidance Strategies Scale (DOERS)" (Budak, 2020) and "Personal Information Form". tool was used. The "My Parent, My Digital Game Guide" program was implemented for seven weeks and seven hours in total. Normality and homogeneity tests were performed to test the findings obtained from the study and the parametric test assumptions on the average values of parents with preschool children. In obtaining the findings; Kolmogorov-Smirnov Z test, Homogeneity of Variances test, Mann Whitney U test and Kruskal Wallis H analysis, Wilcoxon signed ranks analysis were performed. According to the results of the research, it was determined that there was a significant difference between before and after the implementation of the family education program. According to the analysis results, it was seen that the family education program was effective on parental digital game guidance strategies. Additionally, it has been observed that boys tend to be more addicted to digital games than girls. Based on the results obtained from the research, parent education programs containing digital game guidance can be disseminated.