Intergenerational Co-parenting and Children's Screen Use: A Scoping Review

Children's screen use is an increasingly prominent global public health concern. However, existing guidance has largely focused on immediate caregivers, with limited attention paid to grandparents and other forms of intergenerational co-parenting (ICP). We conducted this scoping review to examine current knowledge about ICP and children's screen use with four research questions: (1) How have ICP and children's screen use been measured in existing studies?; (2) How does ICP affect children's screen use?; (3) Are there any identifiable patterns of ICP that seem to be related to children's screen use?; and (4) Within an ICP context, what factors have been found to influence children's screen use? We searched five databases for articles published in English and Chinese between 2000-2025 and included 17 relevant studies. Nine were conducted in Western countries and eight in non-Western contexts such as China and Brazil. Ten were published in the past three years. We found that these studies had several methodological limitations, including inconsistencies in conceptualisation, a lack of methodological diversity, and limited use of multiple informants. Findings on the association between ICP and children's screen use were mixed, although most studies suggested that ICP was linked to longer children's screen use time. Different ICP patterns related to children's screen use were also identified. Finally, five categories of influencing factors emerged: (i) children's characteristics, (ii) parent's characteristics, (iii) grandparent characteristics, (iv) media-related characteristics, and (v) family environment characteristics. Future research should prioritise this understudied area to better inform guidance for healthy screen use among children.