Cyberparenting in Malaysia: a case study of parents in City Hall of Kuala Lumpur / Nur Shahrizan Abdul Jalal

Parenting nowadays has becoming more challenges as there are no longer 'barrier' among the countries around the world. Children are so attached with their technology gadgets such as computers and tablets which indirectly giving an impact to their social behaviour and environments. This is where the parents need to enhance their parenting style by putting in the digital elements. They need to know about the technology, the beneficial and the harmful part in raising up and securing their children. Physically the children may be in front of our eyes, but at the same time they are connected to the people around the world. The unseen Internet threats are very harmful to them, thus proper strategy and action plan must be taken by the concerned parents. Since cyberparenting is quite new in Malaysia, a case study research was conducted among parents in City Hall of Kuala Lumpur. There are two objectives of this study, (1) To identify the type of parenting style among parents in City Hall of Kuala Lumpur.; and(2) To investigate the relationship between age and digital literacy among parents in City Hall of Kuala Lumpur. This research adopted Theory of Planned Behaviour(TPB) as the research model. Research was conducted by distributing questionnaires to the City Hall of Kuala Lumpur employees located in seven different departments such as Human Resource Department, Finance Department, Health Department, IT Department, Enforcement Department, Planning Department and Licensing Department. This study would give an overview of the parenting style among parents in City Hall of Kuala Lumpur. Findings show that the four types of parents, Primitive Parents, Cyber Parents, Ignorance Parents and the Geek Parents exist among the City Hall of Kuala Lumpur employees. Cyber Parents are the major types of parents in City Hall of Kuala Lumpur. By identifying the parenting style, this study would like to further share the effective strategies to become the ideal parents, Cyber Parents. By using Mann-Whitney U Test, the relationship between the two independent factors, the parents' age and their level of digital literacy were tested. It is proven that there are relationship between these two factors. Cyberparenting is quit new topic in this country, thus there are so many area for future researcher to explore. One of the scope that this study find it interesting and would highly recommend is the impact of external factors towards the intention of cyberparenting.