Parental influences on excessive Internet use among adolescents

87 The development of Internet dependency (or Internet addiction) has been recognised as an issue by parents (UNICEF, 2017), and there is an increasing body of evidence that demonstrates that the behaviours of parents themselves and the nature of the parent-child relationship may influence adolescents’ problematic use of the Internet (Ding et al., 2017; Faltynkova et al., 2020; O€zaslan et al., 20. [...] However, Internet Gaming Disorder has been added to the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (World Health Organization, 2018) and the appendix of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013), and the demand for prevention and treatment of Internet addiction is mounting (Rowicka, 2016). [...] Studies on EIU often narrow down these maladaptive preoccupations, urges and behaviours to six criteria, labelled as the components of Internet addiction by Griffiths (2000) which include salience of the Internet in a person’s thinking; mood modification resulting from Internet engagement; the development of a tolerance to the mood modifying effects of certain quantities of Internet use; withdrawa. [...] To the best of our knowledge, the research of this paper represents the first study of predictors of EIU in Ireland, where the findings are of relevance for the national context. [...] Table 1 documents the characteristics of the analytical sample, and a correlation table of the variables studied is included in Table A-I of the online Supplementary File.