Abstract
Parental caregiving practices in the use and management of digital media among early childhood children have become an important issue in semi-peripheral regions characterized by collective family traditions and relatively low levels of digital literacy. This study aimed to explore digital parenting practices among parents of early childhood children in East Lombok by integrating Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory and Livingstone’s parental mediation framework. This study used a descriptive-exploratory approach through the distribution of questionnaires to 105 parents in four subdistricts in East Lombok. The results showed three dominant patterns of digital parenting, namely restrictive at 38.1%, permissive at 29.5%, and authoritative at 32.4%, which were formed through the intersection of microsystem, mesosystem, and exosystem factors. The main finding of this study identified intergenerational value conflict within the Sasak extended family structure as a mediating variable that disrupted parental consistency in mediating children’s use of digital media. In addition, parents’ digital literacy was found to be the main determinant in distinguishing adaptive and maladaptive digital parenting strategies, rather than merely educational level. These findings contribute to the development of theoretical discourse by showing that the Western-rooted parental mediation framework requires contextual recalibration when applied to collective rural communities in the Global South. This study also proposes a community-based child-rearing model in the digital context that integrates Sasak local wisdom, particularly the concept of adat as a mechanism of social control, to promote culturally responsive and technologically adaptive parenting practices in rural Indonesian contexts.