Abstract
Family is the first place where a child meets media and learns to live with it. In research studies, parental attempts to prepare their children for a life with media used to be labelled as "parental mediation." The domain of parental mediation has been developing within the past several decades. The goal of this paper is to enunciate the most questionable issues academic researchers encounter when studying parental mediation. Five theoretical and methodological issues are discussed:
1. unclear terminology,
2. multidisciplinarity,
3. multifactoriality,
4. trustfulness of the data sources,
5. long-term and developing character of the phenomenon. The author has identified these issues both on the basis of available reviews of research studies and observations made while realizing a two-year research project, for which the author was responsible.