Parenthood, information and support on the internet : a literature review of research on parents and professionals online

BackgroundThe aim of this article is to address questions on how parents use the internet to find information and support regarding children, health and family life. Another purpose is to find out how professionals use the internet to provide support and information to parents. This is done by a literature review. MethodsArticles were searched for in five databases through a search strategy called a “building block” approach. The databases were searched from inception until September 14, 2007. ResultsThe database searches yielded a total of 484 articles, the vast majority were found in PubMed. Of these articles, 109 articles were included by the researchers as relevant to the topic of parenthood and internet. Again, the majority of the articles were sourced from PubMed. In addition, we found that 15 articles were indexed in multiple databases, thus the actual number of relevant articles was lower, 94 articles in all.ConclusionsThe review shows that all the more of today’s parents search for both information and social supports on the internet. However as most studies are purely empirical and lack of a theoretical framework many questions remain unanswered on how we can understand this phenomenon. Many professionals have also recognized the parents great interest for going on line and offer both information and support on the net. But, interventions for a wider group of parents, as parent training on the net, are still very rare and we need more research to evaluate different forms of interventions on the net