Beyond Screen-Time Rules: A Theory of Faith-Anchored Digital Boundary Legitimation in Muslim Families
Keywords:
sacred anchoring, digital boundary legitimacy, parental mediation, bounded voice, self-determination theory, religious socializationAbstract
Digital parenting increasingly requires families to establish boundaries for children's participation in rapidly changing digital environments, yet existing parental mediation research explains intervention strategies more effectively than why particular digital limits become normatively legitimate. This conceptual paper addresses this explanatory gap by developing Faith-Anchored Digital Boundary Theory (FADBT), a middle-range theory of digital boundary legitimation in Muslim parent–child dyads. Through an integrative theoretical synthesis of parental mediation, self-determination, family-rule legitimacy, and religious socialization scholarship, the paper reconceptualizes sacred values as normative anchors that simultaneously delimit negotiability and provide transcendent justification for digital boundaries. FADBT proposes that sacred anchoring generates legitimacy through differentiated negotiability, bounded voice, and autonomy-supportive boundary translation, whereas controlling translation can trigger coercion attribution and weaken legitimacy. The theory advances digital parenting scholarship by shifting attention from mediation strategy classification to legitimacy-generating mechanisms, explaining how normative stability can coexist with meaningful child participation. It offers a falsifiable framework for future dyadic, experimental, and longitudinal research on digital boundary legitimacy and compliance across religious family contexts.
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