Smartphones and Children: Relationships,Regulation,and Reasoning

Relationships

Examining media use through a relational framework allows investigators to understand how mobile technologies interrupt interaction cascades, how they are influenced by parent stress or mental working model of their child, and technology's potential effects on child social-emotional health. By widening the lens from children's media use, relational frameworks capture the aspects of the child's social environment—specifically the quality of the parent–child relationship—that predict resilience in times of stress. Abeele, Abels, and Hendrickson examined parent–child dyads in everyday encounters such as waiting rooms and playgrounds in order to assess whether parent mobile device use is associated with lower responsiveness to child bids for attention. Interestingly, they found a decrease in responsiveness with high parent phone absorption but not with occasional glances to their phone (in other words, some parents have adapted to parenting with smartphones with a “dual attention mode”—which should make parents feel better about multitasking while stuck home with their children). Building upon the technoference literature, Sundqvist, Heimann, and Koch found that parent technoference—but not children's level of technoference—was associated with more difficult behavior in their 4- to 5-year-olds. Thus, frequent interruption of parent–child activities with technology may contribute to child behavior escalation, or may be a means of parental escape and stress relief. Coyne et al. surveyed expectant mothers and found that those who describe using media as a coping strategy, and those with higher depression levels, also reported higher technoference behaviors when their children were infants. Taken together, these findings remind us that heavy parent use of technology, whether it be for work, news, or entertainment, needs to be balanced with other healthy family coping strategies.

Regulation

In a digital environment in which interfaces are designed to interact with user psychology, it is crucial to base research within a conceptual framework of child–computer interaction: what the child brings to the interaction, and what the digital design brings to the interaction. McDaniel and Radesky used longitudinal data to demonstrate that the use of tablets and video games was more common in children with behavior problems, mediated by parenting stress, but not the opposite. The same may be true during school closures, when children with self-regulation difficulties may struggle without the structure of school, and parents may try to occupy them with more media use. Linder, Potter, and Garrity used data on thousands of U.S. children and found small but significant cross-sectional associations between media use and child self-regulation abilities such as self-calming in the preschool years. Gordon-Hacker and Gueron-Sela demonstrated an interesting interaction between child negative emotionality (NE) and the use of media to regulate child distress—wherein only children with initially low NE whose parents used media more to regulate distress had increases in NE over time. This suggests that use of media to calm fussing children may displace other natural opportunities for emotional problem solving and self-calming at times of high emotions or frustration.

Reasoning

Finally, several studies in this issue examine the cognitive or learning implications of modern media. Beatty and Egan used recent data from more than 9,000 5-year-olds in the Growing Up in Ireland study, and found that <1% of the variability in nonverbal reasoning scores was explained by screen media use. Children with ≥3 hours of media use per day scored approximately 1.5–3 points lower than children who used less media. Topic, Velic, and Merkas showed that screen media use was negatively associated with letter recognition in 6- to 7-year-olds, which appeared to be explained by less parent–child interactive reading. Felix et al. used data from 27 preschools in Brazil in which caregivers were interviewed about their child's daily habits, and children were directly assessed for motor skills. Increased screen media use and decreased sleep time were independently associated with lower motor skills, hypothesized to be due to displacement of physical activity. Altogether, these findings reaffirm that hands-on exploration, parent–child reading, and physical activity are all important educational activities whose qualities are not easily replicated by digital media in young children, and all are sources of self-regulation and social interaction for children. As such, preserving time for these activities in balance with screen-based activities is important while children are learning at home.

Finally, Vanwesenbeeck, Hudders, and Ponnet examined how 4- to 5-year-olds process advertising presented on YouTube versus television, which is highly relevant, as children spend a significant amount of mobile device time on YouTube. They found that most children could recognize advertising (although it is important to note that advertisements have a visual disclosure cue in Belgium), but more than half thought it was part of the regular content and did not express a critical attitude about the ad. It is interesting to consider how children might come to expect advertising content as a normal part of what they encounter, and whether this effects how critically they can resist it.

Future Directions

These studies are a launching point for future research that considers the social context and implications of media use, the interaction between children's individual characteristics and media, and how children's thinking is shaped by the media they consume. To craft guidance for families, it will be helpful to know the thresholds at which technoference seems to influence child well-being, and how this differs for dyads with different attachment security or interaction styles. Further examination of individual child differences that moderate media effects will also inform more precise guidelines. However, future research should also examine questions that have implications not only for what parents and children should do differently—but for what industry should do differently in terms of designing products for families. For example, how should home wifi networks be configured to let families carve out the unplugged time they need as a source of resilience, and not have to work to resist the onslaught of notifications vying for their attention? How can work e-mail or child digital products include nudges that help families disengage and engage with their social or three-dimensional worlds? How can YouTube and other platforms represent advertisements in a manner that children truly understand? Once these design-centered research questions are addressed, there will be a more balanced responsibility between industry and families in helping children develop healthy relationships with technology.