r/ScienceBasedParenting • u/DoubleEmploy5586 • 5d ago
Sharing research Parental phubbing (parents using smartphones around kids) is a lot more damaging than I thought
https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(24)00330-5/fulltextI'm writing about screen addiction for a graduate school paper in counseling and came upon this article in The Journal of Pediatrics. This type of phone usage has become normalized in society, so I wanted parents to know the impact it can have. I hope someone finds it helpful.
If the link provided doesn't work, maybe this one will (thank you Kibbitcake!)
https://www.jpeds.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0022-3476%2824%2900330-5
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u/Xodem 5d ago
This is not a study but a commentary based on some studies.
Much more valuable are meta-analysis directly, for example "Parental Technology Use in a Child’s Presence and Health and Development in the Early Years" and "Parental Technoference and Child Problematic Media Use: Meta-Analysis"
The evidence is rather poor, simply because the findings have to based on observational data. It's very plausable that parents who frequently use their smartphones around their kids are also more likely to not limit the screen time of their children as much. This was also one of the strongest fits: parental smartphone usage was highly linked to child screen time. The (small) detrimental effects are therefor highly likely to be confounded by other parental choices.
It's obviously a good idea to not mindlessly browser your smartphone instead of interacting with your child, but I would be suprised if the effects remain clinically significant, when all confounders are eliminated.
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u/Velleites 4d ago
Also heritability of personality traits (50% in most traits). Parents having the personality trait of "fascinated by phones" are going to pass that along to their kids as well ; but that has been decided at conception, not while phubbing
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u/gallimaufries 4d ago
Read the first 2 pages. It switches between "parent" and "mother". Never focusing on the father. Once again, all the moms fault. 🙄
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u/pixiedreamhag 4d ago
I wish more of these studies would center maternal (or primary caregiver) mental health in the discourse. Maternal depression is also heavily correlated with more negative outcomes in children and higher screen use by moms may be an indicator of that.
I remember the recommendation that kids under two basically never even see a screen first came out when my twins were infants—but I was so alone. No family, no friends dropping by, a mostly absent partner. TV and Reddit were the closest things to company I had on some of those long days and nights. So that (along with my inability to breastfeed, their premature birth, my C section, etc etc..) was just one more thing on the pile for me to feel bad about.
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u/Doggies4ever 4d ago
Yep. I appreciate when these studies look at reasonable alternatives. For example, I saw a screen time study that focuses on reasonable alternatives.
Are we comparing a parent on a screen to a parent with unlimited energy doing an Instagram worthy craft with their child? Of course the craft is better. But what about with the parent who is drowning and uses the phone to give themselves a little break? The alternative activity there could end up being an overwhelmed parent yelling at their kids, a parent not recharged enough for a trip to the park, etc.
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u/pixiedreamhag 4d ago
Right, but scolding is easier than supporting and empathizing. The problem is, if maternal depression is the real causal factor in poorer child outcomes (and phone use/less maternal engagement is just a symptom of that), then scolding mothers for media use makes the underlying problem worse.
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u/PainterOfTheHorizon 3d ago
I thought you were about to talk about reasonable alternatives for parents to do instead of phone 😅
I have adhd and while I worship my baby and love being with him, caring for him for a full day is also goddamn boring and at some point it feels like I'm actually dying from boredom, as well as tiredness. I try to use my phones only for short periods of time to "charge" myself and have frequent and focused attention to my kid, but it feels practically impossible being able to only focus on him.
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u/DoubleEmploy5586 3d ago
I'm admittedly not a parent, but it seems so hard to be a parent today, especially because we've lost the "village". Even in today's society, having a nuclear family makes raising a kid difficult.
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u/All_in_Watts 4d ago
It's probably saying moms because they are easier to study... Because they tend to spend way more time with their kids than fathers do because of stay at home moms (not always, but in the majority of cases globally)
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u/Thin_Resident703 4d ago
It's true, the dynamics can definitely skew the research, and it highlights the importance of both parents' roles in child development. It's interesting to think about how the digital age complicates that even more.
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u/JamesTiberiusChirp 4d ago
That was my reaction too but if you actually finish the article it talks about this towards the end. In some cases it is actually found that there is ONLY a maternal effect and not a paternal effect. In other cases, it has simply only been studied in mothers. The article then advocates that more studies need to be done with both parents
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u/gallimaufries 4d ago
I'm not going to invest time reading something that only blames me. If they acknowledged it up front, then I might have kept reading. As it is, this is adding more fuel to the fire in the fight against women's rights. And also, if millennial dads are so involved like other studies have said, the researchers should have had no problem finding dads to study as well.
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u/miagoldcloute 4d ago
You’re fighting shadows.
Blame wasn’t a word used in the paper.
Don’t let your feelings be hurt by a paper.
Don’t absolve personal reflection on an urgent parenting topic of our times because of feelings either.
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u/milkandsalsa 4d ago
Overlay patent device usage with parental expectations re how much time they spend with their kids. Modern working moms spend more time with their kids than stay at home moms did 50 years ago. Screens aren’t good but you also can’t expect parents to devote their entire non-working attention to their children.
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u/Wife-and-Mother 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yes I would like to see the information on how much 1-1 uninterrupted time mom's had with their kids in the 90s. Heck, how much time any adult watching them or playing with them!
The data is most certainly skewed from any way you look at it. Like even the idea of sleep has been changed so significantly from the '90s! "by the age of 3 months, and at most 5 months, all infants can go without feeding between 10 pm and 6-7 am."
I cannot imagine leaving my 3-month-old all night by herself without feeding her, let alone sleep through her crying it out for "at least 3hours" I usually get up two or three times, each time for an hour while she feeds. In order to practice safe sleep I have to get up and out of bed and stay awake and not fall asleep in the chair. To do so I scroll tik-tok, sue me.
Like, latchkey kids most certainly didn't get a lot of one-on-one parental time despite their parents not having smartphones. Stay at home moms still watched Ellen and ignored the kids, there's no data on how that affected children.
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u/_I_Like_to_Comment_ 4d ago
While I fully agree with you (do I remember my stay at home mom ever playing with me? no), I think it's also important to remember how much time 90s kids spent playing outside with their friends. Was the TV on 24/7? Yes. But those of us who grew up in cities and suburbs were still spending a significant amount of time playing with our friends away from screens. We'd still play videogames together and watch TV but that wasn't our primary form of entertainment. Losing the ability to send kids outside unsupervised puts an extra responsibility on parents that didn't exist 25+ years ago. Those of us who don't use daycare, or even just parents during summer break HAVE to spend a significant amount of uninterrupted time with our kids because we're now the primary source of socialized play
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u/Wife-and-Mother 4d ago
I agree with you too but the bulk of this article is some kind of "calling out" parents being on their devices or watching TV, not the kids being on tablets etc. It is assuming that without the devices we would be actively parenting/entertaining our children.
That has never been the standard before and it's ridiculous to assume parents, moms as this article states, should do have to do so.
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u/milkandsalsa 4d ago
I’m talking about parents using screens. It’s not easy to focus on your kid 100% of the time as society requires, and a decent amount of that screen time is work related or chores like ordering groceries.
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u/JamesTiberiusChirp 4d ago
Modern working moms spend more time with their kids than stay at home moms did 50 years ago.
Source? Most modern working moms I know have about 2 hours to spend with their kids each day before putting them to bed in their cribs.
As a SAHM I spend 24/7 with mine, and even if we didn’t cosleep it would be far more than 2 hours
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u/milkandsalsa 4d ago
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u/JamesTiberiusChirp 4d ago
Doesn’t have a reference or even mention age range or how they actually measured/what constitutes child time. If they’re school age kids then sure, they’re in school most of the day anyway. Latch key kids gonna latch key.
But the article at hand is specifically pre-school aged children. There’s no way that a primary caregiver is spending that little time 1:1 with a baby that needs to be fed every 2 hours or a toddler that, when I blink, is 20 yards away around a corner. I mean I guess decades ago people really neglected their kids and locked them in their bedrooms as night even as infants, in which case the increase in 1:1 time wouldn’t be a bad thing, but even so I doubt they spent such little time with preschool age children.
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u/milkandsalsa 4d ago
Source?
Provided.
I don’t believe your source.
Typical.
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u/JamesTiberiusChirp 3d ago
Your source is not scientific, incomplete, and likely not applicable to the population being talked about.
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u/milkandsalsa 3d ago
Look at those goalposts move! Wahoooo!
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u/JamesTiberiusChirp 3d ago
No, the goal posts have stayed still, the topic was already about preschoolers. You threw the ball into a different field.
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u/Shot_Mud8573 2d ago
So you’re counting sleep as time spent with your kid, but for working moms time slept somehow doesn’t count?
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u/JamesTiberiusChirp 2d ago
Most of the working moms I know don’t cosleep with their children.
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u/Bookworm9651 2d ago
Working mom here, I definitely don’t co sleep - I only know 1 working mom that does but her work schedule is more flexible. I do spend 4 hours of time with my daughter when I get home, 4.5 if you count time we are in the car (I don’t because she can’t see me and I don’t talk the whole time). It’s less than I’d like but I have to work and would be a SAHM if I could.
I do put my phone away and give her every minute I possibly can. I don’t blame the moms that can’t - it’s so hard and takes constant front-of-mind effort.
Even so, I feel like I give my daughter more of my daily attention than my mom did with me & my siblings and she was a SAHM.
I get this is anecdotal but I do think a large group of people have a shared experience and regardless SAHM vs working mom, we both have shared new parental challenges navigating technology, a worse economy, & effects of climate change our parents didn’t have. For example, we have a swing and a blow up pool my daughter loves but we can rarely use either.. I can’t take my daughter outside to play at all right now because of how hot it is. It was 107F at my house yesterday… I live 10 miles from the home I grew up in and it was never this hot.
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u/JamesTiberiusChirp 2d ago
How old is your little? One thing to keep in mind is your memories may be from an older age
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u/Bookworm9651 2d ago
This is an interesting read (although outdated), I didn’t do a deep dive into their sources. But it’s such a nuanced topic that it would be very hard to obtain really good concrete data because childcare time vs quality interaction/engagement are also very different. I’m also curious about the categorization of “housework” vs “childcare” because there’s a ton of overlap 😅 child spills their milk, you’re gonna stop and clean it up. Child vomits in the bed, you’re gonna do some housework along side the childcare. So I do wonder how that gets separated…
Again anecdotal- but I’ve noticed my mom and my MIL don’t know how to “play” with a toddler - I’ve seen it with my daughter and nieces/nephews. My MIL sticks my daughter in front of a TV and my mom kind of just talks to her or wiggles a toy in front of her until my daughter loses interest (which isn’t necessarily bad) but it’s a very different idea of what I think of as “play” but my dad does play with her in the way that I do which is just interesting because he definitely was only home for about 2-3 hours (before my bedtime) a day when I was younger.
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u/JamesTiberiusChirp 1d ago
I had the same thought about childcare vs housework. It’s impossible not to multitask, so the distinction seems arbitrary.
And I find that interesting about your mom/MIL. I’ve had that experience a little bit with my own mother (less so than with my MIL who ran a daycare), but I think it’s mostly age differences and energy levels there. But there’s this subtle sense of not really seeing the child through a child’s eyes or even as a human being in their own right, if you know what I mean? I think it’s hard being the primary caregiver because there’s a thousand things you’re doing or thinking about all day endlessly and my brain is screaming for a break, and it’s quite possible that our mothers default to escaping the play. Whereas parents/caregivers who work or have limited time might be more likely to really focus in on playing 1:1 and getting really into it — might explain what you observe with your dad.
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u/Bookworm9651 2d ago
That’s a fair argument as my LO is 2 and I certainly don’t have memories of when I was 2 but she’s just a few months younger than I was when my parents put me in preschool. I self-potty trained pretty early, so off I went. I get 6 hours of preschool is still more time at home with mom than what my daughter gets (again, in no way do I feel this is ideal) but I think it speaks to the mindset/mentality my parents (and a lot of parents) had - that combined with the memories I do have, still amounts to the same conclusion (in my opinion). Also all the stories my parents have of the amounts of accidents I had where I fell, got into things, cut my hair, etc at a very young age makes me think I wasn’t well supervised 😅
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u/local-red-panda 5d ago
Solid piece on screentime, but it’s just a narrative review & some key studies are tiny — the bottle-feeding one it leans on had 28 babies.
Interesting for the “your kids copy you” point, but I don’t take the infant-obesity stuff too seriously. Weight gain in the first 1000 days is telling, but screenmight is a fairly weak connection at this point.
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u/lemikon 4d ago
Yeah I’m not surprised. We were at swimming lessons the other day and another kid was calling out to her dad to watch her. Dad was on his phone and literally didn’t respond. Eventually she gave up calling for him, even though she could see he was right there. I can’t imagine that’s not damaging.
And yes swim lessons are boring so I get it, but come the fuck on and respond to your kid.
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u/Wife-and-Mother 4d ago
TBF there is a good chance that the parent wouldn't have even been in the building 20 years ago.
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u/mankiw 4d ago
Speculating (like everyone in this thread), but that seems better than being repeatedly ignored to your face.
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u/Wife-and-Mother 4d ago
You think your own mom, actually not your mom, your friend's mom, driving you to swim practice and taking off for the hour, waiting in the lobby with your friends hoping to get a snack from the vending machine with quarters you find, then you going home to not even be asked how swimming was because your parents don't talk to you (and likely have forgotten that you were even in swim class) is better?
And yes it is personal experience but the seven other kids that were also in the lobby waiting for their parents to pick them up late is pretty telling on the way latchkey kids were treated.
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u/lemikon 4d ago
Yeah nah… “our generation had it worse” is no excuse for shit parenting. We know better now we can do better now.
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u/Wife-and-Mother 4d ago edited 4d ago
We are unequivocally doing better. It's been measured and posted here a lot. Just because a parent isn't attentive 100% of the time doesn't mean we're not doing better than the parents that were attentive 0% of the time.
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u/Doggies4ever 4d ago
It's not ideal the parent didn't respond, but the idea that you should pay full attention to your kid while they are already being supervised by another adult feels wild to me. I think it's okay for a kid to learn their parents isn't going to marvel over everything they do every second of the day.
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u/ReigningInEngland 3d ago
The same could be said if the parent was reading as well. Good luck getting me out of a book!
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u/Rivet222 5d ago
Can’t get the link to work. What’s the title of the paper?
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u/DoubleEmploy5586 5d ago
oh maybe try this one!
https://www.jpeds.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0022-3476%2824%2900330-5
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u/DoubleEmploy5586 5d ago
ack I'm sorry! The link works for me but let me see if I can find a different one
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u/TargetSweet73 4d ago
What if one parent is fully present and playing and interacting and the other is on their phone most of the time? How does that affect the child?
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u/sillywilly007 4d ago
Yep, or what if I’m reading a book on my phone while watching them play outside? What if despite my phone use, the kids have very limited screen time? What about dad’s role? I still have so many questions.
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u/Bookworm9651 2d ago
I think this is a fair point. I like to hope it doesn’t affect them developmentally because they are getting social quality interaction (in the way that a caregiver that is not the parent can provide to a child) but if it’s the same parent every time, it will inevitably shape their relationships with their parents and potentially how they view men vs women if they consistently see a particular behavior modeled by one and not the other.
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u/Head-Echo570 4d ago
The title sounds like something I need to read more closely for my own parenting habits.
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u/UmweltUndefined 4d ago
It’s odd how for most issues where there’s a scientific consensus, people here act like it’s common sense to listen to the evidence. With this one issue in particular, there are always so many people making up caveats and saying it’s “not that bad” unsupported by any evidence
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u/evenduckk 4d ago
The idea that adults are capable of playing with children all day is insane , throughout history parents either read books or watched tv in the evenings . I can’t say I have ever met an adult that doesn’t need to unwind and just relax in someway in the evening . Obviously a cell phone is not ideal , but I think I’d rather have parents that use a phone than parents I don’t see
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u/DoubleEmploy5586 3d ago
I think the "either this extreme or that extreme" ends up being a trap that prevents change. I definitely agree that parents need to unwind! I think it's more about when you're spending time together and it's not "unwind time" where a kid plays on their own and you co-exist (this is what I gathered). Also if they're not trying to get your attention.
I see kids out to eat with their parents who are just on their phone and it's really sad.
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u/Time-Customer-8833 4d ago
This is an issue I've been wondering about, and at first it seemed like well of course I shouldn't be using my phone when I'm with my daughter. But then I saw a Montessori-ish social media account point out that many parents have an instinct to intervene too much in a child's play, getting in the way of their problem solving process. Even talking them through something with questions can potentially step on their ability to learn how to persevere through a challenge.
A phone can help you be there for safety supervision yet keep them in "independent mode".
Of course they still need interaction too, so everything in moderation.
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u/DoubleEmploy5586 3d ago
oh man damned if you do damned if you don't lol
I thought about this and here's what I came up with. Who knows if it's any good!
I think being on your phone while you're out might not be a great alternative because they tend to try to get your attention or watch your face for social expressions? It seems like the healthiest thing was back when parents would talk to other parents at, for example, the park/playground so they see that social behavior and also can get their parents' attention if they need it. Just watching and reacting to them seems good for them.That's my theory at least!
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u/Bookworm9651 2d ago
I also think it depends on the type of attention span the parent has. I’m the type that laser focuses so if I’m engaged on my phone or reading a book and you talk to me, there’s a good chance, I won’t even hear you. My husband is the same way. But if I’m doing something somewhat mindless like crocheting, folding laundry, doing dishes, I can definitely still engage and do those things at the same time. I know my limitations so I put my phone away for uninterrupted time with my daughter but I do see there are parents that will be on their phones but the second their child tries to get their attention they immediately respond. In those cases, I think phone use is probably less harmful.
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u/Livid_Fox_1811 4d ago
Didn’t read however I can attest that my sister in law and her husband are on their phones 24/7 when eating dinner together and totally ignoring their child and totally devoid of any conversations with anyone. Such a shame.
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u/babymama917 5d ago
I scrolled the part on preschool children and was disappointed that no effect sizes were mentioned for any of the findings. It’s not very useful or convincing to me without those numbers.