It’s time to stop blaming your phone.
Screen time doesn’t necessarily worsen parent-child relationships, but researchers say. In fact, it’s just a distraction in general.
To find out whether distractions from sources other than the phone are actually just as harmful to parent-child relationships, Swiss researchers are using what they call “techno-references,” or digital devices The interference caused was analyzed.
What they discovered was that the distractions ultimately didn’t matter. Children just wanted their parents’ undivided attention. And when parents didn’t get it because they were looking at their phones or engaged in non-digital activities, the relationship deteriorated just as much.
“This study shows that when parents are distracted, the quality and quantity of parent-child interactions are impaired compared to when parents are not distracted,” said the study’s lead author. said Nevena Dimitrova, a researcher at the University of Applied Sciences. Swiss Arts Western said in a statement: “This was regardless of whether the distractions were from digital or non-digital activities.”
For research, Published on Tuesday In “Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry,” scientists tested 50 parent-child pairs, divided into three groups.
In the first group, parents were instructed to play with their child (average age 22 months) for 10 minutes. In the second group, parents were instructed to play with their child but after 5 minutes they were instructed to complete a pen-and-paper questionnaire.
In the third group, parents were given the same questionnaire, but completed on a tablet. The “distracted” group was instructed to continue trying to play with their children while completing the questionnaire.
The results showed that children in the “distracted” group had lower levels of social engagement with their parents, and their parents were less sensitive to their children’s communication signals.
However, there was no difference in ‘techno-references’ where parents used tablets instead of pen and paper.
“This finding was surprising to us as well, because screens are so ubiquitous today that young children have become accustomed to the reality of seeing their parents using screens. Our interpretation is that this may be the case,” Dimitrova said.
Researchers say the best parent-child interactions are those that are completely uninterrupted. And they point to a “moral panic” over screen use, which they say is somewhat unwarranted.
“We found that it’s not the screens themselves that negatively impact the quality of parent-child interactions,” Dimitrova explained. “Rather, it appears that it is the fact that parents are not fully involved in the interaction that is having a negative impact on parent-child communication.”
