“Mom, dad, look at me”: The development of the Parental Phubbing Scale

Abstract

The widespread diffusion of smartphones has opened new challenges regarding the psychological consequences of their usage on social relationships. The term phubbing (a combination of phone and snubbing) indicates the act of ignoring someone in a social context by paying attention to the smartphone. The few existing studies show that phubbing is widespread, mutually reinforced, and socially accepted, with possible negative consequences for social and individual well-being. Phubbing can occur in every social context, including romantic relationships, workplaces, and family. However, to date, minimal attention has been given to the possible impact that phubbing carried out by parents can have on their children. To start filling this gap, in this paper, we introduced a new scale that measures the perception of being subject to parental phubbing and showed the prevalence of perceived phubbing on a stratified sample of 3,289 adolescents. Firstly, the dimensionality, validity, and invariance of the construct were proven. Moreover, our results showed a positive relationship between children’s perceived levels of parental phubbing and their feelings of social disconnection with parents, thus suggesting that the more children felt that one or both of their parents were phubbing them, the less the children felt connected with their parents.

The Effect of Parental Phubbing on Depression in Chinese Junior High School Students: The Mediating Roles of Basic Psychological Needs Satisfaction and Self-Esteem

“…Spending excessive energy and time on mobile phones, they tend to neglect their children’s feelings ( Jiang et al, 2021 ). Numerous studies have demonstrated that parental phubbing behaviors have a detrimental effect on the parent–child relationship ( Xie et al, 2019 ; Niu et al, 2020 ; Pancani et al, 2020 ; Liu K. et al, 2021a , b ), reducing the quality of parenting ( Qu et al, 2020 ) and possibly resulting in teenagers developing negative emotions such as depression ( Liu J. et al, 2021 ), loneliness ( Geng et al, 2021 ), and internalizing problems ( Wang et al, 2020 ). Apart from that, adolescents may be at an increased risk of internet addiction and mobile phone use as a result of parental phubbing ( Hong et al, 2019 ).…”

Peer Phubbing and Chinese College Students’ Smartphone Addiction During COVID-19 Pandemic: The Mediating Role of Boredom Proneness and the Moderating Role of Refusal Self-Efficacy

“… 17 Researchers have found that both phubbing behavior and smartphone addiction have social impairment on individuals, especially on interpersonal relationships, 2 , 14 such as in employer-employee relationships in the workplace, 18 romantic relationships, 19 and parent-child interaction in the family. 20 However, in contrast with smartphone addiction, phubbing behavior has become a socially acceptable behavior 14 that is much more devious and pervasion. The addiction literature boomed before phubbing became prevalent.…”

The Reflections of Digital Technology: Parental Technoference and Phubbing

“…Phubbing causes various problems in family communication. Researchers have identified the following problems caused by parental phubbing when parents interact with their children; academic burnout (Bai et al, 2020a), feelings of disconnection (Pancani et al, 2020),lower life satisfaction (Liu et al, 2020a), lowerself esteem (Hong et al, 2019;Wang et al, 2020a), parent-child attachment problems (Xie et al, 2019), problematic mobile phone use and mobile phone dependency (Fu et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2019;Niu et al, 2020;Xie et al, 2019;Zhang et al, 2021), internet gaming disorder (Xie et al, 2021), cyberbullying (Wang et al, 2020b), social anxiety (Zhang et al, 2021), neuroticism (Bai et al, 2020a), depressive symptoms (Bai et al, 2020b;Wang et al, 2020a ;Xie & Xie, 2020;Xie et al, 2021). Research on the effects of parental phubbing on child and adolescent behavior should be supported.…”