The effects of maternal smartphone use on mother–child interaction

Abstract

This study assessed the effects of maternal smartphone use on mother-child interaction. Thirty-three Israeli mothers and their 24-to 36-month-old toddlers (16 boys) from middle-high socioeconomic status participated in three within-subjects experimental conditions: maternal smartphone use, maternal magazine reading, and uninterrupted dyadic free-play. The mothers produced fewer utterances, provided fewer responses to child bids, missed child bids more often, and exchanged fewer conversational turns with their children when engaged with a smartphone or printed magazines compared to uninterrupted free-play. The quality of maternal responsiveness was also decreased. These findings suggest maternal smartphone use compromises mother-child interaction, which given smartphone ubiquity in daily life may have negative effects on child development in various domains, including language, cognition, and socioemotional regulation.

Parent social media use and gaming on mobile phones, technoference in family time, and parenting stress.

“…Nonetheless, some felt their use cut into their family time, and this was especially true for SM use and for mothers. In our sample of parents, mothers reported more SM use and fathers more MG playing, which aligns with some of the extant literature (e.g., Lederer et al, 2022) and suggests that the digital divide in types of media consumption may still exist among parents of young children. Alternatively, considering the greater standard deviation from the mean for mothers than fathers, it could be that more men exhibit compulsive use (see Dong & Potenza, 2022) and that is driving the higher mean scores.…”

Do toys get in the way? The duration of shared emotional experiences is longer when mothers engage their infants without toys

“…First, we used secondary data resources as an initial first step. Thus, videotapes predated facets of current‐day parenting, such as parenting following a global pandemic, as well as the growing acknowledgment that technology use influences mother‐infant interactions (e.g., Inoue et al., 2022; Lederer et al., 2022). Future research may benefit from exploration of how mothers’ use of technology, especially in the presence of their infants relates to maternal bids for interaction and dyadic‐level shared emotional experiences.…”

Toddlers’ physiological response to parent's mobile device distraction and technoference

“…Media distraction in the context of social interactions, a phenomenon some scholars call technoference (McDaniel & Coyne, 2016), is marked by behaviors such as breaking off social engagement to scroll through social media to read or respond to a text message or check email notifications (McDaniel, 2019, Stockdale et al., 2023). In the context of parent–child relationships, frequent patterns of technoference have been associated with a poorer quality of parenting (Beamish et al., 2018), including fewer verbal and nonverbal bids being directed toward children by parents (Konrad et al., 2021; Lederer et al., 2022; Radesky et al., 2014). Parents may also respond more harshly and with less warmth and responsiveness to children's bids for attention when they are distracted by a mobile device (Radesky et al., 2014; Stockdale et al., 2018) and provide fewer opportunities for toddlers to engage in joint attention (Krapf‐Bar et al., 2022).…”

“…Not surprisingly, prior research suggests that frequent mobile device use by parents is linked to reduced opportunities for parent–child interactions (Konrad et al., 2021; Lederer et al., 2022; Radesky et al., 2015). Recent research reveals that when parents become distracted with a mobile device during face‐to‐face interactions, infants show increased negative affect associated with the distraction akin to infants’ response to still face (Myruski et al., 2018; Stockdale et al., 2020).…”