Parental device use and the adolescent-caregiver attachment bond
frontiersin.org
frontiersin.org
So I would expect the study to find that the children of phone-overusers were more likely to be anxious/insecure.
Still, I would also expect that less phone use (subbed with more attention to kid) would help the kid with this.
This study specifically excludes it, and fair enough when being honest about the statistical inference and not overreaching, but that is the question I find most interesting as someone who uses my phone to get away from my desk but keep work going so I can spend time with my kids while doing my job.
One outcome would be this is damaging and worse than just not spending time until after work, the other result would say this is a beneficial arrangement.
In terms of attention I actually find it pretty easy to identify their cues even when on my phone. It's more of a general feel of how much I've played with them vs solo play and when they want to hang out they will walk over and make it clear. Plus you are always watching them.
Or otherwise said, if you are on the phone a lot, you are creating a barrier to interaction and people (both kids and adults) will eventually end up tired of trying and having less reciprocation.
If you are not physically there, it is actually less frustrating to others then if you create a barrier while being there.
These days I was “on call” at home and had to be able to answer my phone urgently. And I hated the fact that I needed to glance at my phone at every notification when talking with other people. Truly just having the damn thing is socially damaging.
I was definitely not present or available when reading.
I think this is all a very complex topic and the desire to find a clearcut simple answer is more damaging than helpful
We have lots of evidence about how harmful it is to have parents that are in the throes of gambling addiction. Folks, it's not good for the children. It's in fact pretty bad, even if they don't gamble away the home equity and the college fund.
Tom Clancy begs to differ. Paperbacks are always exciting
And yeah the excuse to "stay with the family" is still there, except me and my wife refused to force our kids on the table: the kids will stay at the table if you talk with them, otherwise it's your (grandparents) fault
If you're a parent, one factor matters more than any other: the parents' emotional health determines the children's emotional health. Whether the parents have secure attachment, any intimacy/trust issues, high or low self-esteem, anxious or not, self-aware, how repressed they are, how comfortable with their own and others' emotions...
If a parent is uncomfortable with their thoughts/emotions and compensates with digital distractions, the issue isn't the phone. The media obsesses too much over symptoms and not causes.
> but that is the question I find most interesting as someone who uses my phone to get away from my desk but keep work going so I can spend time with my kids while doing my job.
This is probably more relevant to people who are using their phones for passive entertainment than work. The difference is that your kids are more engaging than your work, so your attention will naturally be pulled toward your kids, whereas parents who are scrolling social media or playing games are going to be more drawn to their phones and are going to have punctuated and shallow interactions with their kids.
Personally, I don't think I've ever observed someone who was actively engaged with their phone who was also fully engaged with the people around them.
The "jelly star" phone looks kind of fun. I just sat in a busy tram and wondered what the scene would look like if we all had phones like that. It's an innteresting thought experiment.
I think the biggest difference is actually the lack of newspapers now. Plenty of people were plugged into headphones via iPod/Walkman/whatever was era appropriate. The people who stare at their phones today were staring at newspapers in the pre smartphone era.
People with headphones looking absentmindedly straight ahead doing their best not to focus on anything, isolating themselves as much as possible to make the complete lack of personal space more bearable.
This is already what crowded subways in my city look like when you pass the threshold where people are too cramped to browse their phones. This is not a bad thing, just a coping mechanism.
I think there is much more room for behavior change if you consider people at a table (coffee or restaurant) with and without phones suitable for continuous media consumption or social network interactions.
So it's only a tiny barrier but if you need it, you turn on wifi sharing and take out the "real" phone. Otherwise it stays unconnected.
2. Try to replace parts of your smartphone with other things. Buying a clock helped me fix the habit of "I just opened my eyes, time for phone". I found my old PSP and I'm planning to run some emulator on that instead of phone to play some minigames.
3. I have my phone always completely silent. There's literally no notification that cannot wait until I decide to check the phone.
4. I sometimes turn off the data transfer in my phone. First, I get less notifications. Second, it's yet another barrier and it gives me a second to ask myself "do I really want to play with my phone now".
look at maps only in the car, mute whatsapp and then check it from time to time.
seems pretty straightforward.
There's an app for Android called "Forest" that gamifies not using your phone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.forestapp
Not sure what solutions exist on Android but I'd be amazed if there are none.
Don't forget about the other stuff usually handled by smartphones, like music (my old Sansa Clip+ still works) or GPS (the one in my car will do).
[0] - Call audio was pristine
[1] - large live tile for SMS was great
[2] - Bundled HERE Drive let you pre download map data long before competitors had the option.
I learned to drive with paper maps and have never really made much use of GPS navigation, so that part was easier for me than it might be for most.
I'm not going to get rid of my phone entirely, but after that experience, I feel like not carrying it all the time anymore.
That seems like a cultural thing to me. It's common in some countries for daughters ~15yrs to ~40yrs to claim their best friend is their mom.
Give kids the freedom to make mistakes and suffer the (nonfatal, no loss of life or limb) consequences.
Yes, there are cases to intervene, but generally, you should let your kids hurt themselves more. Pain is a very important form of learning. By overprotecting them, they become very vulnerable adults, then worse things happen.
This is quite presumptuous. Even minor injuries can add up to long term damage. We don't need to keep our kids inside or wrapped in crazy layers to protect them. We also don't need them to get hurt a lot for them to learn what's good or bad.
Children need to take these risks themselves, the caregiver there is to put them in a place where the control limits the damage.
but I guess part of this "screen based society" we live in is the loss of nuance and charitable interpretation.
I suggest that reading previously took the roll devices take today. When my parents weren’t at work they were reading as often as not; newspapers and novels.
You can interpret that as either "there's always a moral panic about anything new" or (my own take) "this is how far we have fallen".
[0] https://clivethompson.medium.com/why-novels-will-destroy-you...
Most high school age children of the 1800s weren't inclined to read novels 12+ hours a day and neglect their sleep and hygiene to finish a few more chapters...
Part of me misses it, part of me thinks it's the same, just different now. I do think phones capture attention more than newspapers though, and trigger more violent or faster emotional ups and downs. Scrolling through social media exposes you to something fun, worrying, horrifying, etc every few seconds, I can't imagine that's healthy.
I have the same need for cognition as my mother, but I opt not to lock myself in my office. Instead I tell my kids, "I'm around if you need me and I'll keep an eye on you but I'm not currently a playmate; I'll be here reading on my phone."
The difference is my mother clearly separated relationship-building from study. I don't. This probably means I'm available more often, but with lower quality? I'm not sure. What is better? No idea.
In fact that's probably a big part of why offices exist in the first place. If I had kids here then for much of the day, they would be trying to interact with me and I would be either getting distracted from work or shooing them away.
What I'm actually there I would want to be fully present with them. It goes without saying that I would follow the example of the people who invented the stuff, and not give them a brainrot device in the first place.
That's not entirely true as I have early memories of him teaching my older sister how to play chess and me occasionally participating, but makes one think about this balance that needs to be struck.
I'm doing somewhat better than my father in this regard, but I wonder what is the healthy amount of attachment really? People are saying I'm going to miss these prompts when they'll grow older, but I don't want to do this just because of FOMO.
The heavily hinted implication is that device use damages relationships. But look at what they actually measured. They ask adolescents to answer questions like:
"My primary caregiver ignores me when they are on a device." (DAIS, their new scale)
And then also ask them to answer questions like:
"I often worry that this person doesn't really care for me." (ECR-RS)
And then act like it's a revelation that these two self-report scales are correlated.
A much more plausible causal explanation is that a single psychological variable (e.g. a bad relationship) causes both self reports, rather than the implied pathway that device use causes A, which then causes B.
Parent-child interactions, relationships, feelings are probably the hardest thing to quantify at any scale.
In the end, it's really, "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.
> "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.
I wouldn't be too sure of that actually: https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/the-secret-to-parenting-...
I think weak studies validating people's natural intuitions tend to do more damage than we give them credit for. Even if another better d signed study does way more work and comes with clear results that disprove the natural intuiton, it will be buried in the sea of low effort studies and people will already have settle the issue in their minds as "proven by science".
So many studies now a days have experiments designed to confirm a hypothesis instead of challenge it. They should be doing everything possible they can to disprove their hypothesis and only accept it after all attempts at falsification fail. But of course that's in idealized science. In reality, publish or perish means you need to get something published and negative results don't get published. And so this study, like what seems to be most now a days, is designed to prove their hypothesis - which ironically proves nothing.
Like when kids were growing up a couple decades ago they could just do whatever they wanted and those folks turned out all right. And now we've got people obsessing over where their children are and literally tracking their location, and the results don't seem to be so great.
(I heard that this difference had actually been quantified but unfortunately I don't have a link.)
I remember something about how, some percentage of children are not even allowed to leave the yard. Whereas their parents were just roaming for miles, at a much younger age.
Although I suppose at the same time, we're also less present with each other. So I guess there's at least two dimensions to that.
I guess the first one would be, are you relaxed and do you trust them to take care of themselves, even at a young age.
And the second one would be... are you actually there, or is it just your body that's there.
Are people who are very very securely attached to their parents happy later in life, or is there a ceiling? The terminology invites certain conclusions here.
Maybe the whole attention thing is more a matter of quality, rather than quantity
Why is that much more plausible? It implies that it has always been there, and that nothing has changed since the last century, which is unlikely. Unless you want to introduce some other recent factor, but that is going to be even less likely.
And why? Because other studies have shown how addictive "phone" use is, and how it isolates people. And addicts (drugs, alcohol) are bad caretakers.
So there's really nothing that makes the explanation implausible.
You may ask yourself if it's not your own addiction speaking.
Correlational overlap between self-report scales is common. It's actually so common that at decent sample sizes, almost any arbitrary self-report will significantly correlate purely on valence. For instance, one should expect a correlation between people self-reporting "I had a tough childhood" with "I frequently suffer from skin rashes". This is because trait neuroticism (the degree to which people are prone to feel negative emotion) is a major driver of how people interpret and respond to scales generally.
In contrast, psychologists mightily struggle to find replicable experimental results. That's what you need here.
But your explanation isn't "much more plausible". It is based on absolutely nothing, and the priori are against it. You only have a vague idea of correlation between answers (based on probably equally unreliable papers), but nothing on the missing factor. In this paper, however, they at least take some effort to find structure in the responses, and this factor correlated stronger than the others. Shaky, but it has a basis: phones/social media/etc. are terribly addictive.
> In contrast, psychologists mightily struggle to find replicable experimental results. That's what you need here.
No, that's not needed here. The paper might not be good, but we need to get rid of the phones. It's obvious that it's a problem. Just try to take someone's phone away. What "we" do not need here is distraction from the problem.
This study does not come without limitations. First, it is important to recognize that the present findings are correlational and cross-sectional in nature and therefore do not permit conclusions regarding directionality or causality. Although caregiver device-centric behaviors and adolescent attachment insecurity were robustly associated, it remains unclear whether perceived caregiver distraction is related to attachment insecurity, whether adolescents with higher levels of attachment insecurity are more likely to perceive caregiver behavior as inattentive or disruptive (i.e., reverse causality), or whether both reflect other unmeasured contextual or relational factors. Second, several of the DAIS items assess emotional reactions, which could conceptually overlap with anxious attachment. Thus, the relationship between the DAIS and ECR may reflect a partial overlap of the constructs. Third, both the DAIS and ECR-RS are self-reported measures at a single time point, which may have shared method variance. [...]
I definitely think some people get addicted to the phones, and that addiction is negative for the relationship with the child. I also think one can be active on a phone while also being attentive and available to the child, which would be less problematic for the relationship.
I also don't think the phone is new in this regard. I've certainly heard many stories from back in the days about parents being glued to the TV or work and not being attentive to their child. It's even the point of the quite well known song Cat's in the Cradle[1].
The main difference I guess is that the phone is so prevalent in the population, and there are a lot of apps and sites that are engineered to grab your attention.
It doesn’t really seem to compute how hypocritical that is.
Phone addiction is harmful to everyone at all age groups. It's not really the individuals to blame through. The tech companies have broken human psychology and developed something more addictive than drugs.
You’re not going to overdose from using your phone too much, or die from withdrawal if you suddenly stop using your phone, so that seems like a stretch.
The claim is usually made without specific citations. The few studies I'm aware of show correlation between mental health issues and phone use, but don't show which way the causation runs. It's just as plausible that mental health causes more phone use, yet these message boards always like to blame the phone for the mental health issues.
Phone addiction is not identical. In some aspects its similar but in most others not.
U.S. Government info: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/distracted-driving
Telling your kid to not drink beer is giving them the courage to say no to drinking beer. I personally don’t just bark out rules with no context. I also have discussions with my kid about why drinking beer can go awry. We all expect that they will, likely before we’d feel it’s relatively safe. So I want him to at least know what’s in store and how to not make compounding mistakes.
Changing habits is hard enough on it's own.parenthood and modern life makes that even more difficult
I seriously, I feel like so many people just somehow magically forget their entire childhoods, maybe selectively?
I lack the ability to lie to myself like that unfortunately
a solipsistic viewpoint I suppose.
*Taking Charge of Adult ADHD
There's a reason why most of the books I've read on ADHD have mentioned "Don't self-diagnose; get an expert to diagnose you." Short version: many of the symptoms of ADHD such as distractability happen to everyone, or nearly everyone, to some extent. Everyone can be distracted by a random thought; most people shake it off and get their train of thought back on track. Some people are more distractable than others, but it's perfectly normal to be distracted now and then. Which is why most people reading an ADHD book will recognize some of their behaviors in that book.
My opinion? (And note that I'm not qualified to diagnose anyone, so this is strictly an opinion). If you read the ADHD book and go "Hmm, maybe that describes me, I'm not sure"... then chances are that you do not have ADHD. Because my own experience was reading an ADHD book and going, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait. I know for a fact this author never interviewed me. So how come he's describing me perfectly?" Not in every single chapter — I don't have emotional-regulation problems to nearly the level that he described in some of the case studies, for example. But when I got to the bits about starting projects and not finishing them, or the parts about getting (seemingly-paradoxically) hyperfocused on some task and not noticing when other people are talking to you, I just shook my head and laughed, because he was describing me to a T.
Now, even if you don't have ADHD, that doesn't mean some of the organizational techniques mentioned there won't be helpful to you. Go ahead and apply them: many of them do help even the people who fit more into the "normal" part of the distractability spectrum. But certainly do NOT try any medication without having gotten a diagnosis first. Some ADHD medications can have side effects that should be watched for, and most of them are controlled substances in most countries I'm aware of (due to the possibility of addiction if you take way more than the amount normally prescribed, for example), meaning that in most countries, it's illegal to take them without a prescription.
But go ahead and apply some of the suggestions about ways to organize your life: they can be helpful even if you only have a normal level of distractability.
However, I live in Japan, where simply finding a doctor qualified and willing to diagnose someone over 20 years old is super rare. Short of expensive monthly trips to Tokyo or something just to be diagnosed, and then having a prescription that has to be received in person monthly. And the medication is highly controlled.
So I have just kinda accepted to keep applying these techniques (as well as being aware of my own created mechanisms), keep trying my best, and just live a happy life. It's been working so far!
but still, imo I haven't changed that much. less risk taking, more worries, more wisdom (somewhat)
maybe for some people they really are super different when they're younger but for me it's been kind of a linear path after a certain point
+ don't quote me on this but from what I know, ADHD affects mostly short term and working memory, but long term memory, especially significant events/etc. can be quite well retained, which matches my experience
It is possible to make changes, I would say this is one of the easier bad habits to beat. The best is to start with fixed moments where you as a family decide phones are forbidden. For example, shortly after our daughter was born, we decided "no phones during eating (breakfast/lunch/dinner)". When both parents are in, it is easy to mutually enforce. For over a decade, we have never used a phone during dinner and it's one of those moments of family time.
Now we are always surprised when we have dinner together at a restaurant that some people are on their phones half the time (sometimes doing useless stuff like checking Facebook/insta), rather than enjoying each other and dinner. It's so weird.
Another good method is to remove addictive social media from your phone. Primarily games and apps with algorithmic timelines like Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, etc. I removed all those from my phone. I noticed with apps that do not have an algorithmic timeline, like Mastodon, you catch up once and after that it's not interesting anymore.
If you are really addicted, seek help (we have to accept that it can be a real addiction). If not, set strict boundaries and remove addictive apps.
But it strikes me that many parents don't really think about it that much, as in the original rationale. I've had a suspicion there is something unethical about this. What choice could be more significant? Then again, maybe the personal nature of it means one is simply not aware of what other people are going through. Maybe everyone is really thinking it through. I am led to doubt it though. I'm curious if other people have had the chance to ask their own parents and felt satisfied by the results. That might be one of the few occasions you might have hope for a somewhat revealing answer.
I've found this notion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism somewhat interesting in this regard.
Biology / evolution. The drive to reproduce is baked in by natural selection. Organisms that didn’t want offspring didn’t pass on genes.
The number one reason is because they see other families and the love and joy that their children bring into their lives. This is inspiring, and brings people around to making the decision, even if they know the sacrifices they will have to make.
Boiling it all down to pure biology is stripping parents of agency to fit your worldview.
Personally, I know (online rather than in person) at least one couple who thought about it a lot, and ended up deciding not to have kids, because they were both carriers of a recessive gene (I forget which) that could have been nasty to whatever kid ended up with both copies. Which is kind of the opposite of "completely ignor[ing] if their kids even have a chance of a good future", IMHO. Other parents thought about it and decided to have only a certain number of kids and no more, because that was how many kids they could afford to raise and launch into a path that potentially leads to a good future.
Now, are there people who have kids for selfish reasons? Yes. I can think of some examples. But the people who think about it a lot and end up deciding to have kids? They're usually (not always, of course, but usually) some of the best parents around, precisely because they've thought about the sacrifices they would have to make and decided they're willing to make them for the sake of their kids' future happiness.
Group 2 some think about it and do,
Group 3 and some don’t think about it much and are (probably) more likely to end up with a kid than group 1 because most people like having sex and this group will be less careful than group 1.
Why?
As a human being who was once born, I am extremely grateful for my existence, and how much thought my parents put into it beforehand is of practically no consequence.
You seem to imply that if parents haven't already committed to giving their kids a perfect childhood with perfect parenting then the kids are better off not living at all?
As for myself I would simply summarize that making an important choice such as bringing life into the world, without considering the consequences, is already somewhat unethical. One should think before taking an action that has irreversible consequences to anyone. In this case, the person being born. I wouldn't say I'm an antinatalist, I just find it interesting. On a rational level I'm not sure there are many good arguments against some of the conclusions there. If there are I'd be interested in hearing them. The fact that you are personally grateful for your existence is a pretty weak argument imo. If you had never been born you would not be around to know the difference. However had your existence been different it is not so hard to imagine you might feel differently. Surely your life is not so peachy that a scan of that article will be incomprehensible to you. Then again, perhaps you simply lived a far better life than I.
I'm not taking a position one way or the other. As I said, I just find it interesting.
Almost everybody's revealed preference is to stay alive rather than to not be alive, otherwise we'd see a lot more suicide.
> making an important choice such as bringing life into the world, without considering the consequences, is already somewhat unethical.
This is a view you can take, but it's not as obviously important as you seem to think.
An alternative view is "making an important choice such as FAILING to bring life into the world, given the opportunity to do so, without considering the consequences, is somewhat unethical."
If the standard was truly that you can't have kids unless you're sure they're going to have a great life, then we would have gone extinct millions of years ago.
The desire to avoid death is explicitly dealt with. The way you have thus answered it is somewhat amusing. Yes, we know people do not want to die. This is obvious. The question is then why do we keep creating people who will die? If they were never created in the first place they wouldn't know the difference. But as soon as you create them, you condemn them to that ultimate end you just acknowledged people want to avoid. You should also probably acknowledge the nature of suicide. It seems to me the antinatalists understand this better than you. After all suicide is painful because humans do not want to die. It is the ultimate suffering, not merely an escape from life. The grief associated with suicide comes from the recognition that someone has done something to themselves that they didn't really want to do. Do you really think the agony of suicide is equal to never having been born? How could that be possible? Where is the unconceived person who has been subjected to such pain? They don't exist and never did. The point of the antinatalist argument is why would you create life in a world like this? This also makes your last point sort of irrelevant for a bonafide antinatalist, as the obvious rejoinder would be, so what? If we are moral agents and not evolutionary automatons then what point are you making? The question is a moral one. Why you think evolution would provide an answer here I am not sure.
As to your middle point, it's all good to just reverse the argument. But you didn't even make an effort to substantiate it. Why would creating life be a moral imperative? Because evolution? Is the act of creation not a more deliberate and significant act than the act of abstention from such activity? To what level should parents be responsible for their children? What symmetric responsibility would you impose on non parents? It would be hard to see how it could be symmetric at all unless you think parentage is largely irrelevant. Which would imply an acknowledgement of the relative significance of having a child vs not.
As for me, I also think your last sentence betrays something. No one can be sure their kid will have a great life. That should never be the standard because it cannot exist. I generally think however it is sensible to say if a person can only provide a hand wavey answer about why they think tomorrow will be better than yesterday, in 2026, and yet still chooses to have a child one might ask if that seems unethical. You don't need to delude yourself into offering some guarantees. But I personally think it is probably unethical to create life without some conviction that at the very least, on balance your child will face more good than bad. But parents aren't responsible for everything that happens. They're human beings, like their kids. No one expects perfection. Antinatalism isn't really a question for parents it's a question for those who have not yet conceived and offers a particular moral lens from which to evaluate the option. I just think it is a somewhat interesting one. Generally I just hope people having kids are being thoughtful about it and have conviction in the future.
Thanks for the back and forth.
Considering how the vast majority of people don't actively seek to end their lives, I think it's reasonable to assume that they prefer to live.
The crown argument against these musings is that according to them the only way to realistically act ethically is to not have children at all - that is self-defeating and not sustainable.
Also it places emphasis on avoiding harm/suffering etc. Problem is, these are unavoidable parts of life and trying to minimise them at any cost is essentially attempting to not live.
I think the term sometimes used for such things is "death cult".
Selfishly, nobody will love me like my children, at least in their early years. They're also amazing playmates and students. And they give me social permission to do silly things like climb on playground structures. They're also a great excuse to get out of stuff.
Selflessly, I believe me and the mother of our children are sensible people and the world needs more sensible people. Plus someone needs to maintain the replacement rate. And it's a weird, warm, fuzzy feeling to care for one's children at one's own expense.
In the intersection, it's a fun challenge to try to achieve balance in life, work, and family. I also really appreciate the chance to get a do-over of everything my parents did, keeping the good stuff and improving on the bad.