To distract from the endless worries, household noise and din, many parents spend time buried in their smartphones. However, the study shows that excessive parental involvement with mobile devices does not have the best effect on children.
Pediatrician Jenny Radesky, a researcher at the Boston Medical Center (USA), advises parents on developmental and behavioral issues in children. She has long been interested in how smartphones, which have already become truly ubiquitous, affect the quality of communication between children and parents. For example, some previous studies have shown that a TV that plays in the background, even when a child is not watching it, negatively affects his creativity and attention.
Pass the tests
- What are you afraid of in communication?
To learn more about the impact of mobile devices on the quality of family communication, Jenny Radesky and her colleagues decided (without advertising it) to observe families with children who came to dine at fast food restaurants in Boston. In total, they observed 55 families. In most cases (58,2%) the restaurant was attended by one adult with one or three children of school age. Lunch lasted from 10 to 40 minutes. At the same time, in forty out of 55 families, adults used mobile devices.
Observations clearly demonstrated that many parents were so immersed in their phone or tablet that they did not even want to see and hear their own children. In some cases, the children tried to literally take their mother’s face away from the electronic device, but they did not succeed. Some parents irritably brushed off their children, moved away from them, or reprimanded them in any way possible.
Read more:
- Kids and Gadgets: 7 Principles of Healthy Relationships
Jenny Radesky emphasizes that live communication, a face-to-face form, is extremely important for the development of children. “In this way they learn language, learn to understand and regulate their own emotions. Watching an adult, the child learns to conduct a conversation, to distinguish facial expressions of people, to respond to it. When children lack live communication, it turns out that important stages of development slip away, remain unpassed, ”the pediatrician emphasizes. Also, kids shouldn’t feel like they have to compete with electronic devices for their parents’ attention.
The results of observations and analysis of the data obtained allowed Jenny Radesky, together with the American Academy of Pediatrics, to begin developing recommendations for parents on limiting the use of smartphones. She also plans to continue research in this area, in particular by recording parent-child interactions to better understand how parents, immersed in their mobile devices, react to communication attempts from children, as well as how children themselves react in such situations. . It is also important to find out what exactly captivates parents so much that they do not tear themselves away even for a second from their electronic devices.
Read more:
- I have learned to live without a mobile
In the meantime, experts recommend putting smartphones and tablets aside during joint lunches and dinners with children. It is also useful to tell stories to children at night, to read, putting them to bed, of course, without touching gadgets at this moment.
Подробнее см. J. Radesky et al. «Patterns of mobile device use by cCaregivers and children during meals in fast food restaurants», Pediatrics, March 2014.