Feeling Cranky: Maybe It's Time to Put Down Your Smart Device!
Do you ever yell at your children for absolutely no reason and feel guilty about it after? A new study from the Boston Medical Center has discovered that parents who are sucked into their smart devices (phones, tablets, etc) have more negative interactions with their children. Children often feel like they are competing for their parents' attention and therefore act up or do other attention grabbing stunts to get the attention they need and crave!
Dr. Jenny Radesky, a fellow in developmental-and-behavioral pediatrics at Boston Medical Center, was interested in finding out how distracting smart devices might affect how parents and their children interact. Would their quality of time be affected at all, and how so?
The study sent undercover investigators to fast food restraunts where they observed adult(s) and their children as they ate. The observers recorded the behaviors of the adult(s) and the children, and this experiment resulted in 55 different observations of adult/child groupings.
The observations that were made were heart breaking to say the least. The investigators noted a number of instances where children were begging for their parent's attention. One observation was of a child who was "attempting to lift his mother's face while she looked down at a tablet, with no success." Another mother kicked her child under the table after the child's many attempts to get her attention! "What stood out the most," one investigator noted, "was that in a subset of caregivers using the device almost through the entire meal, how negative their interactions could become with the kids."
If parents are using the device during the entire meal and showing negative interactions, imagine what the interactions are like when it's the child using the device: ignoring their parents' attempts to speak with them, refusing to eat their food, getting grumpy or upset when their parents insist they put down the device they are using. It just makes sense that parents, who really should know better, would react in the same way!
With these study results, Radesky is working closely with the American of Pediatrics to develop "guidelines" for smart phone usage in front of children, which are similar to guidelines that have been developed in the past about TV viewing. One way Radesky and AOP hope to spread the word about negative parent/child interactions involving smart devices is to produce campaign videos that show parents how damaging their interactions can be when they use their smart devices. Radesky also wants to dive further into this topic and find out exactly what parents are doing on their smart devices to determine if there are better and worse things parents can do while with their children.
After reading about this study, my advice to you parents with smart devices is to put them aside during quality family moments like meal time, bed time and story time. Treasure your children as much as you can. They grow up so fast and they need you to show them how to be postive role models who can make a difference in the world around them.
Thanks for listening,
~Kayla