We really need to look at our own behavior. What the research says about parent phone use, and what we can do about it.
This article is for educational purposes and isn't a substitute for individualized clinical care.
Sit in a restaurant for twenty minutes and count how many adults are engaging with their child or teen for the entire meal, and how many parents are looking at their phone or glancing at their phone repeatedly. The conversation about screen addiction in children and teens has a hole in the middle of it, and, we as the parents, are at the center. I am not writing this to make anyone feel terrible. I am guilty of this too. Our phones are work, calendars, cameras, ways to communicate with loved ones. But, since having a child, I have realized the extent to which the conversation around screen time in kids and teens is missing a major point. We need to look in the mirror.
We talk constantly about kids and screens. Too much time on the tablet. Games designed by people who understand reward schedules that create a dopamine hit and cause more drive to play longer. All of that is real, and the people who built those systems carry some responsibility for them.
But there is a second half to this, and it is harder to say out loud.
Children are growing up watching us. And a great many of us are on our phones far more than we realize, in front of them, during the exact moments they need us most.
Researchers call it technoference, and it's become a large topic of conversation in the research world. It refers to the everyday interruptions in face-to-face time that happen because of a device. Not the hours you spend on your phone after bedtime. The seconds and minutes that break into time you are already spending with your child.
In a study published in 2016 by McDaniel and Coyne, mothers of children under three were asked how often technology interrupted their interactions with their child. The results were maybe not surprising but alarming nonetheless. Sixty-five percent reported it happening during playtime. Twenty-six percent during mealtime. Twenty-two percent reported it interrupting them during discipline and limit setting. This is all concerning for reasons outlined below, but the interruptions during play are the most concerning to me from a child development perspective.
Play is the single most important window you have with a young child. It is where language develops, where emotions get named, and where your child learns engaging with you is rewarding and fun. This is critical to the parent-child relationship and attachment. And it is the activity highly interrupted by parent screen use.
There is a study I think about often. First conducted fifty years ago and replicated many times since.
It is called the Still Face Paradigm. A parent sits face to face with their infant and plays normally. Smiling, talking, responding. Then, on instruction, the parent's face goes blank. They stay physically present, still looking at the baby, but they stop responding. No expression. No sound. Two to three minutes.
What happens next is hard to watch.
Tronick et al. (1978) found that within seconds, the infant notices and starts working. They smile bigger, point, reach, vocalize, try every social bid they have to bring the parent back. When it does not work, they fall apart. They turn away. They slump. Many cry.
This is not only an emotional reaction. Infants in this paradigm show measurable physiological stress: elevated heart rate and increases in cortisol.
The parent never left the room. Unresponsiveness alone was enough.
A parent glancing at a phone is not identical to the still face experiment. You may not be holding a blank stare for three minutes straight. But it is the same mechanism in smaller doses, many times a day. Your face goes neutral and unavailable. Your child's bid for connection lands on nothing and they learn over time you are not responsive. Responsiveness is critical to parental attachment, which is the root of healthy emotional and psychological well-being in children and adults.
When you look at your child while they talk, your face is doing work.
Children learn to read emotion by watching faces respond in real time. They learn that a furrowed brow means concern and a warm face means safety. They learn empathy by having their own feelings mirrored back by someone who was paying attention. They learn that their words cause something to happen in another person, which is the foundation of communication itself.
When you are looking down, your child is trying to engage with the top of your head.
This is not sentimentality. Higher technoference has been associated with less warmth in parent-child interactions, and with more child behavior problems, both externalizing behaviors like tantrums and defiance and internalizing behaviors like withdrawal and anxiety (McDaniel & Radesky, 2018; Stockdale et al., 2018).
Before you spiral into guilt, know this. The relationship runs in both directions. Longitudinal research found that difficult child behavior predicted more parent technology use due to the level of stress the parent felt. Which makes complete sense. When your child has been screaming for forty minutes, your phone is the nearest available exit. It is a quiet little escape temporarily.
Hard behavior drives parents toward their phones. But then phone use during interactions is associated with harder behavior. Around it goes.
That should reduce your shame, not your responsibility. You are not a bad parent for reaching for your phone. But you are the only one in this loop who can decide to break it, because you are the adult.
Researchers in this area have asked directly whether it is even fair to tell parents to simply use their phones less (Torres, Radesky, Levitt & McDaniel, 2021). I don't think there is a perfect answer. Your phone is your work, your calendar, your camera, your pediatrician's after-hours line. "Use it less" is not a great plan in my opinion. But, using it differentially may be the answer. Protecting specific windows completely works better than trying to pretend we can cut entirely.
If you have been following the Parent Steps, you know that Step 3 is Special Time. Five to fifteen minutes a day of child-directed play (depending on the age of the child), where your child leads and you follow.
I have written about the mechanics. What you do, what you avoid, which activities work. This is the part underneath all of it.
Special Time works because it is a concentrated dose of exactly what the research above says children need. Your face, available. Your voice, responsive. Your attention undivided, for a defined period, every day.
The DO skills are all connection skills and ways to give positive attention. Labeled praise requires you to be watching closely enough to notice something specific. Behavior descriptions require you to be watching at all. Reflections require you to have heard what your child said. None of these are possible with a phone in your hand.
So when I tell families the phone goes in another room during Special Time, that is not etiquette. It is instruction given for an important reason. Ten minutes of split attention is not a smaller version of Special Time. It is a different thing, and it does not produce the same result.
Special Time is also repair. In the Still Face research studies, what happens between the parent and child after matters enormously. The reunion, when the parent's face comes back, is where the child recovers. A daily, protected, fully present window builds a reunion into every single day.
Put the phone in another room during Special Time. Not face down, not in your pocket. Another room. Silenced notifications still pull at you because you know they might be arriving. Even if you resist the urge to pull out your phone, the notification or vibration will pull your attention away from the strategies you're attempting to engage in during play.
Say it out loud when you do need to check. Teaching your child that your phone is a tool rather than used for fun or entertainment may be a good approach. "I need to look at something for two minutes, then I am coming right back." "I need to check my calendar to know when our doctor's appointment is." "I need to reply to grandma's text so she knows when to come over." Children handle a stated absence far better than an unexplained one. It also stops them concluding they lost you to something more interesting than them.
Watch the transition moments. School pickup, walking through the door at the end of the day, the first ten minutes of a meal, and when your children speak to you. These are reunion points, and they are arguably the most critical. Transition moments: phone away entirely. If you are on your phone and your child comes up to speak to you, phone down immediately even if temporarily. This takes practice and it won't be perfect. But it's worth improvement.
Batch it. Check three times in an evening on purpose instead of eleven times by reflex. Reflexive checking is what your child learns from, because it is what they see modeled dozens of times a day. Your child will pay attention to what you attend to. My daughter certainly has an interest in my phone despite never holding it and me moving it out of sight as soon as she sees me look at it. She has learned I am interested, so she is interested. I have work to do on this as well.
Pay attention to how you come back. Look up, make eye contact, and respond to whatever they were saying before you looked away. The return matters, so practice this when you catch yourself.
Do not aim for zero. Aim for protected windows where you are completely there, and when you really need your phone, explain to your child what you're doing. Ideally, you can give a warm positive statement before telling them you need to take a look at something on your phone. For example, "Sweetie, I loved that you were showing me your drawing. The flower you made is beautiful. I can't wait to see more. I am going to take a look at my phone to see if grandma replied to let us know when she is coming over." Extra effort? Yes. Worth it? Definitely.
Your child is not competing with a screen for your attention. They are learning, from watching you, what a person does with a phone in their hand. They will do it too if we continue in this manner. We can do this!
Thanks for trusting me with your family.
— Dr. Emily
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