Extensive smartphone use by parents might damage child’s development: Study

A brand new study has found that interaction between mothers and their toddlers is reduced by a factor of four when the mothers use their smartphones. The research has been published in the Child Development Journal. Led by Dr. Katy Borodkin of the Department of Communication Disorders at the Stanley Steyer School of Health Professions, Sackler Faculty of Medicine of Tel Aviv University, the study involved dozens of mothers of toddlers.
The mothers were ostensibly invited to participate in a study examining the link between the mother’s and the child’s interests, and so they were asked to perform three tasks: Browse a designated Facebook page and like videos and articles that interested them, read printed magazines and mark articles that interested them, and finally, play with the child uninterrupted.
Borodkin said, “Our goal was to simulate situations in real life where the mother has to take care of her child, while at the same time devoting some of her attention to her smartphone.” She added, “The mothers were unaware of the purpose of the experiment, so they behaved naturally by splitting their interest between the toddlers and the smartphone and magazines. We videotaped all the interactions between the mothers and the toddlers and later scanned the recordings frame by frame in an attempt to quantify the mother-child interaction.”
Researchers from Tel Aviv University have defined three components of mother-child interaction. The maternal linguistic input was examined first, which is the linguistic content that the mother conveyed to the child. Conversational turns were examined as such as how interactive the discourse was. And maternal responsiveness was examined, that is, to what extent the mother responded to child bids. It is a measure of the immediacy of the response and its contingency on the child bid’s content.
Dr. Borodkin said, “We found that the three components of mother-child interaction were reduced by a factor of two to four relative to uninterrupted free play, both when the mother was reading printed magazines and browsing on her smartphone.”
“In other words, the mothers talked up to four times less with their children while they were on their smartphone. Moreover, they exchanged fewer conversational turns with the toddler, provided less immediate and content-tailored responses, and more often ignored explicit child bids. Even when they were able to respond while browsing Facebook, the quality of the response was reduced - the mothers kept their responsiveness to a bare minimum to avoid a complete breakdown in communication with the toddler,” she added.
“We did not find that one media distracted more than the other. However, it is clear that we use smartphones much more than any other media, so they pose a significant developmental threat. It should be noted that we currently have no research evidence suggesting an actual effect on child development related to the parental use of smartphones, as this is a relatively new phenomenon. However, our findings indicate an adverse impact on the foundation of child development. The consequences of inadequate mother-child interaction can be far-reaching,” she explained.