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| Illustration by Katherine Streeter for NPR. www.katherinestreeter.com . |
NPR
REPORT—GUEST BLOG By Patti Neighmond for National Public
Radio--It's not just kids who are overdoing screen time. Parents
are often just as guilty of spending too much time checking smartphones and
e-mail — and the consequences for their children can be troubling.
Dr. Jenny Radesky is a pediatrician specializing in child
development. When she worked at a clinic in a high-tech savvy Seattle
neighborhood, Radesky started noticing how often parents ignored their kids in
favor of a mobile device. She remembers a mother placing her phone in the
stroller between herself and the baby. "The baby was making faces and
smiling at the mom," Radesky says, "and the mom wasn't picking up any
of it; she was just watching a YouTube video."
Radesky was so concerned she decided to study the behavior.
After relocating to Boston Medical Center, she and two other researchers spent
one summer observing 55 different groups of parents and young children eating
at fast food restaurants. Many of the caregivers pulled out a mobile device
right away, she says. "They looked at it, scrolled on it and typed for
most of the meal, only putting it down intermittently."
This was not a scientific study, Radesky is quick to point
out. It was more like anthropological observation, complete with detailed field
notes. Forty of the 55 parents used a mobile device during the meal, and many,
she says, were more absorbed in the device than in the kids.
Radesky says that's a big mistake, because face-to-face
interactions are the primary way children learn. "They learn language,
they learn about their own emotions, they learn how to regulate them," she
says. "They learn by watching us how to have a conversation, how to read
other people's facial expressions. And if that's not happening, children are
missing out on important development milestones."
And, perhaps not surprisingly, when Radesky looked at the
patterns in what she and the other researchers observed, she found that kids
with parents who were most absorbed in their devices were more likely to act
out, in an effort to get their parents' attention. She recalls one group of
three boys and their father: The father was on his cellphone, and the boys were
singing a song repetitively and acting silly. When the boys got too loud, the
father looked up from his phone and shouted at them to stop. But that only made
the boys sing louder and act sillier.
Psychologist Catherine Steiner-Adair wrote a book about
parenting, called The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family
Relationships in the Digital Age. She sees lots of parents, teens and younger
kids in her clinical practice in Massachusetts. The father's reaction to his
three silly boys might be expected, she says, because "when you're texting
or answering email, the part of your brain that is engaged is the 'to do' part,
where there's also a sense of urgency to get the task accomplished, a sense of
time pressure. So we're much more irritable when interrupted."
With tablet technology still relatively new, pediatricians
are trying to understand how interactive media affects children.
And when parents focus on their digital world first — ahead
of their children — there can be deep emotional consequences for the child,
Steiner-Adair says. "We are behaving in ways that certainly tell children
they don't matter, they're not interesting to us, they're not as compelling as
anybody, anything, any ping that may interrupt our time with them," she
says.
In research for her book, Steiner-Adair interviewed 1,000
children between the ages of 4 and 18, asking them about their parents' use of
mobile devices. The language that came up over and over and over again, she
says, was "sad, mad, angry and lonely." One 4-year-old called his
dad's smartphone a "stupid phone." Others recalled joyfully throwing
their parent's phone into the toilet, putting it in the oven or hiding it.
There was one girl who said, "I feel like I'm just boring. I'm boring my
dad because he will take any text, any call, anytime — even on the ski
lift!"
Steiner-Adair says we don't know exactly how much these mini
moments of disconnect between a parent and child affect the child in the long
term. But based on the stories she hears, she suggests that parents think twice
before picking up a mobile device when they're with their kids.
First published on NPR Blog, April 21, 2014:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/04/21/304196338/for-the-childrens-sake-put-down-that-smartphone?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140421&utm_campaign=dailydigest&utm_term=nprnews
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