Abstract
Studies have demonstrated that parents often exhibit a still face while silently reading their cell phones when responding to texts. Such disruptions to parent-child interactions have been observed during parental media use such as texting and these disruptions have been termed technoference. In the present study, we explored changes to mother-child interactions that occur before, during and after interruptions due to texting using an adapted naturalistic still face paradigm. Specifically, we examined the effect of an interruption due to either maternal smartphone use or use of an analog medium on maternal interaction quality with their 20- to 22-month-old children. Mother-child interactions during free play were interrupted for 2 min by asking the mothers to fill out a questionnaire either (a) by typing on the smartphone (smartphone group) or (b) on paper with a pen (paper-pencil group). Interactional quality was compared between free-play and interruption phases and to a no-interruption control group. Mixed ANOVA across phase and condition indicated that maternal responsiveness and pedagogical behavior decreased during the interruption phase for both the interruption groups (smartphone and paper-and-pencil) but not for the no-interruption group. Children also increased their positive bids for attention during the paper-and-pencil and the smartphone conditions relative to the no-interruption control. These findings are consistent with a large body of research on the still-face paradigm and with a recent study demonstrating that smartphone interruptions decreased parenting quality. The present study, however, connects these lines of research showing the many everyday disruptions to parent-child interactions are likely to decrease parenting quality and that toddlers are likely to detect and attempt to repair such interruptions.
Highlights
The quality of early mother-child interactions during play contributes to both child development and the mother-child relationship (e.g., Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2001; Landry et al, 2006; Ginsburg, 2007)
It was observed that other parental activities on playgrounds absorbed parents and impaired parental responsiveness, but not as much as parental smartphone use (Abels et al, 2018; Lemish et al, 2019; Vanden Abeele et al, 2020). These findings suggest that immersive smartphone use by parents disrupt every-day routine parent-child interactions
We found that smartphone use during a free play episode can impair maternal responsiveness and pedagogical behavior
Summary
The quality of early mother-child interactions during play contributes to both child development and the mother-child relationship (e.g., Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2001; Landry et al, 2006; Ginsburg, 2007). Parents use smartphones a significant proportion of the time in everyday family situations, in the presence of their small children, for example during play, meal, and bedtime routines (McDaniel and Coyne, 2016; Yuan et al, 2019; Barr et al, 2020; Vanden Abeele et al, 2020; Wolfers et al, 2020). Smartphone use during interactions results in repeated disconnections between social partners which has recently been labeled “technoference” (McDaniel and Radesky, 2018). Mothers of toddlers report experiencing smartphone interruptions during interactions with their toddlers—which they report are either self-initiated or due to device notifications (McDaniel and Coyne, 2016; Newsham et al, 2020)
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