Following my previous blog post about executive functions and the possible effects of the COVID period, I received an interesting question from a reader. In their staff room, they wondered whether something else might also play a role. Not only children’s own screen time, but also parents’ technology use. If parents are frequently on their smartphones, does that affect how children behave or how well they can focus their attention?

That question connects well with a fairly recent meta-analysis published in JAMA Paediatrics by Marcelo Toledo-Vargas and colleagues.

The researchers examined a phenomenon often referred to in the literature as “technoference”. This describes situations where technology disrupts an interaction. For example, a parent may repeatedly check a smartphone while playing, eating, or talking with a child. Notifications can also interrupt a conversation.

For the meta-analysis, 21 studies were brought together, involving nearly 15,000 participants. Most studies focused on young children up to around 5 years of age.

The results are interesting, but they require some nuance.

Children whose parents use technology more frequently in their presence tend, on average, to score slightly lower on cognitive tasks. The effect is small, but statistically significant. Researchers also found small but consistent associations with behaviour. More parental technology use is linked with slightly higher levels of internalising problems (such as anxiety or sadness) and externalising behaviour (such as anger or tantrums). They also found small associations with less prosocial behaviour. In addition, attachment outcomes were slightly less secure.

It is important to read this carefully: these are associations. It is extremely difficult to demonstrate clear causal relationships here. And it could also be the case that parents reach for their phones more often when a child is displaying difficult behaviour. In other words, the direction of the effect may partly run the other way.

And for other reasons, too, the findings may sound more dramatic than they actually are. All of the effects are small, something the researchers themselves emphasise clearly.

The pattern, however, is fairly consistent. When interactions between parents and children are more frequently interrupted by technology, some developmental outcomes appear to be slightly less favourable on average. The explanation researchers usually give has little to do with technology itself. Instead, it has much more to do with interaction.

For young children, short reciprocal interactions with adults are crucial. These are moments when a child shows something, reacts to a look, asks a question, or explores something together with an adult. Developmental psychologists often describe these moments as serve-and-return interactions. When these interactions are more often interrupted by a parent looking at a screen, there are simply fewer learning opportunities.

So the issue is not so much the device itself, but missed interactions.

Interestingly, the researchers also found no difference between two types of technology use: distraction (for example, scrolling on a smartphone) and interruption (notifications or phone calls). Both appear to show roughly the same small associations with the outcomes studied.

What we can cautiously say, therefore, is that when technology more frequently interrupts interactions between parents and children, researchers observe small associations with cognitive and socio-emotional development.

Whether this has anything to do with the observations many teachers report since the pandemic is something we simply do not know.

What it does remind us of, however, is something important. The development of attention, self-regulation and executive functions does not happen only at school. It grows in thousands of small interactions at home.

And sometimes, quite literally, a screen sits in between.

Image: https://familytimecenters.com/blog/postpartum-depression-guide