Smartphones Are 'Contaminating' Family Life, Study Suggests (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets can be distracting from child-rearing, upending family routines and fueling stress in the home, a small, new study finds. Incoming communication from work, friends and the world at large is "contaminating" family mealtime, bedtime and playtime, said study lead author Dr. Jenny Radesky. She's an assistant professor of developmental behavioral pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School. Her comments stem from her team's study involving interviews with 35 parents and caregivers of young children in the Boston area. "This tension, this stress, of trying to balance newly emerging technologies with the established patterns and rituals of our lives is extremely common, and was expressed by almost all of our participants," Radesky said. "We have to toggle between what might be stress-inducing or highly cognitively demanding mobile content and responding to our kids' behavior," she said. The result, said Radesky, is often a rise in parent-child tension and overall stress. Modern parents and caregivers interact with tablets, smartphones and other communication devices for about three hours a day, the study authors said in background notes. Radesky's team previously found that when parents used mobile devices during meals they interacted less with their children, and became stressed when children tried to grab their attention away from the device. The new study included 22 mothers, nine fathers and four grandmothers. Participants were between 23 and 55 years old (average age 36) and cared for toddlers or young children up to age 8. Roughly one-third were single parents, and nearly six in 10 were white. On the plus side, many parents said that mobile devices facilitated their ability to work from home. But that could fuel anxiety, too. Some said smartphones provided access to the outside world, and alleviated some of the boredom and stress of child-rearing. On the down side, caregivers described being caught in a tug-of-war between their devices and their children. The study findings were published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.

Comments

Maybe

[HalAtWork]

When I'm around my kid I just don't use these things, including video game consoles or watching TV. Even if my kid is playing well enough by himself I've got stuff to do anyway like clean or make his meal, only time I really have to pay attention to anything personally for myself is nap time or when he's gone to bed, or off with mom just the two of them.

Even before he was born I found that going online for too long was causing me stress and I'm not sure for what, I mean, at one point I was just refreshing favorite sites, making comments, soaking up any news item or just following trends like memes etc. My wife got pissed off because she wasn't into that and demanded I make time for her, and it got to the point where I had to do that or something in the relationship was going to go real bad. So I just cut back, and found I had a lot more space in my head to think, be creative, and enjoy what I already had. It only took about a couple weeks before I didn't even remember what I was doing all that time. It seems like a waste now.

But then my wife got a smartphone and Facebook was a thing and suddenly the script has flipped! Now I really see why she was annoyed. :)

Re:Not new

[drinkypoo]

Automobiles were also supposed to ruin "family time" or something.

But they did. If you had an automobile, you could feasibly commute to a job in another city. So now... we're all commuting. And the lost time is taken away from our loved ones, if we even have time for those. The automobile outcompeted rail with anticompetitive behavior, and now we're trying to figure out how to have self-driving cars to solve the problems caused by not extrapolating rail to PRT, but instead going back and extrapolating the horse-cart out to the automobile. We had the technology for self-driving cars in the 1800s, and it was called rail. Combine it with the concepts behind automated looms and you get automated transport networks. Instead we have... this.

Same stuff on a different day. People learn to turn the stuff off when they should or suffer the consequences.

It's more true with smartphones because fairly simple means can be used to avoid the problems; anyone who really has to stay in touch can use do-not-disturb mode to permit the office to reach them while otherwise enjoying their dinner. But you can't just wave a magic wand and make commuter culture go away. You still have to pay your bills.