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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.
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. :)
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I don't have any kids, but my sister does. Four of 'em to be exact.
They're all aged 7-12. They practically live online. One spent the summer with us this year. I couldn't believe how much time he spent on his iPad/iPhone. I'm hesitant to say he was addicted to it, because we were still going out and doing stuff around town and it's not like he was on the device all day long totally ignoring us. In fact, now that I think of it, he never once pulled out his phone while we were busy eating together (unlike some other people I know, who have their handheld out and in front of their face before the SMS alert sound finishes playing).
Still...
When we weren't doing stuff together, he was online with his friends, and almost completely immersed in whatever it was he was doing. Every single day, without fail, he'd be on his iPad in the mornings, and at night (usually until 1-2 AM). If we weren't doing anything together, he'd be off on the internet doing other stuff without us.
Now, don't get me wrong- there was absolutely nothing rude or wrong about that. My sister did a pretty good job raising her kids. I've just never seen anyone who alternated so definitively between "doing things IRL" and "being online with friends". It made me wonder how someone like that would react to a week long internet outage or any other kind of temporary disconnect from the online world. Would they find other things to do? Would they suffer withdrawal? I dunno. It does seem like social networking is getting baked more deeply into each generation as time goes on, to the point that it's basically become a critical way of communicating and interacting with others.
To be fair, I have noticed on several occasions that my sister's household is extremely well behaved. I grew up with two brothers and a sister, and none of us really got along that well until later in life. There were plenty of screaming matches and other altercations throughout the years. Oddly enough, it seems like my sister has had to deal with absolutely none of this (unless the WLAN goes down- god help her poor husband when that happens). The kids are very well behaved and the online interactions seem to prevent a lot of the interactions that could cause family friction otherwise. It's almost like everyone lives together in the same house, but at the same time they don't? I'm not sure how to explain it. They still have breakfast/lunch/supper together, and they still watch movies together, and play games together, and all that stuff, but otherwise people are off in their own world doing their own thing online.
I think technology has definitely changed the way families work. Whether or not it's "contaminated" them, I don't know. Things are different now, but it's hard to say whether or not that's a good or bad thing.
The next interesting study will be about parent mobile usage's impact on children. What person do you become when your parents preferred a machine to you for years?
So much for children "being seen but not heard".
In the "traditional" Western family model, kids pretty much had to put up with whatever their parents gave them. Bad food, lots of chores, and lots of time being ignored by the parents (especially the father)? Too bad, so sad, suck it up. You had a roof over your head (when you weren't getting shooed outside so Mom could get some stuff done for once) and clothes on your back (albeit hand-me-downs) and that was good enough.
Sure some parents were wise, insightful, and pretty awesome during those few hours of the day when Dad wasn't working 50-60 hour weeks and Mom wasn't, you know, cleaning stuff or . . . whatever. Others weren't. It doesn't take cell phones and tablets for parents to find ways to ignore their children. My paternal grandfather would read sci-fi novels in the basement while drinking beer instead of interacting with anyone . . . including his kids (my dad & aunt).
About the only difference here is that parents would almost all have a few moments of face time with the kids that they could hardly avoid: dinner, and church on Sundays. So if you are using your phone during those times then yeah it can make a difference. But if they are getting more time with you during other parts of the day . . .
I remember watching The Waltons on TV (a show about a family living in a Virginia rural community through the Depression and WWII) where one episode focused on the family getting a telephone. It was a big deal and not without people being concerned about how it might affect their life. A rather humorous, and quite realistic, scene involved the patriarch having to leave the bathtub to answer the phone. I believe the episode ended with them getting rid of the telephone but it reappears later in the series with much less fanfare.
Then came television. People were concerned about how that might affect the family too. I lived through some of this as I remember Dad bringing home a second TV after Mom demanded the one TV we had be removed from the kitchen. Dad did not want his TV viewing to be interrupted by supper. Come to think of it I was probably watching The Waltons while eating supper.
Computers, internet, video games, all technology that was going to invade "family time". That's just the electronics. Some of you may have read enough history to know how big of a deal clocks were to how society worked. Automobiles were also supposed to ruin "family time" or something.
Same stuff on a different day. People learn to turn the stuff off when they should or suffer the consequences.
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"On the plus side, many parents said that mobile devices facilitated their ability to work from home."
That explains why, on so many web forums, I keep seeing unsolicited testimonials from young mothers who make $5000 a week working part-time from home.
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60 hour work weeks for both parents are "contaminating" family life. Smart phones are just the means we stay in touch with our kids during those long work hours.
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Reasonable sample sizes depends on the nature of the study you are conducting. If you are looking for drug side effects, you want very large study sizes because very rare events can be show-stoppers for you. In most social science contexts, on the other hand, modest sample sizes are both more practical and desirable.
Smaller studies are not only more financially efficient, excessively large sample sizes can lead to results that are statistically significant but are not very practically interesting (i.e., you can disprove the null hypothesis at a p < 0.05 level but the magnitude of the effect you're looking at is so weak nobody should care about it).
So sample sizes in the 15-30 range are usually a pretty good choice for many social science purposes. If you design the study protocol correctly and choose the proper statistical tests you shouldn't get many spurious positive results from a modest sized sample. You will get many spurious negative results, but if the study is well-designed the effects you miss will be relatively weak. This is a reasonable tradeoff in a world with limited funding.
The bigger problem is getting a representative sample to test. You can't fix a skewed sampling methodology throwing even more oddball bodies into your study; in fact that makes problems worse. Better to conduct a modest sized study and then confirm it with a similarly sized study whose subjects are recruited in a different way.
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When I was little I would want to keep playing with my trainset and not want to go sit down and eat dinner. 10 years later computers and video games kept me in my room. 10 years later internet and online gaming kept me up allnight. Some people watch tv all night and don't even like the shows. There is always something new and exciting to do.
But I do see a difference with personal devices. You can't bring your trainset, console video games or desktop computer to the restaurant or to bed. It happens to us, my wife can spend a whole dinner on facebook, checking every 30 seconds for new notifications and feeling the need to instantly respond to everyone. We may as well be eating separately. Work emails and texts from coworkers 24 hours per day don't help either. Same thing at home, the bedroom is not as active as it once was, facebooking or playing candy crush until she falls asleep and hardly any 'special' together time.
Not long ago there were a couple of ads for the Kindle Fire where a child needed attention, so the parent, home alone, just turned on the parental controls and handed the tablet over with a sigh of relief.
I found those ads to be highly offensive. Yet I have seen that happen myself. A parent will buy one of those built like a tank sub $50 Android tablet for this reason alone. I have seen people do this to kids as young as two just to shut them up when the poor kid needs human interaction when crying. Inevitably the kid breaks it but because they are so cheap the parent just buys another if the don't already have another in waiting. I have seen this stunt language skills in children with no other sign of developmental disability.
I wonder what these kids brains are going to be wired for as adults. It's a safe bet it will be something we have never seen before. Autism move over. There is a new game in town.
Two disclaimers: I own the latest Kindle fire and love it. I have seen that very situation benefit kids with autism.
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