Technology and gadgets are now indispensable in our daily lives. In the past few years, carrying a smartphone in a pocket has become commonplace. It has helped the insatiable appetite for information at the fingertips.
But as with everything in life, the excessive use of smartphones has been implicated in so many unwanted outcomes; car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, drowsiness and fatigue during the day.
Even so, emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It involves kids’ development. A new study showed that extensive use of smartphones by a toddler’s mother or father could damage their development. This study was done by Tel Aviv University.
Many mothers carry their smartphones close to them, and they are looking for a moment to sneak away for some time to scroll through social media. Some take time off to check the latest gossip sites, fashion or the latest movie.
The study found that when a mother is on her smartphone, the interaction between mother and toddler decreased substantially and this can be damaging to a toddler’s development, which relies on interaction with their parent. There is even worry that this can have a lot of long-term consequences as the child grows.
The experiment, according to the journal, Child Development, involved “dozens” of mothers and their toddlers and they were all invited to participate in this study to look at the link between the mother and the child’s interest and they were asked to perform three tests.
One of the activities involved browsing a designated Facebook page and liking videos and articles that interest them; another is to read printed magazines and mark articles that interest them. The last was to play with the child while the smartphone and magazines were outside the room (uninterrupted free play).
The goal was to simulate situations in real life where the mother has to take care of her child, while at the same time devoting some of her attention to her smartphone. The mothers were unaware of the purpose of the experiment, so they behaved naturally by splitting their interest between the toddlers and the smartphone and magazines.
All the interactions between the mothers and the toddlers were videotaped and later scanned in an attempt to quantify the mother-child interaction. This includes the linguistic content, how interactive the discourse was, and to what extent the mother responds to child bids.
They found that mothers talked up to four times less with their children while they were on their smartphones. Moreover, they exchanged fewer conversational turns with the toddler, provided less immediate and content-tailored responses, and more often ignored explicit child bids.
Even when they were able to respond while browsing Facebook, the quality of the response was reduced—the mothers kept their responsiveness to a bare minimum to avoid a complete breakdown in communication with the toddler.
Dr Haleem Abdulrahman, a consultant psychiatrist, University College Hospital (UCH), Ibadan stated that excessive smartphone use could cause a suboptimal attachment between parents and children.
According to him, “they are distracted, obviously the time they will be spending with the child is going to be limited; the social interaction is going to be limited. That means that the attachment is going to be suboptimal.
“Social media has made some parents decide that they need a house help that will be taking care of the children not because they are at work, or they are away. They are in the house, but they just want to have more time on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.
“This is a very wrong aberration in our environment and it is growing. Its consequences will become more obvious in years to come. The children could grow up with severe emotional neglect; they grow with low attachment.
“Their children may grow up not caring what anybody says or what anybody does because they don’t have an attachment to people and that will predispose them to things such as opposition defiant disorders and conduct disorder.”
Dr Abdulrahman declared that a mother should know that she is more attached to her phone than her baby when individuals need to call their attention to their babies or spend more than two hours on their smartphone.
He added, “when people note the number of hours they spend on each application on their phone, they can get to know the proportion of the whole day that they have sent away from their families, away from their children, away from people who need their attention and of course when it is becoming too much.”
According to the researchers, although the smartphones did not distract the mothers more than the magazines, it is clear that the use of smartphones is much more than any other media and so they may pose a significant developmental threat.
While the study focused on the mothers, the researchers believe the findings characterise communication interferences between fathers and their toddlers as well, since the smartphone usage patterns are similar between men and women.
Previous studies revealed that reduced linguistic input leads to decreased vocabulary in children, a shortcoming that may extend to adulthood. The back-and-forth discourse between parent and child is a predictor of language and social development, as the child learns that he or she has something to contribute to the interaction as well as the basic social norms of social interactions.
Smartphones have their good sides; the distraction it causes from other things is what mothers should look away from. Mothers everywhere may need to take a break from their smartphones throughout the day and make sure they are interacting with their toddlers.
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