Cell phones have long been characterized as harmful
devices that distract parents from engaging meaningfully with their children.
But a new study suggests that cell phone use may actually help with parenting
as long as the parent isn't immersed in the device while the children are
present.
So, firing off a quick text message to a friend, quickly
looking up a recipe or glancing at a funny meme, even while children are
sitting right nearby, Eleanor Goldberg Fox of Insider.com writes, can actually
benefit a parent by giving them a break while they're still physically with
their children. She points out that data also suggests that momentary
distractions are typically followed by "an intensive burst of highly
attentive parenting," according to the study’s researchers.
“The key is keeping the phone from displacing time with
children or making kids feel like they're competing with the phone for a
parent's attention,” Goldberg Fox writes. “At low levels of family disruption
and family conflict, more parental phone use was associated with higher-quality
self-report parenting.”
The new study, based in Australia, acknowledged that there
are potential downsides to using a phone while with children. “Starting from
the hypothesis that 'smartphones are a problem' and looking for confirmation of
that hypothesis, we were asking-what are the patterns?" its authors said.
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