Nowadays, we are glued to our smartphones. Whether we used it for work purposes, studies or entertainment, we always keep our phones within reach. But how does this effect people around us, specifically children?
When parents use their phones in front of their children, they are distracted and tend to ignore them. Researchers used the Still Face Paradigm and posed that the unresponsiveness of parents negatively effects the social-emotional development of children (Myruski et al., 2017).
The Still Face Experiment was conducted for the first time in 1975 by Edward Tronick and his collegues. They let a child interact with his or her mother, the latter not responding or showing any expression. The child tried, unsuccesfully, to make contact with his or her mother for three minutes. The child became distressed, but did not stop trying to interact with the mother. In the end, the child turns away from his mother with a clearly distraught facial expression (Fulwiler, 2013).
Myruski et al. (2017) repeated this experiment, but added the use of phones. The children reacted negatively when the parents withdrew attention by using their phones. The sprouts were less interested in their toys, engaged less with the parent and were less inclined to explore the room they were in.
But with the ever growing need to be available through our mobile phones for work or studies, it seems impossible to put our phones away when we get home. Moreover, tablets are used in the education system at an increasingly young age anyway: iPad’s are already being used in education of toddlers (4 years old). According to Apple’s study, toddler’s reading skills increased after the implementation of the iPad in kindergarten class (Apple, 2017).
So why not let children get used to mass mobile device use as soon as possible? Would you expose your future children to mobile devices at a young age?
References
Apple (2017). iPad in het onderwijs: wereldwijde resultaten. [online] Apple, p.4. Available at: https://www.apple.com/nl/education/docs/ipad-in-education-results.pdf [Accessed 2 Oct. 2019].
Fulwiler, M. (2013). The Research: The Still Face Experiment. [online] The Gottman Institute. Available at: https://www.gottman.com/blog/research-still-face-experiment/ [Accessed 2 Oct. 2019].
Myruski, S., Gulyayeva, O., Birk, S., Pérez-Edgar, K., Buss, K. and Dennis-Tiwary, T. (2017). Digital disruption? Maternal mobile device use is related to infant social-emotional functioning. Developmental Science, [online] 21(4), p.e12610. Available at: http://file:///C:/Users/Romaana/Downloads/Myruski_et_al-2018-Developmental_Science.pdf [Accessed 2 Oct. 2019].
