Photo by Wyron A on Unsplash

The other day as I was leaving work, I observed an interaction where a father was helping his two-year-old son get dressed into his snowsuit to go home, all the while talking animatedly on his cell phone. The father was paying attention to the child enough to functionally get him ready to go, but there didn’t seem to be any deeper attention paid, or conversation between the two. I feel like these kinds of interactions are relatively common, and perhaps I only really noticed because I have been thinking about tech use within the infant/adult dyad. This incident made me want to dig deeper into last week’s topic and examine how mobile devices impact face-to-face interactions. Kildare’s and Middlemiss’ literature review (2017), Impact of Parents’ Mobile Device use on Parent-Child Interaction, dug in to describe how the quality of parent/child interactions is affected by parental device use. The iPhone Effect: The Quality of In-Person Social Interactions in the Presence of Mobile Devices by Misra, Cheng, Genevie (2016), and Yuan looked at how the presence (or absence) of a mobile device, whether in use or not, affected in-person conversation partners perceived attention, closeness, and empathy during conversation.

Having already discussed the ubiquity of mobile devices in children’s and parents’ lives, as well as the pressure parents’ feel to stay connected, we’ll get straight to the meat of the articles.

The iPhone effect: The quality of in-person social interactions in the presence of mobile devices

“One can communicate with a social group or an individual, regardless of proximity or location, thereby elevating a spatially distant relationship over proximal, face-to-face relationships (Gergen, 2002).” (Misra et al., 2016, p. 280)

Misra and colleagues commented on the sensory overload people experience living primarily urban lives, and how people retreat from this overload by selectively tuning out – like listening to podcasts on public transit rather than engaging with other passengers. They say that there is a new form of cognitive overload, which they call cyber-based overload, which “taxes individuals’ working memory, amplif[ies] distractedness, and mak[es] it difficult for them to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information”.

They also go on to say that phones are not just phones, but a symbolic representation of people\s wider social networks and all the information and communication that phones connect us to. As some of my colleagues would say, phones have agency and purpose, and so their mere presence fundamentally alters an interaction. Misra et al. conducted a naturalistic experiment where they studied how a person’s smart phone or tablet just being placed on the table where they were conversing with another person affected the quality of their face to face conversation. It was an elegantly designed study with interesting results:

• “If either participant placed a mobile communication device (e.g., smartphone or a cell phone) on the table or held it in their hand during the course of the 10-min conversation, the quality of the conversation was rated to be less fulfilling compared with conversations that took place in the absence of mobile devices.” (Misra et al., 2016, p. 290)
• “participants who conversed in the presence of mobile communication devices also reported experiencing lower empathetic concern compared with participants who interacted without distracting digital stimuli in their visual field.” (Misra et al,  2016, p. 290)
• “The relationship between the presence of mobile devices and empathetic concern was more pronounced for participants who reported a closer relationship with each other compared with those who were less familiar with each other.” (Misra et al., 2016, p. 290)

Misra et al. suggested that the reason for this is that while conversation partners were aware of the presence and potential of the mobile device, they were “potentially more likely to miss subtle cues, facial expressions, and changes in the tone of their conversation partner’s voice, and have less eye contact”. All these verbal and non-verbal cues are important to a fulfilling conversation.

So, the takeaway from this article is that phones are distracting, even when not in use. This distraction represents a cognitive overload which lowers the quality of face-to-face interactions. This study was with adults, but Kildare and Middlemiss studied the impact of device use on parent-child interactions.

Impact of parents’ mobile device use on parent-child interaction: A literature review

“Parents who use their phones during parent-child interactions are less sensitive and responsive both verbally and nonverbally to their children’s bids for attention, potentially leading to lower quality parent-child interactions.” (Kildare & Middlemiss, 2017, p. 579)

Kildare and Middlemiss begin by discussing the displacement hypothesis which I was not familiar with by name but recognize as a common discourse in the nature vs. tech dialogue. Basically, it posits that “time spent with & technology or media may displace and decrease meaningful parent-child connections”. This is critical because it is well-established that child development is strongly influenced by parents’ behaviour and parent-child interactions.

This hypothesis echoes the findings of Misra et al. when they describe the way one retreats from cognitive or sensory overload by selectively focusing. Both articles discuss the way that mobile devices take precedence over face-to-face communication due to the representational nature of the tech. Kildare and Middlemiss also comment on the fact that people are expected to be available to respond to their devices all the time, and the pressure to be continually connected interferes with quality face-to-face interactions. Here are selection of the conclusions that I found the most interesting:

• 35% of American adults reported to frequently using their phone while playing with their children
• Parents often use their smart phones to stay connected with their teens, but use it to deliberately disconnect from their younger children by using social media to connect with other adults instead
• 52% of parents reported checking their phone too frequently, and 28% felt that they were not modeling appropriate device use

The authors also commented on the fact that as parents’ devise use potentially displaces parent-child interactions, parents may experience less positive parenting moments. This, especially where young children are involved, has the potential to cause parents to retreat further into their phone to escape the negative interactions.

Toward the end of the article Kildare and Middlemiss discuss parents’ role modeling of mobile devices, which, to me, is a critically important factor. Young children learn about mobile devices and the social norms surrounding them through observing others interacting with them. So not only are young children’s potential for quality interactions being displaced, but they are learning that the mobile devices is more important than them. The authors wrap up the article by suggesting that parents limit their use of mobile tech in the presence of their children, however even they recognize that this is no easy task.