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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.

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“Parents shape their children’s media habits from the time of infancy, through setting limits on amount and content of media use, helping children understand what they encounter on screens, and role modeling technology use.” (Redesky et al., 2016, p. 694)

An important facet of my inquiry is determining how adults and young children (particularly infants) actually communicate in an environment where digital and/or mobile technologies are being used. In A Naturalistic Study of Child and Family Screen Media and Mobile Device Use by Domoff et al. the authors studied what was being said by, and to, young children when any screen or mobile device was in use in their immediate home environment. They had several interesting findings:

• Parents’ mediation of screen media tended to be reactive and aimed at restricting use or explaining technology functionality.
• Active mediation was initiated most by the children (in preschool and school-age groups) asking or commenting on the content of the media. This was less evident in the infant group as they lacked the speaking skills to initiate those dialogues.
• Siblings played a more dominant role in mediation than parents.
• Parents and children negotiated screen time limits.
• “Parallel family media use was common. Multiple family members engaged with their own mobile devices while simultaneously being exposed to background screen media (i.e., media multitasking).” (Domoff et al., 2019, p. 401)
• “Active mediation of TV has been found to mitigate the risks of exposure to violent media (e.g., aggression; Nathanson and Cantor 2000), and enhance positive effects of prosocial media (e.g., Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood; Rasmussen et al. 2016).” (Domoff et al., 2019, p. 402)

The second point was the most interesting to me as my research to date has highlighted the importance of mediating screen media with very young children. Domoff et al. describe active mediation as “consist[ing] of parents’ communication with their children about media content, including characters’ actions and motivations”. It looks then like this is not happening very much with the youngest children. If parents don’t often initiate active mediation, then the ones with more consistent speech skills are privileged, as they are able to initiate these interactions. The authors last point about family members engaging with separate devices while together made me wonder about whether the adults were so wrapped up in their own device use, that their interactions with their children were reactive rather than proactive.

Then I wanted to know about parents’ perceptions of their own media use around their children. Enter Parent Perspectives on Their Mobile Technology Use : The Excitement and Exhaustion of Parenting While Connected by Radesky et al.. In it, the authors describe a study where they conducted a series of interviews to elicit parents’ nuanced and complex feelings toward they way that they use screen and mobile technology around their infants.

“Cognitively, they described the act of multitasking between technology and children as stressful or less effective; specifically, they described how the cognitive load of doing work or accessing information via technology often makes it difficult to read and respond to children’s social cues in the moment” (Redesky et al., 2016, p. 699).

Parents felt tensions between their tech use and their parental and daily responsibilities. This supports the Domoff’s findings that parents interactions around technology use tend to be reactive and rarely focus on the content that their children are accessing unless the child brings it up. It seems that parents are distracted by their own devices and so are less mindful of their children’s experiences with screen and mobile media than they might like to be. The question is, how does parental use of mobile tech influence children’s socialization and development? Does parents’ attention to their devices impact their child’s sense of self worth? What kind of role-modelling are we adults doing? It brings me back to the idea of consciously role-modelling tech etiquette with young children. It seems we also need to be more mindful of actively mediating young children’s tech use, especially if they are too young to ask us about it.