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Is Your Phone Use Hurting Your Kids? Here’s What to Do
By Movieguide® Contributor
Want to limit your child’s screen time? Cutting your own tech use back might be the answer.
“Parents’ phone use in front of their kids can harm emotional intelligence,” a 2023 study found.
“Emotional intelligence is a set of mental abilities that allows a person to recognize, understand and manage their emotional states. According to the research, people are born with some level of capacity for emotional intelligence. But it’s also a skill-set that can be learned, practiced and developed, and it varies from person to person,” Robin Nabi, a UC Santa Barbara professor of communication, explained, per The Current.
“Some people are very good at detecting emotional nuance in themselves and others while other people are not,” she added. “At a more advanced level, some people are very good at regulating their emotions — such as anxiety or anger — and others are not.”
She went on to explain that how parents “express, reflect and talk about emotions” with kids impacts children’s emotional intelligence development.
Additionally, as Movieguide® previously reported, screen time is linked to “slower language development. Researchers’ current theory for this correlation explains that by spending more time on screens, children receive less face-to-face interaction with adults, which is primarily how they develop key language skills such as grammar and vocabulary.”
When moms and dads are absorbed in their phones, “the outward appearance to the child is a lack of responsiveness.”
A study from Verizon suggests these three tips to limit your screen time:
1. “Review your own screen-time habits.” This means “Move distracting apps off your phone…Think about where your phone is…[and] Schedule recurring tech reviews.”
2. “Make time to switch off notifications and alerts.”
Frequent phone calls, texts and push notifications can make it seem like our devices always require our attention, says Julianna Miner, author of “Raising a Screen Smart Kid.” “Tech use is like any other learned behavior, and parents play an enormous role in establishing what kids will consider normal,” she says. Our kids notice how quickly we jump to respond to an alert, Miner says, but with a bit of time and attention, those alerts can be pared down to only the necessary ones—leaving more time to be present with our kids.
3. “Talk about your tech health as much as you talk about theirs,” meaning that you “Talk about how tech makes you feel…[and] Tell your kids what you’re doing on your phone.”
“The takeaway is for parents to be more mindful of how often they are using their phones around their children,” Nabi said. “Where their eyes are sends a message to their children about what’s important.”
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