General

The dangers of distracted parenting

Erika
Christakis, The Atlantic, July/August 2018

When it
comes to children’s development, parents should worry less about kids’ screen
time—and more about their own.
Edmon de
Haro

Smartphones
have by now been implicated in so many
crummy outcomes
—car fatalities, sleep disturbances, empathy loss,
relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost
seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our
society may be reaching peak criticism of digital devices.

 

Even so,
emerging research suggests that a key problem remains underappreciated. It
involves kids’ development, but it’s probably not what you think. More than
screen-obsessed young children, we should be concerned about tuned-out parents.
Yes,
parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents
in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the
workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children
than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is
increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their
children’s lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned. To be
clear, I’m not unsympathetic to parents in this predicament. My own adult
children like to joke that they wouldn’t have survived infancy if I’d had a
smartphone in my clutches 25 years ago.
To argue
that parents’ use of screens is an underappreciated problem isn’t to discount
the direct risks screens pose to children: Substantial evidence suggests that
many types of screen time (especially those involving fast-paced or violent
imagery) are damaging to young brains. Today’s preschoolers spend more than
four hours a day facing a screen. And, since 1970, the average age of onset of
“regular” screen use has gone from 4 years to just four months.
Some of
the newer interactive games kids play on phones or tablets may be more
benign than watching TV
(or YouTube), in that they better mimic
children’s natural play behaviors. And, of course, many well-functioning adults
survived a mind-numbing childhood spent watching a lot of cognitive garbage.
(My mother—unusually for her time—prohibited Speed Racer and Gilligan’s Island on
the grounds of insipidness. That I somehow managed to watch every single
episode of each show scores of times has never been explained.) Still, no one
really disputes the tremendous opportunity costs to young children who are
plugged in to a screen: Time spent on devices is time not spent actively
exploring the world and relating to other human beings.
Yet for
all the talk about children’s screen time, surprisingly little attention is
paid to screen use by parents themselves, who now suffer from what the
technology expert Linda Stone
more than 20 years ago called
“continuous partial attention.” This condition is harming not just us, as Stone
has argued; it is harming our children. The new parental-interaction style can
interrupt an ancient emotional cueing system, whose hallmark is responsive
communication, the basis of most human learning. We’re in uncharted territory.
Child-development
experts have different names for the dyadic signaling system between adult and
child, which builds the basic architecture of the brain. Jack P. Shonkoff, a
pediatrician and the director of Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child,
calls it the “serve and return” style of communication; the psychologists Kathy
Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff describe a “conversational duet.”
The vocal patterns parents everywhere tend to adopt during  exchanges with
infants and toddlers are marked by a higher-pitched tone, simplified grammar,
and engaged, exaggerated enthusiasm. Though this talk is cloying to adult
observers, babies can’t get enough of it. Not only that: One study showed that
infants exposed to this interactive, emotionally responsive speech style at 11
months and 14 months knew twice as many words at age 2 as ones who weren’t
exposed to it.
Child
development is relational, which is why, in one experiment, nine-month-old
babies who received a few hours of Mandarin instruction from a live human could
isolate specific phonetic elements in the language while another group of
babies who received the exact same instruction via video could not. According
to Hirsh-Pasek, a professor at Temple University and a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution, more and more studies are confirming the importance of
conversation. “Language is the single best predictor of school achievement,”
she told me, “and the key to strong language skills are those back-and-forth fluent
conversations between young children and adults.”
A problem
therefore arises when the emotionally resonant adult–child cueing system so
essential to early learning is interrupted—by a text, for example, or a quick
check-in on Instagram. Anyone who’s been mowed down by a smartphone-impaired
stroller operator can attest to the ubiquity of the phenomenon. One consequence
of such scenarios has been
noted by an economist
who tracked a rise in children’s injuries as
smartphones became prevalent. (AT&T rolled out smartphone service at
different times in different places, thereby creating an intriguing natural
experiment. Area by area, as smartphone adoption rose, childhood ER visits
increased.) These findings attracted a decent bit of media attention to the
physical dangers posed by distracted parenting, but we have been slower to
reckon with its impact on children’s cognitive development. “Toddlers cannot
learn when we break the flow of conversations by picking up our cellphones or
looking at the text that whizzes by our screens,” Hirsh-Pasek said.
In the
early 2010s, researchers in Boston surreptitiously observed 55 caregivers
eating with one or more children in fast-food restaurants. Forty of the adults
were absorbed with their phones to varying degrees, some almost entirely
ignoring the children (the researchers found that typing and swiping were
bigger culprits in this regard than taking a call). Unsurprisingly, many of the
children began to make bids for attention, which were frequently ignored. A
follow-up study brought 225 mothers and their approximately 6-year-old children
into a familiar setting and videotaped their interactions as each parent and
child were given foods to try. During the observation period, a quarter of the
mothers spontaneously used their phone, and those who did initiated
substantially fewer verbal and nonverbal interactions with their child.
Yet
another rigorously designed experiment, this one conducted in the Philadelphia
area by Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, and Temple’s Jessa Reed, tested the impact of
parental cellphone use on children’s language learning. Thirty-eight mothers
and their 2-year-olds were brought into a room. The mothers were then told that
they would need to teach their children two new words (blicking, which was to
mean “bouncing,” and frepping, which was to mean “shaking”) and were given a
phone so that investigators could contact them from another room. When the
mothers were interrupted by a call, the children did not learn the word, but
otherwise they did. In an ironic coda to this study, the researchers had to
exclude seven mothers from the analysis, because they didn’t answer the phone,
“failing to follow protocol.” Good for them!
It has
never been easy to balance adults’ and children’s needs, much less their
desires, and it’s naive to imagine that children could ever be the unwavering
center of parental attention. Parents have always left kids to entertain
themselves at times—“messing about in boats,” in a memorable phrase from The
Wind in the Willows, or just lounging aimlessly in playpens. In some respects,
21st-century children’s screen time is not very different from the mother’s
helpers every generation of adults has relied on to keep children occupied.
When parents lack playpens, real or proverbial, mayhem is rarely far behind.
Caroline Fraser’s recent biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the author of Little
House on the Prairie, describes the exceptionally ad hoc parenting style of
19th-century frontier parents, who stashed babies on the open doors of ovens
for warmth and otherwise left them vulnerable to “all manner of accidents as
their mothers tried to cope with competing responsibilities.” Wilder herself
recounted a variety of near-calamities with her young daughter, Rose; at one
point she looked up from her chores to see a pair of riding ponies leaping over
the toddler’s head.
Occasional
parental inattention is not catastrophic (and may even build resilience), but
chronic distraction is another story. Smartphone use has been associated with a
familiar sign of addiction: Distracted adults grow irritable when their phone
use is interrupted; they not only miss emotional cues but actually misread them.
A tuned-out parent may be quicker to anger than an engaged one, assuming that a
child is trying to be manipulative when, in reality, she just wants attention.
Short, deliberate separations can of course be harmless, even healthy, for
parent and child alike (especially as children get older and require more
independence). But that sort of separation is different from the inattention
that occurs when a parent is with a child but communicating through his or her
nonengagement that the child is less valuable than an email. A mother telling
kids to go out and play, a father saying he needs to concentrate on a chore for
the next half hour—these are entirely reasonable responses to the competing
demands of adult life. What’s going on today, however, is the rise of unpredictable
care, governed by the beeps and enticements of smartphones. We seem to have
stumbled into the worst model of parenting imaginable—always present
physically, thereby blocking children’s autonomy, yet only fitfully present
emotionally.
Fixing
the problem won’t be easy, especially given that it is compounded by dramatic
changes in education. More young children than ever (about two-thirds of
4-year-olds) are in some form of institutional care, and recent trends
in early-childhood education
have filled many of their classrooms
with highly scripted lessons and dull, one-sided “teacher talk.” In such
environments, children have few opportunities for spontaneous conversation.
One piece
of good news is that young children are prewired to get what they need from
adults, as most of us discover the first time our diverted gaze is jerked back
by a pair of pudgy, reproaching hands. Young children will do a lot to get a
distracted adult’s attention, and if we don’t change our behavior, they will
attempt to do it for us; we can expect to see a lot more tantrums as today’s
toddlers age into school. But eventually, children may give up. It takes two to
tango, and studies from Romanian orphanages showed the world that there are
limits to what a baby brain can do without a willing dance partner. The truth
is, we don’t really know how much our kids will suffer when we fail to engage.
Of
course, adults are also suffering from the current arrangement. Many have built
their daily life around the miserable premise that they can always be on—always
working, always parenting, always available to their spouse and their own
parents and anyone else who might need them, while also staying on top of the
news, while also remembering, on the walk to the car, to order more toilet
paper from Amazon. They are stuck in the digital equivalent of the spin cycle.
Under the
circumstances, it’s easier to focus our anxieties on our children’s screen time
than to pack up our own devices. I understand this tendency all too well. In
addition to my roles as a mother and a foster parent, I am the maternal
guardian of a middle-aged, overweight dachshund. Being middle-aged and overweight
myself, I’d much rather obsess over my dog’s caloric intake, restricting him to
a grim diet of fibrous kibble, than address my own food regimen and relinquish
(heaven forbid) my morning cinnamon bun. Psychologically speaking, this is a
classic case of projection—the defensive displacement of one’s failings onto
relatively blameless others. Where screen time is concerned, most of us need to
do a lot less projecting.
If we can
get a grip on our “technoference,” as some psychologists have called it, we are
likely to find that we can do much more for our children simply by doing
less—regardless of the quality of their schooling and quite apart from the
number of hours we devote to them. Parents should give themselves permission to
back off from the suffocating pressure to be all things to all people. Put your
kid in a playpen, already! Ditch that soccer-game appearance if you feel like
it. Your kid will be fine. But when you are with your child, put down your
damned phone.