Whining. Fidgeting. Tantrums. Sibling squabbles. In these difficult moments, breaking out the tablet or smartphone can feel less like a parenting choice than a lifeline (and sometimes, a little YouTube is what gets everyone through the day with their sanity intact). This tactic actually has a name – it’s a pattern of technology use that researchers call “media emotion regulation,” and on its face can have a bad rap.
But a new study from The Ohio State University looked at how using technology to regulate young kids’ emotions affects their cognitive development, and what they found showed the effects aren’t necessarily one-size-fits-all.
Screens and skills shape each other
Researchers looked at how often parents use screens to calm their kids, and whether that distraction tactic is tied to the development of key thinking skills (or executive functions) that help children manage their behavior, adapt to new situations, and build healthy relationships. To explore the connection to screen use, researcher Jane Shawcroft, PhD, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State who led the study, used data from Project M.E.D.I.A., a long-term Brigham Young University study that followed children from about 2½ to 7½ years old. She tested three possibilities:
- that using screens to calm children affects the development of these cognitive skills;
- that a child’s own cognitive development drives parents to offer screens more or less often;
- or that the two feed into each other in a loop over time.
Most kids showed a reinforcing pattern: the harder a child was to settle, the more a parent turned to a screen to calm them down. That screen use then shaped the child’s developing executive functions, which in turn influenced how often screens were used to calm the child. This cyclical pattern was expected, Shawcroft said, because “children influence parenting, and parenting influences children’s development.”
Parents control how, when and why their children use technology. But they also shape cognitive development in offline ways as well, and those habits can lead to a healthier relationship with tech.
Where parent mental health comes in
Interestingly, in one small outlier group (about 7 percent of children), while screen use did appear to shape how cognitive skills developed, the kids’ cognitive skills didn’t predict how often their parents reached for a screen to manage emotional outbursts. Notably, what did stand out about these families, the study found, was that the parents of children in this group were more likely to report higher levels of depression.
“We found that parent mental health is a strong predictor of the way parents use technology with their young kids, because technology is a lever parents can pull when parents don’t have the resources to cope with their own poor mental health,” Shawcroft said.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway of this study is that supporting parents’ mental health from the outset is the key to helping them parent with technology in a healthier way. This can include access to community resources and offline ways to help their children regulate, like places for kids to spend time outdoors or tools to help practice mindfulness, especially when parents are struggling with their own mental health concerns.
“I really wish the narrative around children and tech would be less about ‘it’s just a parents’ job,’ and more about this shared responsibility we have as a society to support children in this context we’ve built for them,” Shawcroft said. “If we want kids to be OK, part of that is helping their parents to be OK.”
