Researchers recently expressed fear that smartphone use could impair the development of a child and lead to greater far-reaching outcomes due to insufficient interaction between a mother and her child.
A Mail Online report specified that the so-called "tecie moms" have devoted 25 percent of their attention to their children when distracted by a mobile phone, new research cautioned.
The study authors suspected the same goes for fathers who use a mobile device to browse social media and the internet and did not test the assumption in the research.
The mother volunteers were asked to carry out three tasks alongside their toddler-aged two or three-year-olds. The first required them to browse a particular page on Facebook and react to posts that catch their interest.
The second activity was reading printed magazines and marking the articles that caught their interest. Then, the third saw the participants tasked with playing with their child while the magazines and smartphones were outside the room in a so-called "space or uninterrupted free play."
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Poorer Interactions with Their Children
According to the study investigators, the objective was to mimic situations in real life where a mother needs to take care of her child while simultaneously devoting some of her attention to her device.
To encourage natural behavior, the mothers were found unaware of the study's objective when browsing a smartphone or reading a printed magazine compared to periods of continuous free play.
Dr. Katy Borodkin of Tel Aviv University in Israel, who's involved in the observation of dozens of mothers and toddlers said, the former talked up to four times less with their children while using the smartphones.
Not only did the mothers get involved in lesser conversations with their toddlers although the quality of the interactions was poorer, as well, the study authors also explained that the mother provided less immediate and content-tailored reactions and more frequently ignored explicit child bids.
'Maternal Linguistic Input' Examined
Dr. Borokdin also said that even when they could respond while they browsed through Facebook, the quality of the response was lessened.
More so, the mothers were able to keep their responsiveness to a bare minimum to avoid a "total breakdown in communication with a toddler."
As the mothers carried out the tasks, the study investigators examined three components of the interaction between a mother and her child.
First, the researchers analyzed the so-called "maternal linguistic input," as explained in the National Library of Medicine specified, the spoken content that the mother is conveying to the child, which is considered an essential predictor of a child's development.
Conversational Turns Surveyed
Past research revealed that lessened linguistic input decreases vocabulary in children, a shortcoming that is experienced longer-term, up to adulthood.
Then, the researchers surveyed "conversational turns" back and forth between a parent and child that's helping with language and social development, as the child is learning that they have something to add favorably to the interaction and the social norms of social interactions.
Lastly, maternal responsiveness was studied through the extent the mother responded to the speech of their children, a related VNExplorer report said.
This was gauged by the immediacy of the response, as well as the contingency on what the toddler had said. Commenting on their result from the study published in the Journal of Child Development, Dr. Borokdin explained, they discovered that three components of the interaction between a mother and her child were lessened by a factor of two to four related uninterrupted free play, both when the former was reading printed magazines and browsing online using her smartphone.
Related information about the distraction in parents because of the use of smartphones is shown on ABC Action News's YouTube video below:
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