If you’re a parent, you’ve felt it: at least one fleeting, guilt-inducing moment in which your child gets jealous of your phone. Well, a study published last month says that guilt existed for a reason; According to these findings, children who feel that their parents are addicted to the phone may experience a lack of attachment that persists into adolescence.
the studypublished in the peer reviewed journal Frontiers in psychologyanalyzed 600 12- to 17-year-olds gathered at Qualtrics, a company that gathers test subjects for online surveys. She found a correlation between children who consider their parents to be distracted by their phones and children who self-report more indicators of what is known as “insecure attachment.”
Insecure attachment is a widely used term that comes from observable phenomena in babies. It has been studied and studied over the years and has become a Fundamental principle in parenting guidance.. If there is an attachment problem, later in life, according to attachment theory, there will be “avoidant” children who avoid attachment and “anxious” children who crave attachment.
The study linked reports of parents being distracted on the phone with both types of children: anxious and avoidant.
The researchers who conducted this latest study did not have access to their subjects when they were infants and used a survey they designed with adolescents in mind, along with a standard survey on attachment problems in adolescents, used in many other experiments. Their custom study was called the Device Attachment Interference Scale (DAIS).
The document describes the DAIS like this:
“The items assess adolescents’ perceptions that their caregiver’s availability of attention ‘negatively affects our relationship,’ that their caregiver ‘does not pay enough attention to me due to the use of his device,’ ‘ignores me when he is on his device,’ and ‘seems distracted due to the use of his device.'”
They used regression analysis to compare the findings from that survey to the findings from the standard attachment survey to find a correlation, and they say there was one, and it’s not just statistical noise. Children who reported that their moms or dads were addicted to the phone had higher scores on both avoidant and anxious attachment.
The results cannot and do not state that being a phone addict will make your child an insecure person. The opposite is equally plausible: Insecure teens might be more upset because their parents are addicted to their phones. This is something the authors acknowledge.
There has been a a whole wave of lawsuits lately against social media companies, largely over issues related to children and mental health. Taking this into account, one of the authors of the study, media psychologist Don Grantsaid Bloomberg, “We know they caught the children (…) Bravo, you caught us too.” Parents, he said, “were not immune to psychological motivations and manipulations.”
