Smartphones turned 30 in 2024, which means it’s very likely that new parents grew up with these now-ubiquitous devices. Year after year, their incredible technological advancements made them into something we now find very difficult to part with, if even for a few hours. Their apps can entertain us with music and videos, help us conveniently shop from anywhere, keep us in touch with multiple friends at once, navigate us from point A to point B, and so much more. The conveniences, connections, and entertainment offered by our handheld devices are indeed powerful. But is there a cost to that allure, particularly while we’re parenting? The science says yes, and in more ways than one.
PING!
Multiple studies done over the past decade show a significant correlation between the frequency of cell phone usage and stress, anxiety, and insomnia.1 Evidence suggests that checking our phones feels good because it releases dopamine, but that shot of dopamine is short-lived, and because we want more of it (subconsciously or not), our habit of reaching for our phones is reinforced. Consequently, we get stuck in a loop of biochemical highs and lows.
Moreover, receiving frequent notifications only adds to our anxiety because they produce a recurrent state of alertness. I'm sure no one needs to point out that as a parent of young children, any additional stress, anxiety, or lack of sleep is highly undesirable and can have detrimental effects on the parent's mental, emotional, and physical health. Parental stress and “phubbing” (the act of snubbing someone in favour of engaging with our phone) cause yet more harm, but this time, it’s to our children. These are well-documented barriers to securing parent-child attachment, a lack of which has been shown to cause emotional and behavioural problems in children.
PHUBBING
Now, with the help of modern technology, we get to see just how insidious both parental cell phone stress and phubbing can be for our children. The last decade saw an explosion of research using a method called hyperscanning. Hyperscanning uses imaging technology to scan the brain of two people at the same time. This novel technique revealed that when a mother and her baby are in close physical contact, or engaged with one another (as when reading a book to your child), their neural activity, emotions, and behaviour become synchronized. Parent-child synchrony helps guide an infant’s physiologic adjustment to life outside the womb in part by the co-regulation of their autonomic nervous systems. Evidence suggests that this extraordinary phenomenon plays a vital role throughout early childhood by enhancing self-regulation skills and social-emotional development. It’s an evolutionary survival tactic. But that ethereal connection can be fragile. In a study published in 2022, parental phubbing during story time with their child showed a significant decrease in neural synchrony between the mother’s language-related brain regions (left hemisphere) and the child’s comprehension-related regions (right hemisphere). Phubbing effectively obstructs the vital flow of neural nurturance.
That’s not the end of it. The autonomic system is made up of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. Often working in opposition to one another, together they maintain internal balance or homeostasis. The sympathetic nervous system is responsible for the fight-or-flight survival response. Stress and anxiety trigger that fight-or-flight response, which causes physiological changes such as raising the heart rate and increasing certain hormone levels, like cortisol, that enable the body to react faster. The parasympathetic does the opposite by calming things down and restoring the body’s functions to normal. If you are in a synchronous bond with your child while experiencing cell-phone-related stress and anxiety, you may inadvertently trigger that same bio-behavioural response in your child. With modern research tools, we can now see that not only are parents role models in an observational sense, but also they quite literally become the neural template that shapes how their child manages their own feelings, thoughts, and behaviours as they grow.
INTERVENTION
Right about now, you must be throwing your hands up in defeat, wondering if there’s anything that doesn’t potentially harm our precious little ones. Fear not; you can take steps to minimise any potential harm to yourself and your child. First, set aside quality screen-free time for you and your child. Put the cell phone in another room with the ringer off. Sometimes, just seeing the screen light up provokes the urge to reach for your phone.
Second, shut off most, if not all, notifications. As mentioned earlier, receiving frequent notifications only adds to our anxiety because they produce a constant state of alertness. Create phone-free zones like the kitchen table area, your child’s nursery, and your bedroom. Excessive cell phone usage robs you of mindful moments. Make those areas distraction-free, and savour the moments spent in them. That old saying does hold: children really do grow up fast.
Finally, limit your screen time during the last 30 minutes to an hour before bedtime. The blue light emitted from cell phones suppresses the production of melatonin, a natural hormone released in the evening to help you feel tired and ready for sleep.
Following through with these strategies may take some getting used to. Depending on the extent of your typical cell phone usage, they may even elicit some initial psychological discomfort due to the residual cravings for that brief surge of dopamine. But soon, you will notice their beneficial effects, including less anxiety and stress, more mental clarity, mindfulness, and better-quality sleep. Above all, you’ll be sharing a healthy resonance with your child, free of all that outside noise and failed connections.
