Smartphone use not bad parenting, study finds benefits for families – Brisbane Times

“I wanted to challenge the idea that if we just took away smartphones, everyone would be a great parent, and we know that is definitely not the case,” she said.
“We actually found that as long as youre not spending huge amounts of time distant from your family because of smartphone use, it actually has a really positive effect.”
The observational study looked at the phone use of more than 3500 parents, and assessed them based on 12 different measures of phone use, including texting, calling and social media, as well as briefly checking a phone compared with continuous use.
Dr Modecki said the notion of family displacement was key in assessing smartphone use – as long as the phone use was not taking you away from your family, there was no negative association.
“Smartphones allow us to be connected to work, to get support, find information, to run errands, it allows us to be physically present in ways that otherwise we would have to be elsewhere,” she said.
“We also found a difference between if you are immersed in scrolling through social network sites compared to texting or glancing at your phone while still being actively engaged with your family.”
Dr Modecki said despite becoming inescapable in recent years, smartphones were still very new technology, and their effects still werent properly understood.
“We dont actually know what bad parenting is yet in terms of smartphones. Im not saying its not there, but just that simple use is not it,” she said.
“Smartphones facilitate so many ways for us to be around our kids and to deal with things in our life, especially with COVID at the moment.”

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