Technical Interference: Screens and the Parent-Child Relationship

00:00:10 – Introductions by Executive Director of Children and Screens Kris Perry.

00:01:42 – Moderator Catherin Steiner-Adair on the importance of centering the parent-child relationship when examining effects of media use.

00:05:56 – Brandon T. McDaniel on infant attachment and technoference.

00:18:13 – Moderator follow-up: What are the impacts for toddlers who do not understand that parents are engaging in purposeful media use?

00:21:47 – Michaeline Jensen on the ways media can facilitate parent-adolescent relationships.

00:33:54 – Lara Wolfers on impacts of parental guilt and stress about digital media use on the parent-child relationship.

00:41:45 – Moderator follow-up: How can feelings of guilt be reframed as a desire for attachment? How can smartphones be used to facilitate connection and attachment?

00:45:49 – Stephanie Reich on the ways media can be used to support the parent-child relationship.

00:56:08 – Moderator follow-up: What is the appropriate amount of screen time for a middle schooler vs. high schooler?

00:57:41 – The panel addresses questions from the audience.

00:57:47 – Q&A: At any developmental stage, how can a parent repair a parent-child relationship that has been damaged by too much screen time?

01:01:42 -Q&A: What can be done when two parents do not agree about their children’s screen usage?

01:03:17 – Q&A: What can parents do when children live in two different households with different media rules?

01:04:33 – Q&A: What advice do you have for parents whose children are upset about gaming limits?

01:06:50 – Q&A: What is the best way to teach kids about tech so they feel empowered to use it on their own behalf and are aware of the impacts on their relationships?

01:12:03 – Q&A: What are the signs that screen time is negatively affecting a child?

01:18:49 – Q&A: How can parents manage conflict in media conversations with their children?

01:25:07 – Wrap-up with Children and Screens’ Executive Director Kris Perry.

[Kris Perry]: Hello and welcome to today’s Ask the Experts webinar. Technical Interference: Screens and the Parent-Child relationship. I am Kris Perry, Executive Director of Children and Screens. The parent-child relationship is the foundation of a child’s development, shaping their behavior, values, personality and sense of self. But in today’s digital world, how is this critical bond evolving? Do children’s digital media behaviors alter parent child dynamics? And how do parents’ own tech habits impact their children? Today, we’ll be exploring the complex and evolving ways in which digital media shapes the parent child relationship across different stages of development and family contexts. Now, I would like to introduce you to today’s moderator, Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair. Dr. Steiner-Adair is an internationally recognized clinical psychologist, school consultant, speaker, and author. She is the author of The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, which was named a Wall Street Journal Best Nonfiction Book of the year. She received her Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, trained at Boston Children’s Hospital, and was a research associate at Harvard Medical School for over 30 years. She is on the board of the Hamlin School for girls and several nonprofit organizations. Welcome, Catherine.

[Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair]: Thank you so much, Kris. It’s great to be back here. You know, when I wrote the book in – it came out in 2013, I think it’s interesting to note that I actually asked the Wall Street Journal, why did you pick my book to be the Best Nonfiction Book of the Year? It’s so not typical of the Wall Street Journal. And they said it was because I looked at the parent-child relationship and especially at kids’ experiences of their own parents. And in that book, what I did was I asked over a thousand kids, “What’s it like to be growing up in the digital age where your parents have a smartphone?” An iPhone, you know, we didn’t have Bluetooth in the car then, they were talking on their phones in the car. You are the experts, because no other generation has grown up with a mom or dad or a caretaker or a grandma or whoever, with all this digital equipment. And I want to understand, what does it feel like? And one of the most astounding findings for me, after interviewing, you know, a thousand children, all these schools all over the country, two-hundred and fifty 18 to 30 year olds. Everybody, regardless of their age, used five of the same adjectives when talking about the hard stuff with their parents: Sad, mad, lonely, frustrated, angry. It makes me angry when my mommy picks me up at school and she’s on the phone and she says, “Just one minute, honey, I’m talking to grandma.” Why doesn’t she talk to me? College kids said, “You know, it’s so frustrating. Your parents pick you up. You’re coming home from college. They get in the car, they ask you the big questions. “Did you get your frat?” You know, “how are you doing with your roommate?” And you’re telling them something so important. And all of a sudden they’re scheduling a golf game. That hurts. It feels so wrong. So, I’m so grateful that now, you know, 12 years later, 13 years later, than when the book came out, it’s still selling, it’s still evergreen. We are going to hear developmentally from wonderful experts about how we can best manage our relationships. And now we have so much research to really help us feel more confident as parents and more competent as parents. When we create limits, when we explain why we’re doing what we’re doing, and why we really work hard to keep our family connected, and to protect those critical times for families when there’s so much tech interference. And there are special times, I think, that we all can think about, regardless of the age of your kids, when they get in the car, when you pick them up, on the way to school. No technology. Little kids will say, “My mom’s on the phone. You know that Bluetooth when we’re going to school? I feel like she thinks I’m boring.” So we’re going to look at now the research behind how at different stages, it’s really important for both us as parents and to help our children find ways to set certain limits, to work together, to enjoy technology together in ways that protect the primacy of family relationships. Because no matter what the device is, no technology can delete the importance. No app can replace the importance of who we are in our kids’ lives. So, today I’m going to now introduce our next speaker, Dr. Brandon T. McDaniel. Brandon is a senior research scientist at the Parkview Mirro Center for Research and Innovation. He’s an internationally recognized expert on the impacts of technology use on relationships, families, and children. His research has been funded by the NIH, and he’s published more than 80 scholarly articles related to technology use, parenting, family relationships, and more. As a father, of course, he has personal experiences with the complexities of real life, with technology use in parent-child interaction relationships. And he’ll help us with the development of healthy digital habits for all those we love. Brandon, welcome.

[Dr. Brandon T. McDaniel]: Thank you so much, Catherine. Alright. So, today I’m going to briefly talk to us about parenting in infancy, or specifically inside this infancy period, and our media use. I’m going to be coming from a focus of thinking from an attachment perspective, that infants form this attachment, this strong bond with their caregiver that’s really important to them developmentally. And this bond is something where they’re both going to lean on their parent for a sense of security and comfort and be able to use them as this secure base to explore their world. And that’s really important. And the security of that attachment that they form leads to a lot of really important outcomes. If they have a really secure attachment relationship with their caregiver, often that leads to accelerated cognitive development, can have healthier relationships over time, especially since the way that they often have been treated and had all of these interactions with their caregiver can begin to form the way that they view relationships, and what they – whether they’re worthy of love, what this means for them over time, and can impact their mental health, and many other things. There are a lot of factors that go into the way that an attachment relationship forms and this bond forms. But a couple of things that we can focus on or to think about parental or caregiving sensitivity. And when I say that, I don’t just mean being warm and loving, but that we think carefully about, are we aware of our baby’s needs? Are we interpreting the cues that they’re giving us correctly? Are we responding appropriately and in a timely manner? And this also, we can think of this kind of like an interactional dance, or interactional synchrony, where we want there to be a good fit between us and our babies. That we’re reading their emotions in the moment and being able to understand what’s happening and that we respond to them, to give them what they need in that moment that they need it, as opposed to it being very delayed or off or in sort of like sensitive face-to-face time and play. That’s the goal. But we know that parenting is extremely complex, there’s so many factors that go into that, so many stresses and feelings, and differences in context and everything. So I’m taking a very complex issue right now, and I’m going to oversimplify it, into really just, focusing specifically on a few things. So, there’s always good and bad to our media use. And I just want to highlight that there’s definitely a lot of empowerment or feelings of empowerment that we can get out of using our devices, being able to relax, regulate our emotions. and many other things. But at the same time, and often simultaneously, we may experience a lot of those distressing kinds of feelings, like guilt around the fact that we use the device, or maybe it influences the way we see ourselves because of what we saw on the device, feeling like we missed parenting moments, all sorts of things. So, there’s a lot of complexity there. Just know that you’re in good company with all the rest of us, that many of us are feeling all of these things. Although we could talk about a lot of good things that come from our device use, I’ve been asked specifically today to focus on the negative side. So that’s what I’m going to do, is thinking about the distractions that can come. And we can call this technoference if we would like, which is just technology and interference put together, this idea that our technology use and the interruptions and intrusions that can come from that and our face-to-face interactions, you know, can produce a lot of – it can lead to a lot of distraction. And it doesn’t even have to be that you’re quote-unquote “addicted”, or something like that. But our normative sorts of everyday use will just inherently lead to these kinds of interruptions. And, even if they’re not really intentional sorts of interruptions. And if we just think from a distraction, sort of framing here, we – if we’re distracted, that’s going to cause a lot of these kinds of things, of that we’re less aware of our babies cues, that we’re more likely to misinterpret what’s going on, where are our responses are likely going to be delayed, and so forth. It just kind of inherently will happen, and in a similar way that it would happen with other sorts of distractions that have always existed across the whole time in parenting. The difference is that, who – and you know, when and what time frame have we ever had in the world where we’ve had supercomputers, mini-supercomputers in our pockets and hands that have been designed often to capture our attention and keep us coming back and get us absorbed in that use. And so we live in a different time now. And just to give a few examples, there’s lots of different observations, and experiments, and surveys, and research that have been done. But if we just look at this, we definitely see these sorts of impacts, where if we’re going from, let’s say free play with our baby or a toddler to then having the smartphone being present or being used by a mother, back in the free play. We’ll see these kinds of things where there’s this dip in responsiveness from the mother to the baby. Or that we’ll see a dip in the mother’s sensitivity during infant feeding, or less cognitive growth fostering, which often deals with the kind of intellectual stimulation that’s happening with the baby. Or the amount of focused time that they’re giving to the baby. Again, none of it rocket science, but if we’re thinking also less eye contact, fewer vocalizations. And then on the baby’s side, we do see that they are noticing that this is happening, because they also will increase their bids for their parents attention. And sometimes even increase their, although not all the time, but sometimes increase their negative affect and fussiness around that. So what’s it mean? In the moment, clearly, we become less aware of cues, we are slower to respond – these sorts of things, definitely in the moment we get distracted. So, in that specific moment, there might be some distraction. But what does that mean long term? That’s still up in the air of what this is going to mean developmentally. Across years and years of children’s development. If we’re thinking specifically in the infancy period, if it’s happening a lot, then that’s clearly going to interrupt that interactional dance, back and forth between our baby and ourselves, which could lead to some problems with their emotion development, and being able to regulate their own emotions, and their attachment relationship. However, taking this sort of negative view is not, it is – it’s too simplistic. Again, very limited time right now but I do want to highlight just an example, that there are many ways in which parents and mothers find a lot of value in that device-using. And using it one moment can actually help them to be more emotionally available in other moments to their baby or child. So, there’s so much complexity here to this. But in the moment, yes, it causes some distraction. But I think what we can do then with this is that really we just need to realize first, it’s normal. We’re all normal. This is the world that we live in and distractions are going to happen and our devices are all around us. But what we should do then is not be overly critical of that, not too uber sensitive that we might get with this, but instead understand that not all use is bad, and instead we should be aware of it, be a bit more conscious and intentional with what we decided to do with it. Which one of the ways we can do that is to begin to seek to understand the ways in which it’s helpful to us, and the ways in which it’s not. Are there certain ways that you see that it really supports you? It helps– Why do you feel that way? Why do you feel good from that and other ways that you’re like, why do you end up feeling like that wasted time? Why do you end up feeling like, you know, it really didn’t help in that moment, and it made you feel really unhappy with yourself. If you can begin to identify those things, then you can– you can work on those, and you can start to lean more on the side of doing it in ways that are supportive to you. And often we can kind of summarize it like this, that when we’re using it in ways that are supportive, when we feel like we’re in control and we’re doing things intentionally, and if it fits with our values in the way that we feel like we want to be as a parent, then often that’s where you want to be. Some of the ways that you can start to do that. One of the easiest ways is to try to set clearer boundaries around yourself. So that might be thinking about screen-free times and zones. So during a specific time of the day, maybe if you feel like you really struggle from 3 to 5 p.m., or it could look like whatever it looks like in your situation, you might decide, that’s a time when my phone will live over there on the kitchen counter, and I will not touch that, and I will be intentionally focused on my children, on my baby, on life in general, like that. Also, just understand that the way our devices have been designed, they are going to pull us in. We have them with us all the time, so we form a lot of really unconscious habits with them. That’s actually the definition of a habit, is that it’s unconscious. So, we’ll reach for things without even really thinking about it. So we have to do things that, like– don’t feel bad about having to do things to set up ways to make your use conscious again. It’s– so that might be setting limits in ways, like using Android Digital Wellbeing, or Apple Screen Time, or other apps to set a specific time limits on certain apps. Or finding other kinds of apps like I’m not getting paid by One Sec or anything like this, but this is a good example of an app where if you see what happens here, you try to click on the app. All of a sudden it pops up a screen and actually makes you think about whether you would want to get on that app at that time. So, it starts to try to put it back into your consciousness and make a conscious choice about whether you want that. And that’s really good. Creating these little barriers like that where you can be a bit more intentional. So again, what’s that mean? It’s common. Please know it’s normal. It’s okay to have all these conflicting feelings about it, and instead begin to identify what really supports you, what feels like it doesn’t, and lean a bit more on the side that supports you, and try to make that happen a bit more, and set up barriers for yourself and feel okay with the fact that it’s so self control often is not enough. In today’s age, it’s okay to lean on other resources. So, thank you very much.

[Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair]: Brandon, you answered the major questions that were asked in that wonderful presentation. How do we control ourselves? How do we set times? I am a huge fan of using tech to outsmart tech. And other times that I certainly heard from children were bedtime, bathtime, in the car on the way to nursery school, when you pick me up. At night, and don’t walk in the door on your phone texting because you’re not coming home, you’re bringing work home and that doesn’t feel good. I will just add quickly. I think one of the things that happens to us when we are nursing and when we’re feeding our infants at night, which is so repetitive and can feel so tedious and at times frustrating with a cranky baby, which I had, is that when we spend time in the dark hours or repeatedly every two hours without infants, I found that I became a far more patient person. I felt that tuning into my baby actually taught me how to quiet my brain, and I wonder how, and when we’ll get to do research, on really how our attention, our ability for deep focus can get disrupted so easily with a new infant. How do we understand the impact of technointerference with toddlers who don’t quite understand? You know, I’m making a doctor’s appointment for you, but they see their parents constantly on the phone, often doing things on their behalf.

[Dr. Brandon T. McDaniel]: Mhm. I mean, yeah, it depends on what we’re talking about. If we’re talking about doing it for work or a lot of reasons that we can’t control, you know, then what do we have to do with that? The things that we have to do, then we really just need to make sure that our toddler is set up with toys or other things that will help entertain them, while we’re having to focus on other things, you know, things we’ve always had to deal with as parents. And then what you can begin to do, though, with that, since you know that that’s a barrier, that’s something you’re going to have to do, begin to create intentional times of connection with the toddler, whether that’s going to be during the work day at specific times or whether that will be afterward at other times of the day. Just these times when there’s going to be some undivided attention for the toddler. Now, if you’re struggling with if we’re talking about struggling with personal use, during a lot of different times when you’re with them, then you need– it goes back to needing to figure out why that has become a habit with you or why you’re on your phone, because the reason really matters. If you’re feeling like you need that to be able to support you, to de-stress, to be able to regulate and calm down. Then do what you need to do to be able to become emotionally available for your child and to calm down. And that can be really important. But, I will give that caveat that often we find that the things that we turn to when we’re on our device don’t often have the impacts that we thought it would. It doesn’t often fill the need that we had. Like, you might go and start scrolling on social media because you needed to calm down, or you were really stressed out, and then you come away from that actually feeling like you wasted your time, and you feel guilty, and even worse about these things. So you really have to figure out personally, what kinds of phone use feel really uplifting and what kinds don’t, and begin to move yourself towards doing those things that actually do help in the moment, as opposed to your initial inclination of just scrolling through social media. Although sometimes that can be okay, just not all the time. 

[Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair]: Thank you, that’s great. I think what we really want to focus on is how we protect time to be totally focused on our children and for ourselves to be focused on them, and then how to work around that. Thank you so much, Brandon. We’ll have time for more questions about the first critical years of life at the end, I hope. Now I’d like to introduce Dr. Michaeline Jensen. She is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Her research focuses on the development of youth, internalizing, externalizing, and substance abuse problems, with an emphasis on understanding how adolescents and young adults navigate these periods within the social, cultural, and technological environments. She focuses closely on the role of parents and their cultural context, in which families are embedded. And Lord knows we are embedded in a cultural context that is at us 24/7, at times overwhelming, and with us all the time. Dr. Jensen, thank you.

[Dr. Michaeline Jensen] Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. Alright. So, I’m going to be talking to you all about a little bit of a different point in the age span, than Dr. McDaniel was. I’m going to be talking to you about your teenagers. We could probably extend that down to be preteens, too, and the parent-child relationship in that important developmental phase. I’m going to just lay the land a bit here about what we know about parent-adolescent relationships and interactions in the digital age. So, there’s a lot of different ways that technology emerges within the family system. And some of those can be rich, wonderful, family strengthening, ways that technology comes up, but some of those can also be ways that might detract from the quality of the parent-child relationship and we’ll talk about that a bit too. So, the way that I often think about this is, what one of my students calls kind of the 4 T’s. So, one of these are the ways in which technology and the smartphone or video games or what have you is a target of parenting. So, this would be things like setting limits or mediating around parent – youth technology use. Children and Screens actually did a lovely webinar on this fairly recently that I would encourage you to check out, so I’m not gonna spend a lot of our time here on that. There’s also some ways that technology may serve as a trap in parent-child interactions or the parent-child relationship. So, Dr. McDaniel just shared some lovely information with us about technoference and ways in which parents and kids can get distracted by their devices, and that might pull them away from what would otherwise be really awesome, enriching parent adolescent interactions. Sometimes, phones in particular are a prompt for conflict, especially when parents are mediating or setting limits on youth engagement with that. And so that’s one way that it might be something of a family trap. And then a third way is this concern that time that youth are spending on their devices or with technology, it’s time that they’re not spending with their family and that they’re not spending in otherwise enriching interactions, and I’ll talk a little bit about that here today. The third bucket is what I call the “tool bucket,” and so that would be ways in which families are using smartphones and technology as a tool, as a medium, for doing parent-youth interactions or really the daily task of parenting. So that could be things like, using the phone to communicate, so via text message, sI’ll talk to you a bit about my research on that. Or things like as a reinforcer. So using screen time as a reward for desired behaviors in an offline setting. And there’s lots of research that suggests that it can be helpful as a tool. And then overall, something I want us all to think about is whether or not any of the parent-youth relationship is transformed in the digital age, or if there might be some ways in which the things that we already know about what it takes to make a strong parent-adolescent relationship also apply here in digital spaces. And so we don’t have to start from scratch. We can leverage all the things that we already know and that you already know from earlier in development to this new developmental stage of adolescence and to the digital age, with all the tools that come with that. So, let’s start by talking a little bit about the trap, in particular, the potential for technology to displace family interactions that might otherwise be valuable and enriching. The work I’ve done in this space is based on a quite large sample of North Carolina adolescents, where I am now. We surveyed over 2000 adolescents in their homes in kind of the mid-2010s. And then we followed up with a sample of 388 of them for what’s called an ecological momentary assessment. So every day we pinged them three times on their phone to ask them questions about how they were engaging with technology and about things like their mental health symptoms and their perceived quality of parent-child interactions. We learned a lot from this. And this data is cool because it allows us to pull apart what might be differences between families. So, like some families use technology in this way, and it’s associated with these types of outcomes and within families. So, on different days do youth who engage with technology in certain ways, experience different evidence of difficulties. So, we learned a lot here. The take-homes are that we do see some evidence of these cross-sectional between family associations. Such that we do see that those youth who report engaging more with digital technologies for a variety of purposes, they do tend to report experiencing more problems online that spill off into online spaces. So, for instance, maybe a conflict or an issue online that ends up causing issues with their parents or with their peers in offline spaces. We also see that youth who are engaging more with digital technologies report living in families that have more chaos and kind of conflict, and then also experiencing more frequent parent hassles. So, there is– and these parent households are really kind of lower levels of parent-child conflict, not like full blown blowouts, but can be, over time, kind of stressful and accumulating. So we do see that there’s some families for whom technology is causing a problem at this more global level. Interestingly, what we didn’t see was virtually any robust evidence at the daily level. So days on which teens engaged more with technology didn’t really tend to be days when they were spending less time with their families, which is interesting. So, it’s actually somewhat against the detraction hypothesis. And we also didn’t see that they reported having more parent hassles on those days that they were on technology more. So, take-home here is that I do think there are ways that technology can be distracting and distracting, Dr. McDaniel spoke to this a bit. But I also don’t think all is lost. We saw here that a lot of families were navigating the digital age, having their kids on technology for a variety of purposes, and still showing just as many positive parent youth interactions as they did on days when they were on technology less, which I think speaks to the strengths of families to engage and to find those intentional times to be connected. The next thing I want to talk about is this – kind of – where I spend a lot of my time thinking about is, how do we use technology as a tool and what we need to do as parents? It’s hard enough being a parent where we’re often in a hurry, we’ve got lots of stuff to get done. Are there ways in which maybe it’s helpful, or we’re using it in ways that might cause difficulties? So, this is that same sample of North Carolina teens, where we had some ranging age from 11 all the way up to 16. So, a nice span. And we asked them everyday, “Have you engaged with your parent today?” For a variety of reasons. So we said, “Have you had your parent reach out to you to, like, kind of solicit information?” What we would think of as parent monitoring, like asking you where you are, who you’re with, what you’re up to. Disclosures, did you tell your parents stuff about those things and give them some knowledge, which in general, both of those are very associated with better youth outcomes. Did your parent reach out to you via phone to exert behavioral control, right? So, like, maybe to remind you of the rules or to ensure that you were where you were supposed to be doing or where you’re supposed to be doing what you’re supposed to be doing. And then the last category was for support. So, did you and your parent interact today via phone, via text message or phone call, to get emotional or social support? And we saw that teens did engage with their parents for a variety of purposes on about 30, 40% of days. And indeed that they talked about a lot of different things. The supportive interactions were the least common, but did seem to be important. So what we saw here was that days with more digital contacts for any reason also tended to be days with more positive offline interactions with parents. So it really seemed like – it didn’t seem to be causing problems, it might even have been used as a means for connection. We also saw that adolescents who were struggling with mental health symptoms, so that would be things like worry and anxiety, depressive symptoms, the days when they – or the youth who were experiencing more of those symptoms across the study period, so who were having a hard time with mental health, they actually reported using texts and calls more to seek out parent support. So, the way I see that is that parents are meeting their children where they are, and they’re trying to provide support to the kids who need it most, and the phone is one way to do that. Interestingly, we also saw that those parents whose kids were having a harder time with behavior problems, so like getting into trouble, those parents were exerting more behavioral control via phone. So again, they’re finding ways to parent and do the things they need to do, like setting rules and reminding of consequences. That is a really effective strategy for kids with behavior problems, and the phone was one way that they were getting that done, and it seemed rather helpful in that sense. I know I don’t have a lot of time. Just briefly, we’ve also looked at this over age. So we – my team and I have coded like 30,000 parent-late adolescent text messages. So, this is at the transition to college for traditional features of parent-child interaction. So things like solicitations and disclosures that I just mentioned to you. So kind of the checking in and monitoring, advice seeking and advice provision, support provision in more emotional senses. And we really have seen that the text messages are a really rich way for parents and late adolescents, so in that transition to college to stay connected even at a distance. So, parents reaching out to provide support when kids are stressed out with a roommate problem. It can be this in-the-moment ability to access support during times of stress seems to be one of the really neat things about this tool that we all have in our pockets to enable us to stay connected with our growing children as they’re gaining more autonomy, but with some supports and scaffolds from parents. I will say we did all this coding, and we saw there were ways in which it seemed to be tied to a stronger parent-youth relationship. So a lot of these codes were associated with perceiving parents as more supportive, but there were also some ways in which it seems like it could be autonomy-inhibiting. So, especially in families that were really on the far end of texting a lot, a lot, like, way, way, way more than everyone else, those kids did tend to perceive their parents as more intrusive or potentially autonomy-inhibiting. So, I think there’s probably a sweet spot here staying connected and doing the tasks of parenting, staying connected at a sweet spot that is appropriate developmentally.

[Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair]: Thank you so much. That was fabulous, Dr. Jensen. I think we will have time for questions at the end about how, you know, that the audience has. Thank – you know, I think one of the things that comes into my office as a therapist about what you just said is the tension between texting with your college-bound children or your kids in college and answering their questions versus not always being there 24/7, so they develop more autonomy and independence. And I think that’s one of those tricky things about how our kids can stay in touch with us 24/7, but we have to think about it. Is it always the best for their development? Alrighty. Well, moving on with their development and understanding children, we are now going to hear from Dr. Lara Wolfers. She is an Assistant Professor of Digital Lives at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Basel. I just love that you have that title, Professor of Digital Lives. Her research lies in the intersection of Psychology and Communication Sciences, and she focuses on the effects of digital media use in the family, specifically the positive and negative impacts parent and child digital media has on well-being and family relationships. Lara obtained her Ph.D. in Communication Science at the Leibnitz Knowledge Media Research Center in Tübingen, Germany and was an Assistant Professor of Youth and Media Entertainment at the University of Amsterdam prior to her current appointment. Thank you so much, Dr. Wolfers, and welcome.

[Dr. Lara Wolfers]: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. So, yeah, I’m really happy to talk to you about now, a little bit more specifically, about parenting guilt and stress in the context of digital media use, and the parent-child relationship. I want to start off with the observation that a lot of times when parents hear about media use and the messages parents get is that media use is something that’s bad, that’s not good for the parent-child relationship, but something that’s rather worsening the parent-child relationship. So some examples you see here on screen have headlines conveying this message. Okay, media use is something that shouldn’t be done, media use is something that’s bad. If we go on and then we’ll look at – okay, based on these headlines, based off the messages and parents get they form these ideals. Okay. How should we manage our child screen time, and also how should we manage our own screen time? And then parents have these ideas and then we’ll look at what they’re actually doing. They’re usually not following through. So, I really like this quote by a qualitative study where they followed families for a longer time and they say, “We witnessed every single parent in the study willfully undermining his or her own rules and policies.” So, what seems to be kind of the norm is that you have ideas on how you want to manage your kids and also your own screen time, but you’re not really following these ideas. You’re not getting to your ideal situation. What happens if we are in the situation where you think media use is something that’s bad, but then you don’t really follow the ideals that you have in your mind. So, this kind of sets the ground for guilt. Guilt is a negative emotion. It’s something that you don’t want to feel, and it usually comes up if you have a societal or a personal standard, and you’re not following the standard. As I said, guilt is a negative emotion, it’s something you don’t like to feel. And therefore it’s something that can really motivate behavioral changes. So, if you’re feeling guilty because you used your phone, maybe the next time you want to use your phone, you will not do it because you don’t want to feel guilty again. But if this behavioral change is not happening, so you’re not changing your habits, you’re still doing the same things. And also, if guilt is felt in a situation where the behavior cannot be changed, so you cannot really change your media use, then guilt will act as a stressor. So, you feel a lot of guilt and this will raise a lot of stress, which is not something that is great. And I will talk about this in a second. Why is it so hard to change media use, change these behavioral patterns also – also, even if we feel guilty? I think we need to look at the motivations, and Brandon already talked about this a little bit, on why parents are using screens. And when we look at the different motivations, one of the most important ones seems to be that parents want to actually relieve stress. So parents, for example, tell us that they want to find social support when they’re feeling alone, when they’re feeling stressed and they need help. If they’re feeling insecure, they use their phone to find parenting information. But also phones are really used to get a break. Five minutes for yourself so that you afterwards kind of had time to breathe and that focus on your child again and also distract yourself when you’re feeling stressed. Again, five minutes and then, kind of be able to focus, for example, on a conflict again. And we see similar motivations also for parents letting their children use screens more. So, screens are used to calm their children, for example, if they’re feeling very emotional or overwhelmed. And also, screens are used to kind of occupy children if parents have to do something, but also, again, for parents to just get a break from their everyday life stress. So a lot of this, when we look at the media use motivations both on the parent side, but also for when your child uses screens, is focused on stress relief. Now, if you’re doing something to relieve stress and this is actually working, that’s great because stress is usually something that’s not a great feeling and also something that’s really connected to negative outcomes inside of the parent-child relationship. And some of these media use behaviors for stress relief are actually successful. So sometimes taking a break is really helpful. I had a mother, for example, tell me once in a qualitative study that she doesn’t feel control in her life, and then she has this game where she puts red cards and red cards and black cards on black cards, and then she feels in control again, that’s really helping. So if this is really helping, it’s not always the case, then that’s great. But also if it’s – even if it’s helpful, and then this behavior, this media use,this experience is something that’s problematic, it’s something that you should feel guilty about, then what happens with that? What I said before is that guilt works as a stressor. So then actually you have a stress increase even though you didn’t want to have that. And when we yeah, we looked at that at several studies. So for example, I focus here on parental phone use. And we saw that in this case, mothers felt guilty for using their phone while being with their children, then perceived as use as something that was not really efficient for their coping. So they tried to cope with stress using their phone, but it was not helping because they felt guilty. We also saw that mothers who felt more guilty were less satisfied with their mother role. So, being a mother was something that did not feel very happy about it. And we also have a study on this for child screen time. This was conducted during the pandemic. So, here we saw that parents who felt very guilty for letting their child use more screens felt more stressed around this screen use, and unsurprisingly, feeling more stress, especially in this pandemic situation, was related to a lower parent-child relationship satisfaction. And this is also something that we see in a lot of other studies. That’s a really robust finding, also outside of the media use context. Usually if parents are stressed, this is really something that’s not great for the parent-child relationship. We see more harsh parenting. We see less patience with your child, and so on, less quality in the parent-child interactions. So, what should we get– like take away from these things that I just presented? It’s actually quite similar, which I find nice to, what Brandon McDaniel showed earlier. So I think we need to reflect upon our own media use and also the child’s media use. And remember, not all media use is bad for the parent-child relationship. Some is, but not all is. And sometimes, allowing screen use without feeling guilty is really the best you can do for the parent-child relationship. But then there are of course other times where allowing the screen use is not great. So again here the question is: How can we reflect upon this ourselves and then kind of learn when it’s good because it’s giving you a break, and when it’s bad because it introduces actually more stress, and what you’re doing on your phone is not really helping you. What I want to kind of acknowledge, and what I usually do when I talk to parents, is we have a lot of complex relationships here. So, we have like sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t, and it’s really hard to, yeah, to wrap your head around this. And I want to encourage you that you’re the expert on your own family situation. So you know probably best what’s good for you and your family, and also kind of try to feel that confidence because it really can be a good mechanism against the guilt that you’re feeling. So, thanks a lot.

[Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair]: Thank you so much, Dr. Wolfers, I have a quick question and I’m hoping for a very quick response. How can we reframe guilt or how can we move from guilt to a desire for attachment? Going back to our first speaker, how can we really think about how we use the smartphone to help us stay attached? In other words, how can connected in important times– In other words, how can parents watch their own behavior and see if it’s promoting or disrupting important moments for connection?

[Dr. Lara Wolfers]: Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Actually I really like using tech kind of as the solution. If you’re struggling yourself with reflecting to really set timers, for example, some of these apps that remind you of like go off, is it really helping you. Because these set reflection points during the day, that help you think about this. Oh, did this help me, yes or no? And then, yeah, it helps you to allow you to take a break if you say, “Okay, that helped me.” But also kind of gets you off if it really doesn’t. 

[Dr. Catherine Steiner-Adair]: And how do we help ourselves know whether we’re fooling ourselves because we love to shop in the middle of the night, and it’s actually making us maybe less stressed, but also feel bad about ourselves because the size isn’t right for us or whatever it is. You know? Those things I hear so often in my research. And how do we help ourselves really ask deeply is this serving my mental health and well-being as well as my connection to my child?

[Dr. Lara Wolfers]: Yeah. I think there’s kind of no way around sitting down and reflecting deeply, because I think the science that we see is that sometimes it’s helping, sometimes it’s not, and there are a lot of factors impacting that. That’s why I also think that it’s important to really acknowledge that people probably know themselves best, and that’s very hard to kind of find this balance, but maybe taking a break once like a week, for example, and then seeing where it takes you could also be a nice way to try that out.

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: It’s say, taking a break for– on a class trip for five days or going to camp is by far the most healing and helpful way to reflect on their own tech use. You know, one of the things I recommend families do is have some kind of– especially when your children are younger through, I would say to eighth grade at least, high school too– have a family contract about times in the day that we’re going to not use our technology, but if you don’t do that, at least ask your kids, you know, what are the times of day that is most frustrating you? What are the situations where you really want me to be off my devices? Tell me when you feel sad or mad at me. And, because I don’t always know. And sometimes, just as you said, the adults are the experts about their families. Our children can be very astute and informative experts about us. And asking them those questions also makes them feel more valued in how we connect as a family. And onward to how we connect as a family, I’d– thank you so much again– I’d like to introduce Dr. Stephanie Reich. She is a Professor of Education at the University of California, Irvine. Her appointments are in Informatics and psychological science. She is the Director of Development in Social Context Lab and member of the Connected Learning Lab. She’s also a fellow of the American Psychological Association, the Society for Community Research in Action, and Developmental Psychology Division of APA. Doctor Reich served on the advisory boards of Raising Good Gamers, Future of Childhood, and Children and Screens. Her research focuses on understanding and improving the social context of children’s lives, with a focus on family, digital, and school environments. Thank you so much, and welcome Dr. Reich. 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: Thank you. Okay, so it’s a great act to follow. I wanted to start by sharing a little bit of how we as researchers think about the quality of parent-child interactions and in particular the adult side of that interaction. So one piece we look for is responsiveness, and this is very aligned to what Brandon talked about with sensitivity. It’s how much a caregiver notices the things their child is doing or needing, and they cultivate a response to that that’s appropriate. So that could be, feeding a baby that’s crying and hungry, it could be comforting, um, high schooler who’s frustrated with their math homework, but having that responsiveness to them. We also look at the warmth and affection, so this is how much the adult conveys that they care for this child. And this is culturally bound, it looks different in different capacities, but it’s really about showing affection and warmth. Another part is consistency. This is that there is a predictability to life with this caregiver and the ways they’re going to respond. And so this promotes more sense of trust and comfort in that relationship because there’s these predictable, safe ways that are going to happen. And finally, we look at stimulation, and these are the ways in which interactions with children are really promoting their development, and that, you know, looks very different if you’re an infant or a high schooler, but they’re the ways in which you’re really stimulating them to grow and to be successful. And research finds that media can displace, enhance, diminish, and facilitate the quality of these interactions. And overwhelmingly, the research is more focused on the displacing and hindering parts, which I think factors in a lot into the stress and guilt we just heard about. And so these are things like technoference, the over-sharing online, conflict related to what you’re doing, how you’re doing, discontinuing use, and limiting and displacing interactions for parent-child interactions in those ways. So I thought it would be fun to talk a little bit about the ways media can be used to facilitate or enhance parent-child interactions. I think I was given like eight minutes so I can’t do that much, but I’m going to give some highlights on where the research shows that media can be useful in these ways. So one is through co-use or play or joint media engagement, and this is not like just sitting side-by-side watching television together. This is interacting if you’re watching TV together or playing games or using media together, and it provides opportunities for discussion and to cultivate more relationships. It also helps when you can avoid the message that these are sort of non-parent spaces because you’re engaging with them as well. And you avoid blanket statements like, “I can’t believe you’re wasting your life gaming all the time” when you’ve never sat down and played that game and know what it is and why your child likes that, and what’s engaging about that. So, for example, I have a 14-year-old and Snapchat is very popular with his peer group. And while I could make disparaging comments about how many snaps he’s fired off in our very short car ride, I instead have been   trying to have ways to have conversations about Snapchat and why he likes it. So this past weekend, we looked at the different Snapchat filters, we talked about why these were the filters, we talked about who sends stuff, he snapped some of them to his friends. And so it opened the door for us having this conversation through this co-use of Snapchat. There are also concerns about the media sucking people into two different devices not interacting together, but as Mikey really presented, you can see the ways in which text and technology can facilitate communication. So, here are two screen captures that will convey aspects of high-quality parent child interaction. So, on the left you have someone, a child who is stressed about an exam, you have a caregiver who notices that, responds to that with some advice, conveys some, like, love and affection and caring, while also stimulating some ideas on how to cope with that. On the right side, you have this more autonomy-supportive process by which a child can go off with their friends, but as a caregiver, you know where they are, who they’re with, when they’re going to be back. And so by mediating this interaction in a digital way, it can support these aspects of high-quality and the use of, like, immediate emoticons and emojis and things that convey love and affection also add to that warmth part. Research also finds that media can provide what we call media moments. These are the ways in which media provides a catalyst or opportunity for parents and youth to be able to bring up topics and to talk about topics. It’s been most well studied around mental health and suicidality and depression, as well as gender identity and sexual orientation, where it creates a space to have these conversations that may not have been easy to bring up or have without the media help. There’s also some evidence that it can help model some self-regulatory process and some digital behaviors. And so part of that is just purposeful device use, which, you know, Brandon talked about technoference, which is the ways you have these interruptions. It’s a different process when you proactively use that and convey why you’re using media and vocalize that use, it’s not like a suck in, it’s a proactive “Hey, sweetheart, I’m really interested in hearing this story, I have to answer this phone call, but then I’ll be right there” or “I have to do a few things for work, and then we can sit down and do this”. And then that thoughtfulness is also modeling to youth that they should be more thoughtful in what they’re using. Similarly, this happens with posting on social media. In a study that we did with middle schoolers, we found that when the middle schoolers reported that their parents asked their permission before posting about them, they were more likely to ask permission of others and to be more thoughtful about what they were posting. And so this sharenting– sharing, parents sharing online– has this piece of needing a youth contribution to it as well. There’s ways in which using media together can promote more critical discussions and thinking about media. So, I mean, I’m a media researcher, so our family movie nights are sometimes documentaries, but they open the conversation about understanding algorithms and commercial aspects, we talk a lot about their feeds and what’s push content to kids and why they’re seeing what they’re seeing. Sharing social media, following your youth on social media, see what they’re doing, these all provide ways to have these discussions and to be involved. And there are playful ways. So I thought I would share a brief story of a trip that my family took to Hawaii following the COVID-19 pandemic. As soon as we were able to travel again, we went to Hawaii, so did lots of other families. And, not surprisingly, while we were there, we saw a lot of people posing on the beach for social media posts. And we started to notice that they were using some of the same poses, it was kind of predictable where we saw it, and as we’re waiting to go on the water because someone’s taking a picture, we started joking around about these poses and then looking online for examples and then pointing to people on the beach that were doing those. And then we had the creative idea that the kids should pose their father in all these same poses. So this is our photo montage of our trip, with their dad in all the influencer positions we had seen. And while it was quite popular with his Instagram followers as well as the kids, what it facilitated was this conversation about why these images, what does it mean? It provided a playfulness and what we noticed afterwards was that our daughter would bring us pictures she was seeing online, she would talk about stuff, and it sort of opened the door to having more critical conversations around social media. To be clear, families are different. They have different structures and compositions, different numbers of people, they might go live in multiple physical locations or households, children have different ages and needs within those households. Families have different resources and supports and all have different contextual stressors and structural barriers, and we know that those are highly predictive of media habits. But the trick is to try to find ways that media could enhance these parent-child interaction quality– or enhance these interactions. So one is that displacement is not always bad, right? And this has been talked about by all three people before me. Sometimes you just need a break as a caregiver, and if you have a break and are less stressed and less overwhelmed, you are more high-quality in caregiving afterwards. So purposeful breaks, where you give a device to a child, you let them go do something else can be beneficial. It can also buffer children if you are having, you know, conflict in the environment and their attention is elsewhere, it enables them to go elsewhere, and you can still reach them. And devices provide information and social connections to parents, and so those are really important for their mental health and well-being. The trick is to be purposeful so you can increase your responsiveness, your warmth affectionate– affection, your consistency, and your stimulation. And if we think about media as just like one more context that parenting happens in, then it can be a context that can also promote those high quality parent-child interactions. Thank you.

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: Thank you, that was fabulous. I’m reminded of when Degrassi High came out on TV, and either I or my husband watched it every I think Friday night with our then adolescent daughter and we both would try and say in our most chill voice, “Why would somebody say that to someone? What do you think she should do to stand up for herself?” And we were able to use those, you know, very graphic stories that some people might have thought were not age appropriate per se, because they really got into a lot of stuff, to have really important developmental conversations. What would you do if somebody was bullying you? What would you do if someone was bullying a friend? And we needed to have those exact same conversations and understand where kids are using their screens to help them deal with all the input they’re getting. One of the questions is, what do you think the appropriate amount of use is developmentally for, say, a middle schooler compared to a high schooler, and what to tell parents that set limits and their kids are not happy about that. 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: Yeah. So, I don’t think there is a– I mean, obviously, like professional organizations make blanket rules, but I don’t really feel that there is like a hard and fast rule, for how much. It’s much more about knowing your child and their reactions to stuff, what kinds of things they’re using, when they’re using them, who are they using it with, what are they not doing instead, right? And so, ideally it’s a scaffolded process where access does increase with age and more autonomy with age, so it’s more appropriate in those ways. But to have really consistent rules within families and expectations, right, because consistency is so important in that relationship, will facilitate it. So you might have a child who is very excitable by media, they can’t sleep like they, you know, really get wound up. You wouldn’t want them engaging with things right before bed or at certain times before they’re about to go to school, right? But it would be okay like on the weekends or on a Saturday, right? So, it should be more tailored than just a blanket like screen time rule. And to add to that screen time is really when you think about the time is really a displacement, like what are kids not doing when they’re on screens? Then understanding what they’re doing on the screens, with who, why, what instead of, and so the time limit alone is not enough just to think about.

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: This is to everybody, as we switch into a group discussion. At any developmental stage, how can a parent repair their parent child relationship after it’s been damaged by too much screen time? When you become self-aware and realize you have been on your screen too much, your kids are on their screens too much, how do we reboot and reset as families?

[Dr. Brandon T. McDaniel]: I mean, I can dive in quickly and then others can add on. I mean I think it’s really important to have these open and honest conversations with our children. Thinking about their ages, too. So if they were– if we’re thinking about, babies or toddlers or little children, then our conversation may not be that large of a conversation, and it’s more us needing to change our own habits, and just talk to them about how we want to spend time with you, and we want to enjoy our time together, and look at these fun things that we could do, and you can think about it from that type of perspective. But when we get into the older ages where they can begin to come up with their own ideas around these things and have really strong feelings around it, then it really does have to be that kind of neutral conversation about what it is you want to have in your family? What kinds of connections do you want to have? How do you feel loved? How do– what do you enjoy most? Like, what are these things that we can do together in our family that make us be the best that we can be and have kind of this mutual decision making around that. Sometimes you’ll have to make some decisions that are difficult and that they may not like in the end. But explaining those reasons behind those things are really important. Anyway, I know others will have much more to add to that, too. 

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: Anybody else want to hop in? 

[Dr. Lara Wolfers]: I think I would mostly agree with what Brandon just said. It’s mostly about talking, and I would actually encourage parents also to talk to their not that old children already. I think already three-year-olds can really understand what a screen is, and they know that they sometimes like to use screens longer than they intended to. And talking about that, you as a parent might feel the same way. And it’s for you as well, sometimes hard, and that you sometimes feel I think is actually quite important. So I think having this conversation, especially if things maybe didn’t go as you wanted them to go in the past, talk about it, explain reasons, but also kind of come up with a plan how to change together is a really good way going forward.

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: Who else can address this? What do we do– oh, Dr. Jensen, please, come in.

[Dr. Michaeline Jensen]: I just I would just say I would encourage to like, as a family therapist, I encourage families to think about more of the process than the content. So here, we as family members might be making the attribution that the problem in our relationship is the screen. And that may be one way that a problem in our relationship manifests, right? So like we might be experiencing distance between the parent and the adolescent, and we might be trying to like pull apart and find autonomy. That also might be manifesting in other ways, like when we fight about bedtime or any other domain of personal jurisdiction. And so, I just encourage families to think about, we actually need to fix that process. So we need to get closer together, we need to find ways to join and to increase our communication, to lean into our relationship. And one way might be by putting away our phones, but actually, like the phone is probably not going to fix the core problem there. It’s one symptom, but it’s like the relationship itself might be strengthened by setting the phone aside, but there’s other ways that we probably are going to need to do that work, too. I don’t want us to over-attribute all of our problems to the screen, That’s probably one way that a problem is manifesting.

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: Terrific. As a family therapist also, I’m very sensitive and tuned into the following question, it’s: what do you do first when you have parents who don’t agree? One who is really, you know, not concerned with tech time and the other person who really thinks as a family and certainly as a couple, we’re on screens too much. They have a follow-up question. Who wants to speak to that? 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: I’ll speak a little bit to that. As a family researcher, we do a lot on co-parenting. So co-parenting is a really robust area of research where parents really need to have communication skills, they have to find ways to support each other and not undermine each other, especially in front of children, and they should be aligned on their roles. And so, it’s a challenge, but it’s a challenge that really needs to happen outside the interactions with the child. It’s the people who are co-parenting and that can be couples, it can be multi-generational, it’s whoever is responsible for taking care of this child or children. They have to get on the same page, and those conversations have to be really explicit. And they shouldn’t just be about media, there’s lots of, like, that conversation should be around co-parenting, media should be one piece of that. And that communication between caregivers is what really matters versus like, “I know your dad lets you, blah, blah, blah, but with me, you can’t do that.” That’s a stressor on the child. And so the advice is talk to each other, that part’s super, super important and don’t use the child in that conflict.

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: The other follow-up question and I think what you said about don’t engage the child in the conflict, don’t do it in front of the child, is the question: What to do when children are in two different households that have different rules? Can you address that, Stephanie?

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: Yeah, the– it’s still the same process, right? And in fact, the research on co-parenting first emerged, the bulk of it, from people who are parenting from different households. So that communication, those same mechanisms are still really important. But sometimes there’s conflict between people and that’s why they’re in separate households. And so then it becomes very clear discussions with your child that says, “I know that when you’re at so-and-so’s house, those are the rules. But at our house, we have these rules, and they’re consistent and I’m explaining to you why we have them, and those are all the things that are really important. And it’s the same thing when you go to your friend’s house,” like, you know, my son, when he has a sleepover, gets to play video games like all night, and they’re– but that’s not going to happen when he has a sleepover at our house, right? And he and his friends know that difference, right? And so it’s the same mechanism. So you still want to try to communicate and get on the same page as best you can. And when you can’t, you want to be consistent, responsive, warm, stimulating in the ways in your household so your child has that sense of security and predictability. 

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: Wonderful, thank you. Here’s a question I get all the time when I talk at schools. What I feel erodes my relationship with my son is that I limit his on-time gaming, and he hates me for that. What advice do you have to offer?

[Dr. Michaeline Jensen]: What I tell families– yeah, we get this question a lot. So, I encourage families to kind of go into media proactively and set limits from the beginning. So this really, it’s probably long before they get a smartphone, say, that you’re scaffolding their relationship with technology to have some limits to be values-congruent with the way that your family operates, and so I think there’s some nice tools actually, we put some of them in the chat to like develop these kind of like family media use plans proactively before it becomes a problem. And so video gaming would be one aspect of it. So, often for a teen in particular, there would be a collaborative conversation about how much time is reasonable, what types– this might not just be time, right? It might be like, what kind of games are you allowed to play now versus in a few years, maybe when you’re more mature, and having it be not so, especially for older adolescents, top-down and punitive from a parent imposing rules that seem random, that they don’t seem well thought out, and rather having a more collaborative, discursive conversation about media rules, whether that be a video game or some other platform that work for everybody. Because even teens will for the most part acknowledge, like, that they– it’s some limit that needs to be set. And if they can be kind of involved in that rule generation, they can have more buy in. 

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: Anybody else? One of the things I found very helpful when you have a kid who dysregulates horribly when you pull them away from gaming or say, you know, can’t come to dinner on time or can’t get off, is to really show them the research, and look at the research that we have about the impact of technology on your attention, on your mood, and really let them in a safe space where you’re not judging them, but you’re really trying to talk honestly about how they– why it’s so hard to get off. And also especially, why they get so angry, and how technology is designed to keep them engaged and to dysregulate. So that gets to my next question, which is, what’s the best way to teach kids about tech so that they feel empowered to use it on their own behalf, and to get wiser about ways in which it does create interference, both in their relationships with their parents, but also in general.

[Dr. Brandon T. McDaniel]: I mean, I can just– one thing I could add on here is just, having these regular conversations at times that even technology is not happening, that’s not– I would just advise parents– often is not best to be having these conversations in the moment when this dysregulated behaviors happening or, you know, they’re wanting to get on that screen at that moment or other things like that. If we can have these broader conversations– well, I think one of the ways that we can help our children and our teens is to be having these broader conversations with them about who it is that they want to be. You know, who is it that they want to be, what kinds of behaviors do they want to engage in, how do they want people to see them, and what kinds of– what our screen use behaviors can do to us over time, and then have these conversations with them about, well, if this is who you want to be, and the way that you want to be seen, then these are the kinds of things that you would try to do or that you would need to try to do. And then have these broader conversations about what that looks like and how you try to do that in your own life and how they might try to do that, and check in with them at different times about how they’re feeling about those things, as opposed to only coming in like others are saying, and being punitive or setting a strict limit like right in the moment, or trying to get them off, or trying to have this really almost angry conversation at the time when they’re all dysregulated. 

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: You know, as a developmentalist, I also think it’s important to take like a developmental pathway approach, and my favorite analogy is like, if your kid wants to go to the park, you don’t just, like, open the door and push them out, you know? You like, teach them how to, like, hold your hand and cross the street and look both ways. And then at some point they don’t have to hold your hand, but they still walk with you. And then at some point you might stand on the side and you watch them cross the street. And so tech– media is the same way, like the media rules and expectations should start young and they should slowly grow as the child grows. And you– and it’s never too late to start that, right? So even if your child is just getting their first phone, there are discussions about like what these skills they have to have to have that phone, what they’re allowed to do with that phone, you might even have like screen time restrictions that things shut down if you can’t self-regulate and hit that limit yourself so that you’re thoughtful about it. But we have to think about not just in this moment, we’re going to have conflict and have these rules suddenly, but that, it’s a developmental process, and wherever your child is now, you should think about where you are now, and where you want to head to. So that when they’re 18 and they’re an adult and have no more restrictions or adults on them because they’re off at college or off in life, that they will be functional adults on their devices. And so I think taking a developmental growth model with that will help a lot. 

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: Thank you. Anybody else? 

[Dr. Lara Wolfers]: Yeah, maybe one one thing because I notice that often parents say, “Well, how should I teach something that I don’t know how to do myself?” Which is “I’m so bad at regulating my own use, how should I teach my child not to regulate?” And I think that’s a real problem, that’s really hard to solve. So, I first want to really acknowledge that that’s really hard. And I think then kind of going the process with them. So not only talking about that– like your child’s screen use and screen time limits, but at the same time also thinking about your own media use and setting limits and the same way as you would do for your child, maybe of course, a little bit more age appropriate might be a good way to deal with it. So, kind of acknowledging that you’re maybe actually at the same stage of learning than your child is, and then actively managing your own learning process at the same time might be a way to deal with that.

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: Wonderful. I think that one of the things we can also do– and it’s hard, it’s hard. The older your children are, the harder it becomes. But come home when you learn things like in a seminar like this and you learn something and you reflect, and you realize, I need to make changes. I think you can just be very straightforward with your kids and say, “Hey, I learned this and we can’t ignore it now and that– I want to share it with you. So how should we all change what we do, knowing that we’ve heard this” and really try and involve and engage them in the process with us. I think the more we can teach our children and let them be part of a conversation and roleplay, “Okay, you be the mom. What would you do? I’ll be the kid.” And that’s a really fun way to help them realize, oh, okay, maybe, maybe I should go along with it. So, another very important question that everybody’s concerned about are what are the signs that we should look for as adults that indicate screen time is negatively affecting our children? Let’s do the developmental run. Either we can go start with the babies or start with the adolescents. Who wants to dive in here?

[Dr. Brandon T. McDaniel]: You can start– we can start with the babies. I mean, that’s a difficult question because you– I mean, first you’d have to know what’s going on with your baby and whether there’s other things that are involved. But, I think when we’re thinking about the very early on, in infancy, we really have to think a lot about ourselves and our own behaviors since we’re thinking about that interactional synchrony and that responsiveness that we have to the baby and how important that is. Since if we think about an infant’s abilities to be able to regulate their own behavior and emotions, you know, that– they can’t do that very well, or often– almost at all, right, in the beginning, and they have to learn that over time. And so, how do we know? we need to take a close look at our own behavior, and I– there’s no magic number, there’s no magic amount of time. Again, it’s really viewing ourselves as the experts of what are we seeing happen in our own situation. But we should be trying to find that balance to where we are and giving our babies, more attention than we’re giving our devices, especially since, very early on, they can’t regulate their own emotions and behavior, they need that coregulation, that interaction and being held and soothed by their parent or caregiver to be able to learn those things over time. So we will have to focus on ourselves.

[Dr. Stephanie Reich]: I think when we think about the impacts, I think the early childhood space, we’re getting a bigger, better picture on this, on impacts, and I think for the older ones it’s harder. In our own research, we find that when mothers and fathers give a device to a kid, a baby starting at nine months of age to calm or distract them, because it’s a great tool at the moment right, because it really calms them, it deprives the children of that opportunity to learn to self-regulate their own emotions, right? Because it’s such a high distractor, they’re not being held, they’re not being cuddled, they’re not being talked to, all these things. And so what we see is that those behaviors over their first 24 months predict some more behavior problems, you know, moving on into like 30 months in the toddler years. So we, like, it’s clear– we view that more of these things are starting to show clear displacements. Same with language development when devices are on, especially television, there’s this less language directed towards kids in the environment, they play less, right. So those kinds of displacement things are a piece of it. And so the– I think there’s ideas around why you’re using technology with young kids, and is it purposeful or is it just in the moment, a quick, easy thing that might be really displacing something important. That’s an important piece to it. I think as people– as children get older, we– a lot of parents don’t recognize that space. So like a lot of conflict around devices going away or concerns around like game addiction, right? Parents are like, “I don’t know what happened, like we bought the game and then now it’s like fights all the time” and they forget about everything that happened as you got to that space. And so I think it’s really about having those conversations, those norm settings and being aware when you’re tipping the balance into having more problems and trying to reset before it’s extreme moving forward. But the impacts in older ages– of devices are not clear because they then become much more about what you’re doing on the devices when early childhood, it’s just much more about what you’re not doing while you’re on those devices.

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: Wonderful. Other folks want to chime in here? It’s such a great question. 

[Dr. Michaeline Jensen]: I guess just to Stephanie’s point with older like adolescents. For the most part, you’re not going to know unless you talk to them. So it’s it’s very easy to observe what’s going on with, say, a two-year-old because you’re there and you’re in it, whereas the majority of adolescents’ say smartphone use happens in private or relative privacy, and they could be actually getting into some really unhealthy media use patterns and say, like engaging in, body comparison and having some like really body image issues and you’re not going to that’s not visible to you necessarily unless you ask. And so I always encourage parents to be having these conversations early and often about like, what are you what are you getting up to on your phone? Like, who do you talk to? How does it make you feel? Because that’ll be the way that you can help them construct a media experience that is healthy and enriching and is not detrimental. But it’s just really hard to just look for signs because sometimes it’s hard to see from the outside.

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: Anybody else want to speak to problematic signs? I’ll list a few. When your child repeatedly cannot disengage from tech after about 20 minutes, you have to– it really helps to understand the wiring of a younger kid, in an elementary school-aged kid. We see problematic tech use when kids start lying about what they’re doing online, when they don’t do their homework, when they withdraw from functioning and school, when they are extremely obsessed with something and they lose their love of or their enjoyment of engaging in the real world, when they’re totally obsessed with the technology. Now that can happen normally and healthily today for any kid at any time when they have something new. So it’s really about their behavior over time, and when you feel like you are losing them to the siren call of the screen, get help, talk to somebody. The thing that’s so good is now, if you look at everybody’s qualifications for this webinar, when I started doing research on this, in 2011, when smartphones first came out, there was so little research on the parent-child relationship. And now what’s so fabulous is that we have a lot of research and a lot of people who are therapists in this field. So let me go to another conversation– question, which is what do we do when the conversations about things not going well are just flat? You know, our kids won’t engage, they’re mad at us, they do not see us as coming towards them in a helpful way, but rather in a controlling way and infuriating way. What do we do then? Now we’re talking late middle school, middle school especially. And, high school. 

[Dr. Michaeline Jensen]: I think this is a spot where hopefully you as a parent have built up some social capital with your child. So, Brandon and Stephanie, actually everyone, kind of talked about the role of responsiveness and warmth and like, I think it’s important to have a really positive parent-child relationship in general, unrelated to screens necessarily, that can help you weather the storm of conflicts when they arise, right? Because there’s going to be things, especially as adolescents mature and reach new developmental stages, it is in them evolutionarily to be striving for more autonomy and honestly to like, try and break your rules, because that’s part of what adolescence is. And so having a really strong parent-child relationship and having some capital to draw upon when things get tough I think can be really valuable. If you’re in a situation where that bridge has been crossed and you don’t have a ton of capital to expend, I think it’s never too late to start, right? So trying to find some ways to have purposeful, positive interactions and not just be fighting about screens or about anything, right? So like, find some ways to catch your kid doing it right, we can call it catching being good, right? Like so find opportunities to give them some of the positives, to make them feel– it’s really hard when you feel like all that’s happening is your parent is coming at you with criticism and with rules and telling you you’re not getting it right. And I think that balance can help you have a little bit of capital to spend when you do need to to exert some limits.

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: Wonderful advice, anybody else want to help out here? 

[Dr. Lara Wolfers]: Yeah. Yeah, maybe– I think sometimes it’s about trial and error, right? So I think two things that could be useful is one is co-use. So if your child is doing something which you think, like I don’t know, playing a lot of video games and you think that’s far too much, maybe starting playing with them and understanding it better will also make them more open to your– your opinion on this, because they might feel you have no idea what you’re talking about but once you start actually playing with them and trying to understand what this is about, they may also value your opinion on this more. This is maybe one approach, doesn’t have to work, but sometimes it can. And the other option would be also to kind of, start a conversation about technology, maybe in general observing others, or maybe also observing your own behavior together with your child. So not like kind of starting the conversation from you are doing something wrong, but rather from, for example, what’s the research on this? Oh– well, there’s a societal problem that we can discuss on a very high level and then we can maybe focus on the more like specific problem. Or maybe also starting with you, like your as a parent technology use and asking the child, do you feel sometimes that I’m not engaging with you enough? What, how does it make you feel? And then kind of go from there to the more specific problem. 

[Dr. Catherine Steinder-Adair]: You know, I love what you just said about asking the child, because I think really what this whole webinar is about is strengthening our relationships, and we can use technology to strengthen our family relationships. As a grandma, I will say I love FaceTime. And I’ll throw in one more, and the answer to one of the questions here, is it bad for toddlers to constantly have phones in their face of people constantly wanting to take pictures, what’s the effect? I don’t know that we know the effect, but I do know that we always ask our three-year-old, can I take a picture? And she will very often say no, and we respect that. And I think from day one it’s really important to respect our kids’ privacy and their desire to not be– have tech interference. And that said, I think one of the things I, of course, have come to love about technology is all the ways we can use it, and we’ve heard some wonderful ways today to really strengthen and protect our relationships with our kids. I think that slide that showed Dr. Reich, of your husband taking the poses with your daughter, was hilarious and brilliant. And, you know, we’ve talked a lot about co-watching and sharing, as Dr. Wolfers just said. I think it’s really important to actually know what your kids are doing, and you don’t have to be as smart as them, but we have to be curious. And the last question I’m going to just answer and wrap this up is, what do we do if our– our use has been negatively affecting our kids? And we realize that one of the things that I’ve learned working with adolescents and young adults is they love it– and this is true for very little people too– they love it when we apologize, when we are accountable, and we say, “You know, I’ve been doing this way too much. Help me understand when I should stop”. And “I’m so sorry,” and, you know, “I’m so sorry,” can be very magical words for us as parents. And so often we, you know, focus on our kids, “say you’re sorry to your sibling.” So I think one of the things I believe in and I think everybody on this video believes in, it’s never too late to work on and repair your family relationship with technology, and it’s exciting and fun to figure out how as a family you really are using technology to strengthen your family relationships. So now, Dr. Perry, will you wrap this up for us? And I want to just thank everybody. This has been really wonderful. We’ve had the highest participation rate on this webinar than I think most webinars, and certainly all the other ones I’ve been on. So, this is a really exciting moment, because we had this panel of experts who can really share with us actual research. Thank you all very much for tuning in, especially those who tuned in from overseas at odd hours. We really appreciate it.

[Kris Perry]: Thank you, Catherine, and the entire panel, for the thoughtful discussion on how digital media use can affect parent-child dynamics. I hope you’ve learned helpful tips on how to strengthen this important bond in an increasingly digital world. If you are interested in learning more about digital parenting strategies more broadly, we encourage you to check out our February webinar, Win-Win Parenting: Child Safety, Autonomy, and Family Harmony in the Digital Age. It can be found on YouTube and our website. If you found today’s webinar insightful, help us keep the conversation going. Your donation supports future Ask the Experts webinars. Just scan the QR code on the screen, or visit childrenandscreens.org to give. Thank you.