The Costs of Using Devices to Calm Children | Peter Reschke, PhD

[Kris Perry]: Welcome to Screen Deep, where we decode young brains and behavior in a digital world. I’m your host, Kris Perry, Executive Director of Children and Screens. Today’s conversation explores some of the earliest and most important foundations of child development – how infants and young children learn to understand emotions, regulate their feelings, and build social connection, and how digital media may be shaping those processes from the very beginning of life.

Our guest is Peter Reschke, Associate Professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University. Dr. Reschke is an expert in infant social cognition and emotion development. His research examines everything from infants’ responses to parental phone use to the long-term effects of using digital media to regulate children’s emotions. Welcome, Peter.

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: Thanks for having me.

[Kris Perry]: We know that the bedrock of emotional regulation is built in childhood, starting as early as infancy. You’ve done important work to help us understand how infants make sense of emotions and begin navigating their social world. Can you take us through how infants learn to recognize emotions and how that relates to social development?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: That’s such a good question because we take for granted as adults what it means to understand other people’s emotions. We see that someone’s happy or sad or angry, and we know what to do. But if we can rewind, take a time machine back to when we were all babies, we would be able to examine better – how did we get to this place? How did we learn how to do that?

And so infants don’t come to this world knowing what emotions mean. They have to learn that through their own experience. One of the most basic abilities that’s required is just being able to tell the difference between, for example, facial expressions, knowing that a happy face is different from a sad face. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that knowing the difference means they understand and appreciate all of those emotions. And so it’s through trial and error and maybe some socialization from parents that young babies eventually learn what a facial expression is intended, what it means, and what to do about it.

Some of the earliest lessons babies learn are encountering ambiguity or novelty in their environment. Maybe it’s a new object or person or toy or something. And when they’re uncertain, they tend to look towards their caregiver or a trusted person for emotional information. We call that “social referencing.” And they look back and forth between the uncertain object and their caregiver. And the caregiver can express an emotion and babies will respond based on the emotion. They might approach more if it’s a positive emotion or avoid or be cautious if it’s a negative emotion. And that’s kind of the earliest version of learning about emotions that we see in infancy. And over time this helps them navigate their world.

[Kris Perry]: So going a little further beyond just expressing their own emotions, how does parent involvement influence the infant’s development of emotional understanding?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: I think the parent plays a major role. So, like I said, in these social referencing situations, the parent is often the first person the baby will turn to to seek out information on whether to approach or avoid a novel situation. But also, the parent provides a lot of emotional information in those relationships. We have to remember babies have very strong relationships with their caregiver in those early years. And the caregiver expresses a lot of emotions. And there’s some interesting work showing even during different transitions from, for example, a baby learning to crawl or walk for the first time and their world just kind of expands. The parents’ emotions that they express toward the baby actually changes, too. So as a baby starts getting into places around the house or apartment that they haven’t been before and the parent maybe hasn’t prepared as much, they might have a little bit increase in negative emotions, like, “Stay away from that outlet,” or things like that. And those kinds of experiences come from the parent. And because they have that relationship, the baby can learn what emotions mean and how to respond to that.

Parents also help their children regulate their emotions. So when a baby’s experiencing a very negative emotion, often the parent is the one that is there to help them calm down and to eventually understand coping mechanisms, so that as the baby gets older, becomes a toddler, gets ready for preschool and kindergarten, they start to learn some skills themselves so that they don’t always need to have a parent there for every emotion that they feel. So the parent helps the baby learn how to recognize and deal with emotions because they have that relationship.

[Kris Perry]: How early can an infant perceive those emotions that you just described and know that one might be appropriate in a situation and another one might not? 

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: It’s a really nuanced answer to that question because, again, we see as early as shortly after birth that babies can tell the difference between facial expressions. But again, does that mean they know what they mean and how to respond to those? It’s not until later in that first year that we see that babies, when they see another person experience some kind of positive or negative event, and then express an emotion that either matches or doesn’t match that event, we can see that sometimes as early as eight to ten months, babies might show some indication that they expect if something positive happens to you, you should express a positive emotion and not a negative one. And then vice versa.

So it’s really early on, before the baby can even talk, that they seem to kind of understand that emotional fit. It emerges pretty early in infancy, and then as they get older, they themselves can know what behaviors they should respond to others’ specific emotions.

[Kris Perry]: Is that sort of the beginning of empathy?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: Oh, for sure. Yeah. I think emotion understanding and empathy go hand in hand. Again, how does this fit into the parent and the parent relationship? So I think we see a lot of those early prosocial, empathic concern behaviors emerging around the first birthday. And a lot of that is the baby responding to their own caregiver. So there’s lots of interesting research studies where a caregiver might pretend they’ve, like, whacked their hand with a hammer or something, and they see young infants, who can’t even talk yet, show empathic behaviors. And I think it’s matched with the understanding of emotions, as well.

[Kris Perry]: I’m really glad you brought up caregivers because, in thinking about infants just a little bit more and interpreting their behaviors, are infants able to notice when a parent is distracted on their phone in their presence?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: Yes, short answer is yes. They definitely notice that. And we have a lot of research that can answer that question. Before we even had cell phones enter the picture with the parent-child context, we had decades of research looking at what’s called the “still-faced paradigm.” And that was where they would bring a caregiver and their baby into the lab and have them interact and just play with each other, kind of get a baseline setting. And then the researchers would instruct the parent to go still, not respond emotionally, not respond at all to their child for a couple minutes. And they wanted to see, what does the baby do when this happens? And what they found is that babies would show more negative emotion, less positive emotion. And then when they instructed the caregiver to go back to normal interaction, the baby would take a long time to kind of get back to normal. And so we have decades of research just at that. 

And then more recently we have, do we see that same kind of effect happen when a parent is playing with their child and then they get distracted by their phone? Do we see the baby show more negative emotion and less positive emotion and have a hard time coming back? And we have some research suggesting that we kind of do see that still-face effect. So they do seem to notice that. And we even have done studies where we hook babies up to heart rate monitors and we can get physiological measures of how their nervous system is reacting. And even if the baby isn’t showing a negative emotion during a parent distraction by their phone, their nervous system definitely indicates that their body’s preparing to deal with stress. And so there’s kind of this invisible marker that they are definitely noticing it and their body’s getting ready to deal with their environment, maybe more on their own than with their parent.

[Kris Perry]: I mean that dyadic relationship, the way that we communicate nonverbally, all of – even pheromonally, in the way that babies and their caregivers are bonded – that the high level of sensitivity, that there might be any threat to that attachment or bond is, you know, it’s really interesting to hear that you’ve studied that and we understand all these systems inside the body that are invisible to us are activated, and they have an effect.

What are some potential downstream impacts of those interruptions and the ways that babies are reacting to it in the moment?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: I think when we look at research on how that impacts the nervous system and long term, we have to focus on patterns. It’s not a one time thing, like I look at my phone, interrupt my child: “Are they broken? Did I break them?” Right? It’s more, is this a consistent pattern?

So in our research, we’ve seen that there are group level effects where we can see the average response of babies, but then we can also zoom in on ones that maybe have an unexpected response to when their parent looks at their phone. And those are the babies that sometimes they – maybe on average they’re using tablets more or have more screen time. And maybe their nervous system is just a little bit more used to that disruption and it’s more of their baseline rather than out of the normal. And so we see even differences there.

So it really can shape, over months and years, the actual physiological composition of the child. So there could potentially be some areas of concern there because if the normal is doing it on their own, that might potentially have some concerns for us to think about as parents.

[Kris Perry]: I’m really glad you brought up this breaking the child, you know, one or two instances is not what we mean here. It’s really about that habitual behavior and it’s important to recognize and become aware of how much we’re on our phones to try to intentionally dial back the time we’re on it around infants and children so that they’re not experiencing these reactions of, you know, feeling maybe a little ignored or worse. And so the habitual piece is really a different point than, it’s okay to pick your phone up occasionally. It’s all the time. That’s what we’re trying to help parents understand.

How does emotional understanding relate to what we call “prosocial behaviors?” Things like helping or comforting others.

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: So I think when we understand emotions, it’s not just, “Are they happy? Are they sad?” But also understanding why they feel that way. And when someone is in need of help, so – prosocial behavior is like helping, comforting others, or sharing with others. So part of the emotional component of that is recognizing the need. So if a child understands that someone’s sad because they’re cold or they dropped their food in the dirt or something, and they don’t have what the child has. If the child can recognize that need, then they know how to execute a prosocial response that’s appropriate for that context. So if they see someone who’s sad because they’re cold, they know to bring a blanket. Or if they’re angry because someone broke their toy, the baby can provide some space. So that recognizing someone’s emotion, their need associated with that, goes hand-in-hand with how to respond to that with our prosocial behaviors.

[Kris Perry]: Does the use of digital media in infancy and toddlerhood disrupt children’s ability to understand others’ emotions?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: Yeah, so I think the important question here is that the context of media matters. Because if a child is using media and it’s replacing, potentially, a parent-child interaction, that’s one thing. But if the parent and child are using media together, that’s a context that we call “co-viewing,” and it has a lot of positive potential there, right? It’s kind of like if we go back before the time of digital media, and we talked about books. Books could be really helpful if the child has a parent there guiding them and looking at the characters and talking about emotions. We can do the same thing with a digital short or TikTok or anything. The parent can guide the child in that context and have a positive outcome on their emotional development.

So the question is, is media use replacing a context in which the child is going to learn about emotions? Because they need parent guidance, or they need caregiver guidance, to help them understand how emotions work, why it happened, and what to do about it, right? So it only comes down to, is media replacing something better that is necessary for healthy emotional development?

[Kris Perry]: Yeah, so it really sounds like the type or amount of media use matter for helping or hindering emotional understanding or development of prosocial behaviors. And you mentioned co-viewing with parents. I often think of that as sort of joint attention. We’re going to pay attention to the same thing at the same time. Book, media, person.

Are there other types of media use or characteristics of the media itself that are more associated with prosocial behavior development?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: There’s a lot of research looking at this. So some of the research we’ve done has looked at the type of media the parent consumes and how that impacts the parent-child co-viewing of media and subsequent prosocial behaviors. And long story short, we found that if parents consume more prosocial media personally, that seems to be related to their own child’s own production of prosocial behaviors, especially with how they are interacting with the parent. So there seem to be these kind of trickle-down effects where what the parent’s doing seems to also influence what the child’s doing.

[Kris Perry]: It’s very common for parents to use screens to calm down an infant or young child that’s upset or emotionally dysregulated. It definitely seems to work in the moment. Are there long-term consequences of using media to calm an infant or a young child?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: And I think this is the question that so many parents have is, “If I give my child a phone to help them calm down, am I going to, you know, really change how they grow emotionally and socially?” And again, I think it goes back to the pattern. The pattern’s the most important thing to focus on. Screens work to calm a child down. If they’re having a tantrum at the store, a screen will probably do the trick. Our research suggests that it just delays the negative consequence of taking the media away, so it doesn’t necessarily eliminate any negative emotion. Sometimes for children, it actually makes it worse when we do have to take it away. 

But again, it’s the pattern. So what is it replacing? If we give a screen to a child when they’re having difficult emotions, that may calm them down, but it’s not teaching them when it’s most relevant to them how to deal with emotions, how to understand why they feel upset. And so if it’s replacing that key parent-child teaching moment, which can come after the child calms down and the parent can explain and help them understand at their level why they felt that way and how we can get back to good, then it’s a concern.

We want to make sure that we focus on those patterns. “What’s my default as a parent to help my child regulate their emotions? Is it to give them a phone?” If so, we could probably take some steps to form some better strategies, but if it’s not our default, then we’re probably doing okay.

[Kris Perry]: Sometimes I think of the infant or the young child as leveraging their parents’ nervous system. So it’s like, “I’m dysregulated, I’m emotional, I’m not rational.” The adult comes into the picture and provides this alternative experience, this alternative method of self-soothing, calming. And the more you are aware that that’s part of your job as a caregiver, is to give the child this opportunity to scaffold their own internal self-soothing skills, the more you see it as, “This is instructive.” Like, yes, there will be a meltdown. And in putting off, as you say, the skill building around how to self-soothe means that they could get to a much older age and still not have developed some of those early skills around, you know, leveraging their own resources to be calmer and more regulated. Screens, you know, it’s really amazing how effective they are at calming, but it is almost like a postponement of something bigger that we know children need to do.

Is there a difference, in your opinion, between using a screen to calm or regulate an infant versus a toddler or preschool-age child?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: Yeah, I think there is a difference because a toddler, preschooler, they’re gonna have language, right? And so we have more tools we can use to help reason with them. Infants, they might not have that. And so if we’re just using a screen to kind of distract them away from something, I would recommend, in my opinion, more caution with infants, just because they don’t have that language component as much to help with that. 

But again, what is it replacing? Is it replacing that caregiver interaction? The relationship is what matters. And giving a screen, it kind of takes the relationship out of the context in that moment. And that’s probably one of the more important moments to focus on the relationship, that, “I’m a safe person for you to ride out this difficult emotion and I’m gonna help you feel safe, but also help you get back to where you can be more independent and explore and feel confident in this environment.”

[Kris Perry]: I think you have a 2022 study that showed preschool children were less likely to transition off media well to other activities if parents use media to regulate negative emotions. Can you tell us more about that study?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: That study we found that if parents used media more, self-reported, that they were more likely to use media to calm their child down, we found that those children also had higher levels of struggling with media. So there’s “problematic media use,” is kind of the term we use to describe that. And that’s like media disrupting functionality, right? We don’t want to have problematic media use. And so we did see that there were some links with that where toddlers who were given phones more often to calm down over time had a harder time getting off of media. They – it disrupted their lives more and more. So there seems to be a link with that developmentally.

[Kris Perry]: What should parents do instead of handing a screen to a young child during a tantrum to help them develop those self regulation skills?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: If we think of feeling emotions as a classroom where children have to learn the lessons and skills to handle emotions and the parent is the teacher, we don’t want to take kids out of that classroom. We don’t want to take them away from the parent. The parent should help the child calm down. And sometimes that’s sitting down, riding it out and that can – that might not work every time, but you might be in a public place and that’s really difficult to do. So we have to acknowledge that. But in ideal situations, being able to ride out the emotion and then being able to have important lessons depending on the age of the child, age appropriate, of why you felt that way. What can we do to calm down our nervous system? What can we do to help us in the future when this happens again to have a better outcome?

And this is not just a one time lesson. This is a very frequent lesson and class that needs to happen. And so it could be modeling how to respond to the emotion, so the parent can show an example. It could be labeling the emotions and helping the child form a concept of, “When I feel this emotion, these are some of the things I can do to respond to that emotion.” And those are the kinds of lessons in that classroom, that emotional classroom, that parents need to focus on. And if we take the child out of the classroom by giving them a device, they’re not getting those lessons and that’s replacing those key classroom lessons.

[Kris Perry]: I love the classroom analogy. It’s so helpful to think of this as something you learn over a long period of time.

You have a really interesting new study that came out this year that looked at media emotional regulation of older children from ages two to seven and its relationship to later problematic use. What did you find in that study?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: Yeah, so this is from a multi-year longitudinal study. We followed hundreds of families and asked them about their kind of default use of giving a device to their child to calm them down. We were also able to measure a bunch of other things, including that problematic media use that I mentioned earlier. So, really, something we don’t want children to have where it’s really disruptive. Media use is disrupting their life, they have a hard time getting off, they feel anxious when they don’t have it. We don’t want that.

And what we found is that – kind of as a hopeful finding, I think – parents used less and less media as a tool to calm their child down from two to seven years of age. So that’s a little hopeful. It shows us that parents, on average, are not just always using that and it’s increasing across child development.

But we did see some potential areas of concern. We saw that that starting point at the two-year mark, parents who used more media to regulate their child’s emotions had children at age seven, so five years later, who were more likely to have problematic media use. So it seems like that sensitive period – if we want to, maybe that’s a little reading a little too much into it, but if that helps us understand – that sensitive period around age of two, if that’s kind of the default method for parents calming their children down is with that device, it really does seem to impact the child’s own relationship with media when they’re in school, when they’re in kindergarten, and it’s a problem that the we want to make sure parents are aware of so that we can hopefully prevent that. So we don’t want media becoming a coping tool for the child that then makes them so that they don’t know how to deal with emotions and how to have a healthier relationship with media when they’re in school.

[Kris Perry]: Your study also had some findings about the family factors that might be more associated with using media to regulate emotions. Will you break that down and tell us what you found about those factors?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: Yeah, so some of the family factors we looked at included parental education. So parents’ education was related to their starting point at age two of using media to regulate their child’s emotions. So parents who were less educated were more likely to use media to regulate their child’s emotions. We also saw that parents who self-reported more anxiety were more likely to use media to regulate their child’s emotions at that starting year.

[Kris Perry]: So beyond using media to calm down a child, you have some research that looks at the relationship of general amounts of child media use or consumption and emotion regulation. One study looked at preschool-age kids who increased their media use, like everyone else during the lockdown phase of the COVID pandemic. And another looked at preschoolers with problematic amounts of media use. What did you find?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: Yeah, so this study was – we didn’t plan there to be a pandemic in the middle of it, but we had measurements the year before COVID, and then we had some measures during the first COVID year and then the year after that. And the year before and after the start of COVID, we were able to use these physiological measures of children as they viewed media with their caregiver. So we were able to get kind of a, how did screen use change during COVID and how is that related to the children’s physiology? 

So, no surprise, we found that there was a major spike in screen time use during the COVID year. That’s no surprise to anyone. And then we did see it kind of come down for most indicators after COVID, but then how it was related to those physiological measures, we found that prior to COVID, if the children are already using a lot of screen time, that predicted changes in their physiology after COVID. And so maybe some of those lingering effects still had an effect in how they were able to respond to screen time.

And then that second study, we looked at problematic media use and how it changes across childhood and also within the parents. And we did see that across time, parents and children who had more problematic media use and maybe their changes in it across development, it predicted issues in children like aggression and other problems. So if they were using a lot more media in a problematic way and had that, again, it was disrupting their functionality and it was changing differently across development, that was linked with more aggression later in childhood.

[Kris Perry]: That’s unfortunate, right? Like, it’s already really tough to be a kid and it’s tough to raise kids these days. And now we have this device that gives you, essentially, like a quick, easy solution to a hard problem that takes years to work through – emotional regulation. I mean, we know adults that are still struggling with that skill. So I have so much empathy for everybody that’s trying to navigate both their technology use and their parenting all at the same time.

What do you think is the most important thing parents need to know about helping children develop healthy emotional regulation skills? And what’s the most important takeaway from your work for parents?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: I think the most important thing parents can take away is that how we use media with our children, it’s all about the relationship with our child. If anything – if what we’re using media – if it disrupts the relationship, our interaction with our child, that’s where we need to pause and ask, “Is this a pattern that I need to be concerned about, if it’s disrupting the relationship and our interaction?” 

So that’s, I think, my number one recommendation for parents is the way we use media, it’s all about the relationship – either it can completely sever our interaction with our child. Give them a device and now they’re doing everything solo without us there interjecting, commenting, helping them understand what they’re watching. That’s very different than if we’re watching a show together and the parent can say, “Why does that character feel that way? What can we do to help them?” That’s a very rich, positive interaction that I think could have long-term benefits if that’s a pattern. So it’s more about the pattern, the relationship, and is it separating or bringing the parent and child together?

[Kris Perry]: I mean, it’s such a protective factor in child development to have that close relationship with a loving caregiver. And when you brought up the still-face experiment earlier, it breaks my heart every time I hear about that study again – I can picture it because I’ve seen the video of it, of just how tuned in that infant is to their caregiver, that just the the slightest change in their facial expression or purposely not giving them the facial feedback causes so much distress. And if that’s occurring multiple times per day or per week or per month, of course that’s gonna have a lasting effect and it reduces the protective qualities of the loving relationship. So thank you for the work you’re doing on that and highlighting that for all of us. 

Did you ever have an “aha” moment in your career where your research found something or illustrated something that informed your thinking for everything that came next?

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: Yeah, I mean to boil it down to one thing is is difficult, but I think because me and the team of researchers I work with, we’ve been able to use a variety of different measures from just watching parents and children interact, from a questionnaire that we give to parents, to using like a physiological measure of the child. I think all of it comes down to kind of what you were just saying, is that children are very sensitive to disruptions in the parent-child interaction. And then thinking about how that becomes potentially chronic or expected or becomes the norm for the child, that really does shape not just how they interact emotionally with their caregiver, but also in general, how do they notice differences in the social interactions that they’re supposed to be having? And if the phone, which is very effective at distracting a child and maybe having them not think about the emotions they’re feeling and why – what if that is having an impact on just how they navigate social interactions? Are they gonna be capable and equipped with lots and lots of practice, lots of reps of noticing others and how they respond to me and how I respond to them? And if we’re minimizing the number of times children practice with that by using media, I think not only does it change relationships with the parent, but it also changes the child’s own physiology and how they respond to emotions and to those stressful situations that we want them to be equipped and prepared for as they enter school and have less time with a caregiver as kind of their primary instructor in the emotion classroom.

[Kris Perry]: Well, it goes right back to the beginning of our talk today, which is where you were pointing this out that the classroom, these teachable moments, these disruptions, they all just put off this important work that the child has to do with their caregiver, their parent, to become skillful at emotion decoding, emotional expression, emotional management. It feels so natural to us as adults, as you pointed out, and yet it’s a lifetime effort of focus and intentional instruction by the parent and modeling. And I think it’s a really important takeaway from our talk today, is that it isn’t something we’re born knowing how to do, that we learn this from the people who love us and it’s an important skill to have. 

What’s next for your field? What needs to be studied next to understand more about child emotional and social health and media.

[Dr. Peter Reschke]: One of the things we’re looking at next that we have a study that’s forthcoming – still under review – but we wanted to look at the parent side of things because there’s a lot of guilt around this topic. If we tell parents there’s any concern about how we use media with our children, I think a lot of natural feeling is guilt. And so we’ve actually studied how parents feel guilty about their children’s media use and how that changes across their child’s development. And I think the first lesson that we’ve learned is that it’s very common. A lot of parents feel moderate to higher levels of guilt about their children’s media use. We need to normalize that that’s a pretty normal feeling. But then also examine what are the pressures that we put on parents that maybe put them in a place that makes it so that they can’t do anything about it, or they feel stuck with how they manage their child’s media use. And so I think we want parents to feel empowered in ways to help them navigate their children’s media use and how they interact with their child. So I think helping parents have strategies for doing that – I think focusing more on that, that’s that’s next in the field. So helping parents understand and feel educated and informed about how media impacts their child, but then also providing solutions that can help them do something about it because we don’t want parents to feel crippled where they’re at. So I think that’s where we gotta go, is focus more on that. 

And then the second thing is we are now in an age of AI and we need to understand how that’s impacting the parent-child relationship. And we are just understanding more and more about how that is being used with older kids and teenagers and adults, but we don’t know very much about AI use with children. Toys have AI and might be potentially replacing some of those parent-child interactions and we need to look at is that something we need to be worried about? We need to study it, we need to understand it, and then we can move on from there.

[Kris Perry]: Thank you, Peter, for helping us better understand how emotional development begins in infancy and how the choices we make around technology can influence children’s long-term ability to regulate emotions and connect with others. Your research reminds us that while screens may offer a quick solution in difficult moments, children build emotional resilience through relationships and opportunities to practice. Managing feelings with the support of a caring adult and the relationship is what matters most. 

If you’d like to learn more about the research discussed in this episode or explore evidence-based resources for families, visit childrenandscreens.org. And if you found this episode helpful, please consider subscribing to Screen Deep or sharing it with someone who’s thinking carefully about children, technology, and mental health. I’m Kris Perry. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time on Screen Deep.