If you’re a parent, you’ve experienced it: at least that fleeting, guilty moment when your child looks jealously at your phone. A study published last month said that the blame is for one reason; Children who perceive their parents as phone addicts may experience a lack of attachment that extends into adolescence, according to the findings.
Researchpublished in a peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in psychologylooked at 600 12-17-year-olds recruited from Qualtrics, a company that collects test subjects for online surveys. He found a link between children who distracted their parents from their phones and children who reported greater indicators of what is known as “secure attachment.”
Failed binding is a widely used term observable phenomena in infants. It happened read and studied over the years and became a A basic principle in guidance for parents. If there is an attachment problem, then later in life, according to attachment theory, there are “avoidant” children who avoid attachment and “anxious” children who crave attachment.
The study correlated parents’ reports of phone distraction with both types of children: anxious and avoidant.
The researchers who conducted this latest study did not have access to their subjects in infancy and used a questionnaire they developed with adolescents in mind and a standard questionnaire on attachment problems in adolescents used in many other experiments. The study they commissioned was called the Device Additive Intervention Scale (DAIS).
The newspaper describes DAIS as follows:
“The data rates adolescents’ perceptions of their caregiver’s attention as ‘having a negative effect on our relationship’, their caregiver ‘not paying enough attention to me because they are using a device’, ‘ignoring me when they are on their device’ and ‘appearing inattentive because of their device use.'”
They used regression analysis to cross-check the results of that survey with the results of a standard attachment survey to find a correlation, and they say there is a relationship, and it’s not just statistical noise. Children who reported annoying mothers or fathers on the phone scored higher on both avoidant and anxious attachment.
The results cannot and will not claim that being a phone junkie will turn your child into an insecure person. The opposite is also plausible: insecure teenagers may be more upset if their parents are phone buffs. This is something the authors acknowledge.
There was one the whole wave of lawsuits lately against social media companies, mostly on issues related to children and mental health. With this in mind, one of the authors of the study, media psychologist Don Granthe said Bloomberg, “We know they got the kids (…). Bravo, you got us.” Parents, he said, “were not immune to psychological motivations and manipulations.”
