Smartphones Are 'Contaminating' Family Life, Study Suggests (theverge.com) 84
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBS News: Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets can be distracting from child-rearing, upending family routines and fueling stress in the home, a small, new study finds. Incoming communication from work, friends and the world at large is "contaminating" family mealtime, bedtime and playtime, said study lead author Dr. Jenny Radesky. She's an assistant professor of developmental behavioral pediatrics at the University of Michigan Medical School. Her comments stem from her team's study involving interviews with 35 parents and caregivers of young children in the Boston area. "This tension, this stress, of trying to balance newly emerging technologies with the established patterns and rituals of our lives is extremely common, and was expressed by almost all of our participants," Radesky said. "We have to toggle between what might be stress-inducing or highly cognitively demanding mobile content and responding to our kids' behavior," she said. The result, said Radesky, is often a rise in parent-child tension and overall stress. Modern parents and caregivers interact with tablets, smartphones and other communication devices for about three hours a day, the study authors said in background notes. Radesky's team previously found that when parents used mobile devices during meals they interacted less with their children, and became stressed when children tried to grab their attention away from the device. The new study included 22 mothers, nine fathers and four grandmothers. Participants were between 23 and 55 years old (average age 36) and cared for toddlers or young children up to age 8. Roughly one-third were single parents, and nearly six in 10 were white. On the plus side, many parents said that mobile devices facilitated their ability to work from home. But that could fuel anxiety, too. Some said smartphones provided access to the outside world, and alleviated some of the boredom and stress of child-rearing. On the down side, caregivers described being caught in a tug-of-war between their devices and their children. The study findings were published in the Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics.
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Single income families could exist, job security, pensions. Yeah, all nonsense, give me pretty pictures instead while I'm being robbed!
PS: Happy Days was made in the 1970s. Just FYI.
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Gee, our old LaSalle ran great--
Those were the days...
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Yep. Carburetors, point contact ignitions. 16 ton transmissions. Steering more appropriate on the farm than a roadway. Metal dashboards.
Those were the days.
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Too much technology makes you lazy and dumb. It's the Elephant In The Room that no one wants to admit is there because doing so would mean you have to give up your shiny toys, but it's the truth. Reliance on too much technology is not a good thing. It makes your mind and body lazy. In this particular case it's also making us less connected to the rest of the human race, not more, as people spend more time with their heads down, eyes glued to their damne
Maybe (Score:5, Interesting)
When I'm around my kid I just don't use these things, including video game consoles or watching TV. Even if my kid is playing well enough by himself I've got stuff to do anyway like clean or make his meal, only time I really have to pay attention to anything personally for myself is nap time or when he's gone to bed, or off with mom just the two of them.
Even before he was born I found that going online for too long was causing me stress and I'm not sure for what, I mean, at one point I was just refreshing favorite sites, making comments, soaking up any news item or just following trends like memes etc. My wife got pissed off because she wasn't into that and demanded I make time for her, and it got to the point where I had to do that or something in the relationship was going to go real bad. So I just cut back, and found I had a lot more space in my head to think, be creative, and enjoy what I already had. It only took about a couple weeks before I didn't even remember what I was doing all that time. It seems like a waste now.
But then my wife got a smartphone and Facebook was a thing and suddenly the script has flipped! Now I really see why she was annoyed. :)
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Haha. It didn't go down exactly like that, anyway I was clearly a little too obsessed and had other problems besides, maybe I just fixated on that part of it? It was a dark time,every relationship goes through some shit
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Funny thing about a lot of wives... Seems that, when they get married, they expect to be marrying an actual husband.
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"I had a girlfriend who spent every non-working minute on Facebook and not talking to me at all. Carry on a conversation? Forget it."
You may want to reexamine your definition of the word 'girlfriend'.
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I probably lost the best relationship of my life back in the 90s when my beautiful girlfriend decided to move out and leave me because I spent waaaay too much time on usenet instead of with her. And honestly, i think she was right. I fucked that one up good and proper. It sadens me how much of my life I've spent staring at a screen when theres so much good life out there waiting to be had.
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Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
"This tension, this stress, of trying to balance newly emerging technologies with the established patterns and rituals of our lives is extremely common
I think for a lot of the young people starting to have families now, the smartphone is the established patterns and rituals, and the baby is the newly emerging technology in this story.
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It takes time for social etiquette to develop around any new technology so that it becomes part of culture. It's the process we went through with the automobile and the telephone.
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The real problem is greed. You gotta 'keep up with the Jones,' else you're gonna look like a caveman... so go buy all those gadgets now that you have your 2.5 SUVs and .5 Hawaiian bungalow.
Dumb parents just get their kids whatever new device they want –and whatever device they 'think' they need. Then their kids grow up with less imagination and poorer eyesight. Rinse/Repeat.
Steve Jobs was a low-tech parent and there was a reason behind it... he may have been an assh*le, but he wasn't dumb.
Changed? Yeah, contaminated? I dunno. (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't have any kids, but my sister does. Four of 'em to be exact.
They're all aged 7-12. They practically live online. One spent the summer with us this year. I couldn't believe how much time he spent on his iPad/iPhone. I'm hesitant to say he was addicted to it, because we were still going out and doing stuff around town and it's not like he was on the device all day long totally ignoring us. In fact, now that I think of it, he never once pulled out his phone while we were busy eating together (unlike som
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Withdrawl is fairly easy (in mine, anyway). I visit a relative in TN, and in that particular area there's no ATT coverage and no "high speed internet" available. The phone lines are so crappy that the dial-up connection barely allows my relative to pull up a lean picture-and-text-only weather forecast. That's pretty much what she uses it for because, well, she's not into listening to the NOAA broadcasts where you never know when the forecast is coming on air. Anyhow, what happens is the following:
1. I p
Effect on children (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Effect on children (Score:5, Funny)
Much ado about nothing. My wife and I spend lots of time on our devices, and it didn't turn our daughter into an axe mur
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That's weird, your post got cut off. Anyway, I was just reading on the internet about a girl that axed her mom and dad to death. She said he did it was because they kept ignoring her and using their smartphones instead of talking to her. Glad to hear things are well with you but you might want to be more considerate to your child or you'll end up like those unfortunate people, right?
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That's weird, your post got cut off.
You mean axed to death?
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That's weird, your post got cut off.
thatsthejoke.jpg
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What person do you become when your parents preferred a machine to you for years?
You mean like Dad being more interested in watching a movie on TV than reading me a bedtime story?
There was a time when my brothers and I thought Dad was illiterate. In school we'd read stories in school about the poor literacy rate of some adults, and see TV shows about how people that can't read but "fake it" by doing things like learning enough to read a road sign, and order food in a restaurant by looking at the pictures on a menu or asking the wait staff about the daily specials.
I don't know if this i
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That's an issue of government trying to destroy the family, which I'm quite certain was not where you were going but I believe to be a related issue.
Well, that sure popped up out of nowhere.
You should put out a newsletter or something.
I'd try and write a post (Score:2)
What a sham (Score:5, Insightful)
So much for children "being seen but not heard".
In the "traditional" Western family model, kids pretty much had to put up with whatever their parents gave them. Bad food, lots of chores, and lots of time being ignored by the parents (especially the father)? Too bad, so sad, suck it up. You had a roof over your head (when you weren't getting shooed outside so Mom could get some stuff done for once) and clothes on your back (albeit hand-me-downs) and that was good enough.
Sure some parents were wise, insightful, and pretty awesome during those few hours of the day when Dad wasn't working 50-60 hour weeks and Mom wasn't, you know, cleaning stuff or . . . whatever. Others weren't. It doesn't take cell phones and tablets for parents to find ways to ignore their children. My paternal grandfather would read sci-fi novels in the basement while drinking beer instead of interacting with anyone . . . including his kids (my dad & aunt).
About the only difference here is that parents would almost all have a few moments of face time with the kids that they could hardly avoid: dinner, and church on Sundays. So if you are using your phone during those times then yeah it can make a difference. But if they are getting more time with you during other parts of the day . . .
Not new (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember watching The Waltons on TV (a show about a family living in a Virginia rural community through the Depression and WWII) where one episode focused on the family getting a telephone. It was a big deal and not without people being concerned about how it might affect their life. A rather humorous, and quite realistic, scene involved the patriarch having to leave the bathtub to answer the phone. I believe the episode ended with them getting rid of the telephone but it reappears later in the series with much less fanfare.
Then came television. People were concerned about how that might affect the family too. I lived through some of this as I remember Dad bringing home a second TV after Mom demanded the one TV we had be removed from the kitchen. Dad did not want his TV viewing to be interrupted by supper. Come to think of it I was probably watching The Waltons while eating supper.
Computers, internet, video games, all technology that was going to invade "family time". That's just the electronics. Some of you may have read enough history to know how big of a deal clocks were to how society worked. Automobiles were also supposed to ruin "family time" or something.
Same stuff on a different day. People learn to turn the stuff off when they should or suffer the consequences.
Re:Not new (Score:5, Insightful)
Obviously such complaints aren't new, and there are always complaints about how new technology is ruining X aspect of society. But I do think we need to recognize that something is a bit different about how much smartphones (and to a lesser extent other devices like tablets) are transforming our ability to have an uninterrupted face-to-face interaction.
People have always had distractions. And even if they didn't, they'd "space out" and stop listening when they weren't interested in a portion of the conversation. So distraction isn't new. But smartphones provide numerous possible personalized and customized entertaining distractions (many of which, like social media, tend to encourage continuous interactivity), so each individual at, say, the dinner table can be tempted to use his/her phone for some different distraction. Rather than having a kid or dad space out for a couple minutes and then rejoin the conversation, now the kid can find an entertaining thing which can pull his attention away until someone else "breaks the spell."
And oddly social etiquette had suddenly changed just in the past few years so people aren't insulted when others do this frequently. If you were having a conversation with someone and they suddenly pulled out a book and started reading while you were trying to talk to them, you would likely be annoyed. But when someone pulls out a phone these days, we are increasingly accepting that they must be doing something important (e.g., responding to a critical message) and also can " multitask" (hint -- that doesn't really work well). But they might just be checking Facebook or whatever.
So yeah, distractions have been around forever, and people have always complained about "the new thing." But if you haven't noticed, smartphones ARE significantly changing social interactions in unprecedented ways. Whether or not the changes are good or bad is a matter of debate, but they are disruptive in new ways.
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new technology is ruining X aspect of society
I think this is actually true. How much of modern society looks like society of 1980? A society exists, but it is not the same one.
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But when someone pulls out a phone these days, we are increasingly accepting that they must be doing something important (e.g., responding to a critical message) and also can " multitask" (hint -- that doesn't really work well).
Ah, no, I'd still be irritated. If a family member has an emergency, they'll call. Otherwise, there's no reason for you to be constantly checking your phone. That's just compulsive behavior, and I still think it's rude to do it in front of company that you're engaged with. Or supposed to be, I guess. Am I old-fashioned? Maybe so, if that's the new norm.
Technology can certainly become a distraction to your life and relations if you let it. People have ruined their lives because of addictions to online
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Re:Not new (Score:5, Interesting)
Automobiles were also supposed to ruin "family time" or something.
But they did. If you had an automobile, you could feasibly commute to a job in another city. So now... we're all commuting. And the lost time is taken away from our loved ones, if we even have time for those. The automobile outcompeted rail with anticompetitive behavior, and now we're trying to figure out how to have self-driving cars to solve the problems caused by not extrapolating rail to PRT, but instead going back and extrapolating the horse-cart out to the automobile. We had the technology for self-driving cars in the 1800s, and it was called rail. Combine it with the concepts behind automated looms and you get automated transport networks. Instead we have... this.
Same stuff on a different day. People learn to turn the stuff off when they should or suffer the consequences.
It's more true with smartphones because fairly simple means can be used to avoid the problems; anyone who really has to stay in touch can use do-not-disturb mode to permit the office to reach them while otherwise enjoying their dinner. But you can't just wave a magic wand and make commuter culture go away. You still have to pay your bills.
What's the upside? (Score:2)
What benefits are people getting out of their technology addictions?
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Typical answer is instant gratification. Social validation for some. Anxiety avoidance is closer to the truth.
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Boredom is a great incentive for creativity. Social media is not exactly interesting, but it fills up your time in a way that you hardly notice it slipping through your fingers. You can easily spend all day checkout what people are saying about Trump, yet you figured out what you thought about him months ago.
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yet you figured out what you thought about him months ago.
My parents do this 24 hours/day, but with a tv.
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This post comes to you from my bathroom, where I sit on the toilet....which I've done a lot of this week, thanks to some bad food (Jack Ass tour's in Toronto, thanks).
FTFY
Every generation has a similar problem (Score:2)
There are always things that distract parents from family time. Work, TV, sports, bar-hopping, whatever. We simply insisted that our boys not use devices at meals or other family times, and we led by example. Parents who are committed to raising good families are still quite able to do so today.
Re: Every generation has a similar problem (Score:2)
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There are always things that distract parents from family time.
Television has been far more harmful than smartphones or the internet. An entire generation grew up from the 70s to mid 90s totally glued to television programming and their sponsors. Smartphones have a bad side, but they are at least moderately active, requiring users to search and find content they like. TV is as passive as it gets, total brain rot.
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Smartphones ARE Television v2.1. For the vast majority of people they are passive consumers, absorbing curated adverts and programming.
The major form of interaction appears to be the tweet. This has probably been done already and never posted because the results never varied from baseline (or expired fish), but I'd like to see a functional MRI [wikipedia.org] of a person tweeting.
(For those of you not keeping up, reread this thread [slashdot.org].)
Sample Size (Score:2)
A sample size of 35? That's pretty pathetic. Not even 35 families, just 35 individual 'caregivers'.
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Reasonable sample sizes depends on the nature of the study you are conducting. If you are looking for drug side effects, you want very large study sizes because very rare events can be show-stoppers for you. In most social science contexts, on the other hand, modest sample sizes are both more practical and desirable.
Smaller studies are not only more financially efficient, excessively large sample sizes can lead to results that are statistically significant but are not very practically interesting (i.e., y
Plus side (Score:3)
"On the plus side, many parents said that mobile devices facilitated their ability to work from home."
That explains why, on so many web forums, I keep seeing unsolicited testimonials from young mothers who make $5000 a week working part-time from home.
This is fucking hilarious (Score:4, Insightful)
True, but not like it's never happened before. (Score:4, Insightful)
But I do see a difference with personal devices. You can't bring your trainset, console video games or desktop computer to the restaurant or to bed. It happens to us, my wife can spend a whole dinner on facebook, checking every 30 seconds for new notifications and feeling the need to instantly respond to everyone. We may as well be eating separately. Work emails and texts from coworkers 24 hours per day don't help either. Same thing at home, the bedroom is not as active as it once was, facebooking or playing candy crush until she falls asleep and hardly any 'special' together time.
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The end of the world (Score:2)
Kindle Fire Ad and Babysitting (Score:3)
I found those ads to be highly offensive. Yet I have seen that happen myself. A parent will buy one of those built like a tank sub $50 Android tablet for this reason alone. I have seen people do this to kids as young as two just to shut them up when the poor kid needs human interaction when crying. Inevitably the kid breaks it but because they are so cheap the parent just buys another if the don't already have another in waiting. I have seen this stunt language skills in children with no other sign of developmental disability.
I wonder what these kids brains are going to be wired for as adults. It's a safe bet it will be something we have never seen before. Autism move over. There is a new game in town.
Two disclaimers: I own the latest Kindle fire and love it. I have seen that very situation benefit kids with autism.
The solution is simple, really (Score:2)
Ya just gotta unplug Doctor's advice, after watching a hospital video on hypertension and heart disease, the so-called "Silent Killer"
And tell your friends to leave you voice mail or messages, like in the old days, remember?
Let 911 take care of real emergencies. Enjoy the unplugged life, or stay off-grid and under the radar
"New Thing We Do = Less Old Thing We Did Shocker" (Score:2)
A study that found the opposite of this would be much more newsworthy. Everything here is exactly what you'd fucking expect. As research goes, I can see that it has to be done, but fucking hell it's boring and the results are obvious.