How Our Feelings About Technology Affect Our Kids
Could they be as powerful as the devices themselves?
TGIF! In honor of Mother’s Day and all of our complicated feelings about it, I’m running a 25% off FLASH SALE through Sunday! It’s a great time to subscribe if you’ve been on the fence, as I’ve been running a lot of deeply researched paid content recently.
Apparently, it’s tech week over here at Is My Kid the Asshole?. Last Friday, I shared my many thoughts about the the controversial notion that phones are largely responsible for the decline in teen mental health (a post y’all have shared a LOT!), and yesterday, in my Parenting Advice Hot Take, I weighed in on a guilt-inducing parenting meme related to kids and screen time.
Today, I want to talk about the importance of distinguishing the potential effects of technology on our kids from the effects that our perceptions, feelings and opinions about technology can have on our kids. When we worry about our kids’ use of screens, all that anxiety, stress and guilt can influence us and our kids in myriad ways, including through how we engage with them and how much conflict we experience with them.
New research even suggests that the feelings we have about our kids’ use of devices could have the potential to harm family relationships more than the devices do. Other research points to the possibility that our feelings about screens may shape research outcomes in ways that could be overestimating technology’s harms.
In one new study, published in February, researchers at the University of Amsterdam, Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien in Germany, UC-Santa Barbara, and Northwestern University surveyed parents of children between the ages of 2 and 17. They asked the parents how they felt about their relationship with their children, asked them how many hours of screen time their kids had on an average recent day, and asked them how much guilt and stress they felt regarding their kids’ screen time. In a larger follow-up study, the researchers conducted the interviews twice, a couple of months apart, to better tease out cause-and-effect.