Handing a child a mobile phone or tablet when they throw a tantrum may be damaging their ability to manage their emotions, new research suggests. According to the study, if parents regularly use digital devices to calm their children, that child could have issues with emotion regulation – which could lead to anger management problems in later life. Children learn a lot about self-regulation – affective, mental, and behavioural responses to certain situations – during their first few years of life, and this is mainly done through their relationship with their parents, researchers say.
Dr Veronika Konok, the study’s first author and a researcher at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary , said: “Tantrums cannot be cured by digital devices. “Children have to learn how to manage their negative emotions for themselves. “They need the help of their parents during this learning process, not the help of a digital device.
” She added: “Here we show that if parents regularly offer a digital device to their child to calm them or to stop a tantrum, the child won’t learn to regulate their emotions. “This leads to more severe emotion-regulation problems, specifically, anger management problems, later in life.” In recent years, it has become more common to give children digital devices to control their responses to emotions, especially if they are negative, researchers say.
In 2020 researchers conducted an assessment of the parents of more than 300 children aged between .
