Phone use may reduce mothers’ interactions with their infants, new research suggests. “Parental phone use is not uniformly ‘negative’ from the perspective of child speech inputs but rather may have different effects depending on how and when phones are used, with potentially distinct effects on children’s language development,” the study authors wrote. Researchers at the University of Texas in Austin found that phone use lasting only one to two minutes was more strongly linked to less mother-to-infant speech.
Mothers also tended to speak to their babies less when phone use coincided with mealtimes or family members returning home, such as between noon and 1 p.m. and between 3 and 4 p.
m. “A growing number of studies are finding associations between parental phone use and children’s language development. We wanted to look at the way phone use may impact the quantity of speech infants hear as a potential mechanism for this connection,” study authors Miriam Mikhelson and Kaya de Barbaro said in a press release.
“Technoference, which refers to an interruption in a social interaction caused by device use ...
has attracted attention within the field of developmental psychology, particularly in the context of parental phone use disrupting parent–child interactions,” the authors wrote. Brief phone use lasting one or two minutes reduced the mother’s speech output the most, with mothers’ per-minute word count reduced by 26 percent. More extended phone use of .
