Children learn much about self-regulation – that is affective, mental, and behavioral responses to certain situations – during their first few years of life. Some of these behaviors are about children's ability to choose a deliberate response over an automatic one. This is known as effortful control, which is learned from the environment, first and foremost through children's relationship with their parents.
In recent years, giving children digital devices to control their responses to emotions, especially if they're negative, has become common. Now, a team of researchers in Hungary and Canada has investigated if this strategy, referred to as parental digital emotion regulation, leads to the inability of children to effectively regulate their emotions later in life. The results were published in Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry .
"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," said Dr Veronika Konok, the study's first author and a researcher at Eötvös Loránd University. "This leads to more severe emotion-regulation problems, specifically, anger management problems, later in life." "We frequently see that parents use tablets or smartphones to divert the child's attention when the child is upset.
Children are fascinated by digital content, so this an easy way to stop tantrums and it is very effective in the short term," Prof Caroline Fitzpatr.