This is a weak study that is exemplary of psychology's weak experimentation culture and correlation/causation laundering, especially with regard to self-report.
The authors hint heavily at the implication that device use damages relationships. But look at what they actually measured. They ask adolescents to answer questions like:
"My primary caregiver ignores me when they are on a device." (DAIS, their new scale)
And then also ask them to answer questions like:
"I often worry that this person doesn't really care for me." (ECR-RS)
And then act like it's a revelation that these two self-report scales are correlated.
A much more plausible causal explanation is that a single psychological variable (e.g. a bad relationship) causes both self reports, rather than the implied pathway that device use causes A, which then causes B.
My dude, I don’t know how to explain this to you but phones and computers are addictive for people. They get hooked on them to feed the lizard brain with digital junk food engineered for engagement.
A better version of this study would be to run an experiment where you take away (or heavily restrict) parental phone access over a month or two and measure the parent-child relationship vs. a control group.
> "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.
There is always a question of whether a bad study is better than no study.
I think weak studies validating people's natural intuitions tend to do more damage than we give them credit for. Even if another better d signed study does way more work and comes with clear results that disprove the natural intuiton, it will be buried in the sea of low effort studies and people will already have settle the issue in their minds as "proven by science".
100%. I completely agree with this study's 'findings' but also agree the study is garbage.
So many studies now a days have experiments designed to confirm a hypothesis instead of challenge it. They should be doing everything possible they can to disprove their hypothesis and only accept it after all attempts at falsification fail. But of course that's in idealized science. In reality, publish or perish means you need to get something published and negative results don't get published. And so this study, like what seems to be most now a days, is designed to prove their hypothesis - which ironically proves nothing.
This (experiments only designed to confirm a hypothesis and not trying to falsify it) is also part of the reason why so many studies can't be reproduced later, the "reproducibility crisis". One of my relatives, a medical doctor who just recently retired, has often lamented the incentive structure that results in negative results not getting published. (She has also said that she wants to see about seven studies pointing in the same direction before she starts to take it seriously).
I forget the terminology but I read something recently about how people are paying too much attention to their kids and it's making their kids neurotic.
Like when kids were growing up a couple decades ago they could just do whatever they wanted and those folks turned out all right. And now we've got people obsessing over where their children are and literally tracking their location, and the results don't seem to be so great.
(I heard that this difference had actually been quantified but unfortunately I don't have a link.)
I remember something about how, some percentage of children are not even allowed to leave the yard. Whereas their parents were just roaming for miles, at a much younger age.
Although I suppose at the same time, we're also less present with each other. So I guess there's at least two dimensions to that.
I guess the first one would be, are you relaxed and do you trust them to take care of themselves, even at a young age.
And the second one would be... are you actually there, or is it just your body that's there.
Are people who are very very securely attached to their parents happy later in life, or is there a ceiling? The terminology invites certain conclusions here.
Maybe the whole attention thing is more a matter of quality, rather than quantity
IMO this isn't necessarily bad (it's one way to get data), but the numbers are meaningless without a control. Unfortunately, I think we missed that bus by ~20 years. Had the same study been conducted every few years over the last two decades, I think it would have been valuable. Maybe it is still valuable to do this once every few years? (I think that everyone in 2026 is maximally addicted to mobile phones, but maybe I'm wrong and it can get worse).
Why is that much more plausible? It implies that it has always been there, and that nothing has changed since the last century, which is unlikely. Unless you want to introduce some other recent factor, but that is going to be even less likely.
And why? Because other studies have shown how addictive "phone" use is, and how it isolates people. And addicts (drugs, alcohol) are bad caretakers.
So there's really nothing that makes the explanation implausible.
You may ask yourself if it's not your own addiction speaking.
I find it more plausible given my priors as a research psychologist.
Correlational overlap between self-report scales is common. It's actually so common that at decent sample sizes, almost any arbitrary self-report will significantly correlate purely on valence. For instance, one should expect a correlation between people self-reporting "I had a tough childhood" with "I frequently suffer from skin rashes". This is because trait neuroticism (the degree to which people are prone to feel negative emotion) is a major driver of how people interpret and respond to scales generally.
In contrast, psychologists mightily struggle to find replicable experimental results. That's what you need here.
I know survey data is weak. I think you'll find that 95% of all psychological research is bad.
But your explanation isn't "much more plausible". It is based on absolutely nothing, and the priori are against it. You only have a vague idea of correlation between answers (based on probably equally unreliable papers), but nothing on the missing factor. In this paper, however, they at least take some effort to find structure in the responses, and this factor correlated stronger than the others. Shaky, but it has a basis: phones/social media/etc. are terribly addictive.
> In contrast, psychologists mightily struggle to find replicable experimental results. That's what you need here.
No, that's not needed here. The paper might not be good, but we need to get rid of the phones. It's obvious that it's a problem. Just try to take someone's phone away. What "we" do not need here is distraction from the problem.
To be fair they do kinda spell this out in the discussion section:
This study does not come without limitations. First, it is important to recognize that the present findings are correlational and cross-sectional in nature and therefore do not permit conclusions regarding directionality or causality. Although caregiver device-centric behaviors and adolescent attachment insecurity were robustly associated, it remains unclear whether perceived caregiver distraction is related to attachment insecurity, whether adolescents with higher levels of attachment insecurity are more likely to perceive caregiver behavior as inattentive or disruptive (i.e., reverse causality), or whether both reflect other unmeasured contextual or relational factors. Second, several of the DAIS items assess emotional reactions, which could conceptually overlap with anxious attachment. Thus, the relationship between the DAIS and ECR may reflect a partial overlap of the constructs. Third, both the DAIS and ECR-RS are self-reported measures at a single time point, which may have shared method variance. [...]
I definitely think some people get addicted to the phones, and that addiction is negative for the relationship with the child. I also think one can be active on a phone while also being attentive and available to the child, which would be less problematic for the relationship.
I also don't think the phone is new in this regard. I've certainly heard many stories from back in the days about parents being glued to the TV or work and not being attentive to their child. It's even the point of the quite well known song Cat's in the Cradle[1].
The main difference I guess is that the phone is so prevalent in the population, and there are a lot of apps and sites that are engineered to grab your attention.
I would expect anxious/insecure parents to use placating behaviours (like device use) themselves, and I would expect their children to be anxious/insecure too.
So I would expect the study to find that the children of phone-overusers were more likely to be anxious/insecure.
Still, I would also expect that less phone use (subbed with more attention to kid) would help the kid with this.
I can easily imagine the phone use and the kid's insecurity both coming from the same underlying family dynamic, rather than one neatly causing the other
Changing habits is hard enough on it's own. parenthood and modern life makes that even more difficult
It is possible to make changes, I would say this is one of the easier bad habits to beat. The best is to start with fixed moments where you as a family decide phones are forbidden. For example, shortly after our daughter was born, we decided "no phones during eating (breakfast/lunch/dinner)". When both parents are in, it is easy to mutually enforce. For over a decade, we have never used a phone during dinner and it's one of those moments of family time.
Now we are always surprised when we have dinner together at a restaurant that some people are on their phones half the time (sometimes doing useless stuff like checking Facebook/insta), rather than enjoying each other and dinner. It's so weird.
Another good method is to remove addictive social media from your phone. Primarily games and apps with algorithmic timelines like Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, etc. I removed all those from my phone. I noticed with apps that do not have an algorithmic timeline, like Mastodon, you catch up once and after that it's not interesting anymore.
It's not impossible,but on top of all the other stresses in life you need to sit down and figure out this new problem too? You have got to at least sympathize with the situation. I know I've regressed on phone use since my child was born.
All I can say is, time really flies by (before you know it they are teenagers). You only get one shot at enjoying their early years and they only get one youth. Make the best of it, cutting down smartphone use (for parent and child) is part of it.
There are many things you can do to get it out of your family's life. No phones in the bedroom, No phones after X O'clock, Open conversations about social media with your kids, Unite with them in the fight against social media, block social media from your phones (use only a computer). My own poison of choice was twitter but thankfully, it's become X and I've become ex-twitter more or less. It's liberating. I also vibe coded some software to keep me off these things on my work computer so that's been good too.
I remember the same from my childhood: being told off by my Mum for staring at something out of the window while she was doing the same. Mentioned it, got told off by my Dad. Did it affect me? I remember it 40 years later!
I often wonder why even today with falling birthrates so many people have kids. It's a personal decision, so not something you would randomly bring up with strangers and not something one really thinks to discuss with friends until someone has a kid. Once they are on the path to question it would be rude.
But it strikes me that many parents don't really think about it that much, as in the original rationale. I've had a suspicion there is something unethical about this. What choice could be more significant? Then again, maybe the personal nature of it means one is not simply aware of what other people are going through. Maybe everyone is really thinking it through. I am led to doubt it though. I'm curious if other people have had the chance to ask their own parents and felt satisfied by the results. That might be one of the few occasions you might have hope for a somewhat revealing answer.
Group 1: Some people think about it and don’t have kids,
Group 2 some think about it and do,
Group 3 and some don’t think about it much and are (probably) more likely to end up with a kid than group 1 because most people like having sex and this group will be less careful than group 1.
> I've had a suspicion there is something unethical about this.
Why?
As a human being who was once born, I am extremely grateful for my existence, and how much thought my parents put into it beforehand is of practically no consequence.
You seem to imply that if parents haven't already committed to giving their kids a perfect childhood with perfect parenting then the kids are better off not living at all?
You can browse the Wikipedia article I linked. It offers a few possible answers to this why question.
As for myself I would simply summarize that making an important choice such as bringing life into the world, without considering the consequences, is already somewhat unethical. One should think before taking an action that has irreversible consequences to anyone. In this case, the person being born. I wouldn't say I'm an antinatalist, I just find it interesting. On a rational level I'm not sure there are many good arguments against some of the conclusions there. If there are I'd be interested in hearing them. The fact that you are personally grateful for your existence is a pretty weak argument imo. If you had never been born you would not be around to know the difference. However had your existence been different it is not so hard to imagine you might feel differently. Surely your life is not so peachy that a scan of that article will be incomprehensible to you. Then again, perhaps you simply lived a far better life than I.
I'm not taking a position one way or the other. As I said, I just find it interesting.
I did skim the Wikipedia article but it didn't seem to engage with anything I was thinking about.
Almost everybody's revealed preference is to stay alive rather than to not be alive, otherwise we'd see a lot more suicide.
> making an important choice such as bringing life into the world, without considering the consequences, is already somewhat unethical.
This is a view you can take, but it's not as obviously important as you seem to think.
An alternative view is "making an important choice such as FAILING to bring life into the world, given the opportunity to do so, without considering the consequences, is somewhat unethical."
If the standard was truly that you can't have kids unless you're sure they're going to have a great life, then we would have gone extinct millions of years ago.
I think you may have missed the point of the argument.
The desire to avoid death is explicitly dealt with. The way you have thus answered it is somewhat amusing. Yes, we know people do not want to die. This is obvious. The question is then why do we keep creating people who will die? If they were never created in the first place they wouldn't know the difference. But as soon as you create them, you condemn them to that ultimate end you just acknowledged people want to avoid. You should also probably acknowledge the nature of suicide. It seems to me the antinatalists understand this better than you. After all suicide is painful because humans do not want to die. It is the ultimate suffering, not merely an escape from life. The grief associated with suicide comes from the recognition that someone has done something to themselves that they didn't really want to do. Do you really think the agony of suicide is equal to never having been born? How could that be possible? Where is the unconceived person who has been subjected to such pain? They don't exist and never did. The point of the antinatalist argument is why would you create life in a world like this? This also makes your last point sort of irrelevant for a bonafide antinatalist, as the obvious rejoinder would be, so what? If we are moral agents and not evolutionary automatons then what point are you making? The question is a moral one. Why you think evolution would provide an answer here I am not sure.
As to your middle point, it's all good to just reverse the argument. But you didn't even make an effort to substantiate it. Why would creating life be a moral imperative? Because evolution? Is the act of creation not a more deliberate and significant act than the act of abstention from such activity? To what level should parents be responsible for their children? What symmetric responsibility would you impose on non parents? It would be hard to see how it could be symmetric at all unless you think parentage is largely irrelevant. Which would imply an acknowledgement of the relative significance of having a child vs not.
As for me, I also think your last sentence betrays something. No one can be sure their kid will have a great life. That should never be the standard because it cannot exist. I generally think however it is sensible to say if a person can only provide a hand wavey answer about why they think tomorrow will be better than yesterday, in 2026, and yet still chooses to have a child one might ask if that seems unethical. You don't need to delude yourself into offering some guarantees. But I personally think it is probably unethical to create life without some conviction that at the very least, on balance your child will face more good than bad. But parents aren't responsible for everything that happens. They're human beings, like their kids. No one expects perfection. Antinatalism isn't really a question for parents it's a question for those who have not yet conceived and offers a particular moral lens from which to evaluate the option. I just think it is a somewhat interesting one. Generally I just hope people having kids are being thoughtful about it and have conviction in the future.
I think the distinction is that you think a life is only worth living if it is a sufficiently enjoyable life, and I think life is worth living intrinsically.
> However had your existence been different it is not so hard to imagine you might feel differently.
Considering how the vast majority of people don't actively seek to end their lives, I think it's reasonable to assume that they prefer to live.
The crown argument against these musings is that according to them the only way to realistically act ethically is to not have children at all - that is self-defeating and not sustainable.
Also it places emphasis on avoiding harm/suffering etc. Problem is, these are unavoidable parts of life and trying to minimise them at any cost is essentially attempting to not live.
I think the term sometimes used for such things is "death cult".
There are so many reasons it's hard to be exhaustive.
Selfishly, nobody will love me like my children, at least in their early years. They're also amazing playmates and students. And they give me social permission to do silly things like climb on playground structures. They're also a great excuse to get out of stuff.
Selflessly, I believe me and the mother of our children are sensible people and the world needs more sensible people. Plus someone needs to maintain the replacement rate. And it's a weird, warm, fuzzy feeling to care for one's children at one's own expense.
In the intersection, it's a fun challenge to try to achieve balance in life, work, and family. I also really appreciate the chance to get a do-over of everything my parents did, keeping the good stuff and improving on the bad.
I've seen men shed their egos and women become incredible caretakers when they're with their children and they carry some of that joyfulness, compassion and humanity into the world they occupy. It's a sad world without kids.
This can be tricky. I know my mother loves me unconditionally, but I also have strong memories of her shutting herself inside her study to read, and children were not allowed to disturb unless an adult was strictly needed to handle an incipient crisis etc.
I have the same need for cognition as my mother, but I opt not to lock myself in my office. Instead I tell my kids, "I'm around you if you need me and I'll keep an eye on you but I'm not currently a playmate; I'll be here reading on my phone."
They see it's just scanned book pages on my phone, but it's still a phone. Is it bad? Maybe.
Your kids don’t know the difference. To them, you’re picking your phone over them. Just like your mom picked her books over you. Their strong memories will be of you sitting right there in the same room completely disengaged and actively unwilling to be a playmate. Which, tbh, might feel worse.
Also the fact you’re reading and have a need for cognition is meaningless. To them, you may as well be scrolling TikTok and crushing candy.
Sorry to be harsh, it sounds like you’re proud of yourself for handling it better than your mom but I’m not convinced.
No. But from a very early age they can tell when you’re truly preoccupied versus opting to ignore them. And it has an effect on your relationship and how they’ll remember your presence as a parent.
Framing it goes a long way, “I have to clean the garage, then we can go swimming or play a game”. You’re telling them about something you have to do that they won’t be interested in, then offering up something positive.
Much different than, “I’m here, staring at my phone, bother me if you must”.
Also, these things go away soon enough. They won’t want you as a playmate anymore. During these early childhood years, I do my reading and alone time activities after bedtime. Nothing wrong with having an early bedtime just to reserve it for this purpose.
I’m not a pro parent by any means but these thoughts are certainly based on my parenting philosophy. I actively try to engage as much as possible even to the detriment of my personal hobbies and interests because while they want to engage, I want to be present.
Kids also need their own time too. Having a parent constantly interfering is just as bad as having one never showing interest. And you're not a playmate, you're a parent.
The implication was they were asking for a playmate and he’s shutting them down, he has a constant need for intellectual stimulation so has to read instead of engage. I’m all for alone time but if they need it you won’t have to say a word, they’ll just disappear off into their room.
Parenting is not a one dimensional role. A kid that doesn’t see their parent as a playmate is the saddest thing I’ve heard. I hope you’re saying that out of ignorance.
Parenting and being parented are, of all topics, probably the emotionally strongest and most personal that show up on HN [1]. When someone shares their experience in those areas, it's especially important to respond respectfully. The best way to do that is by sharing some of one's own experience, and the perspective it has led to.
Responding with denunciation, either explicit or implicit, degrades the discussion and is likely to hit the other person in a place that hurts.
Beyond that is the aggressive-internet-lashing sort of response, which is what the GP post did. That is abusive and against HN's guidelines. Saying "sorry to be harsh" doesn't mitigate that any more than it would mitigate a physical lashing.
I'm sure that the comment was posted with good intentions—people usually think it will help to post such things, which means their intention is to be helpful. However, (1) it's not actually helpful, (2) what matters is effects, not intent, and (3) it's all too easy for unconscious aggression to seep into such remarks, even when the intent is to be helpful. In fact, the feeling of intending to be helpful often creates a feeling of being justified in such aggression. That's the "for your own good" pattern, and not a dynamic we want here.
That's ridiculous, you think when we were tribes in the jungle mother's didn't have something to do? Gather berries or cook etc? Even 50 years ago it wasn't phones, it was probably household chores that mother's "chose" over playing with their kids.
I really think people who want to feel guilty always find a reason to. Yes, don't avoid your kids over your phone, pay attention to them if they ask and need it, but you can still do other things (including looking at your phone) when around them.
I don't have kids but I've been thinking about how, I would probably need some kind of office separate from the house.
In fact that's probably a big part of why offices exist in the first place. If I had kids here then for much of the day, they would be trying to interact with me and I would be either getting distracted from work or shooing them away.
What I'm actually there I would want to be fully present with them. It goes without saying that I would follow the example of the people who invented the stuff, and not give them a brainrot device in the first place.
You are worse, sorry to be harsh. It would be better for your kids (and yourself) if you locked yourself away for a set time to TikTok on your phone 100%, and them after you put your phone away and you are 100% with your kids.
I have an intelligent, agentic adult spouse, and we both know that if we want to get work done, we should go to our own physical space and close the door, because otherwise the other person nearby will keep accidentally interrupting us because we're "just there". I think a child will struggle even more with this.
I had a fascinating conversation about this with my 5yo, which started with her asking "why won't you play with me?" and me replying "did you know my dad didn't play with me at all?".
That's not entirely true as I have early memories of him teaching my older sister how to play chess and me occasionally participating, but makes one think about this balance that needs to be struck.
I'm doing somewhat better than my father in this regard, but I wonder what is the healthy amount of attachment really? People are saying I'm going to miss these prompts when they'll grow older, but I don't want to do this just because of FOMO.
I would love to get rid of my smartphone altogether, actually. I’m just not quite sure how to do it. I need to use a map app often. And most of the announcements and services in my country from companies and schools are all handled through WhatsApp. So it makes it a bit difficult to cut that tether.
That would be promising if it wasn’t for a ridiculous price tag. You shouldn’t have to pay a premium just to have features removed. The margin on that phone must be incredibly high.
Getting a tiny phone not meant for media consumption is probably the closest you can achieve. You are not going to waste a lot of time watching youtube on a 3" screen, because that's just no fun.
The "jelly star" phone looks kind of fun. I just sat in a busy tram and wondered what the scene would look like if we all had phones like that. It's an innteresting thought experiment.
Well I remember the days before the first smart phone and taking subways in New York City, so it’s not too hard for me to imagine. People reading books, talking to each other, very different.
Maybe it's a cultural difference but I remember before smartphones on the tube in London as well and noone talked to each other during the morning/evening commute.
I think the biggest difference is actually the lack of newspapers now. Plenty of people were plugged into headphones via iPod/Walkman/whatever was era appropriate. The people who stare at their phones today were staring at newspapers in the pre smartphone era.
> wondered what the scene would look like if we all had phones like that.
People with headphones looking absentmindedly straight ahead doing their best not to focus on anything, isolating themselves as much as possible to make the complete lack of personal space more bearable.
This is already what crowded subways in my city look like when you pass the threshold where people are too cramped to browse their phones. This is not a bad thing, just a coping mechanism.
I think there is much more room for behavior change if you consider people at a table (coffee or restaurant) with and without phones suitable for continuous media consumption or social network interactions.
Sure, I didn't imagine a utopia of joyful people talking to strangers. That's not what public transport ever looked like, but I do miss the times of a bit more diversity in how people spend their during the commute. Newspapers, books, handheld game consoles (which don't constantly shove ads in front of their users).
1. When you're browsing your phone but you're not having fun, stop. Try to distinguish "I am genuinely interested in that thing on the screen" vs "I'm just doomscrollig".
2. Try to replace parts of your smartphone with other things. Buying a clock helped me fix the habit of "I just opened my eyes, time for phone". I found my old PSP and I'm planning to run some emulator on that instead of phone to play some minigames.
3. I have my phone always completely silent. There's literally no notification that cannot wait until I decide to check the phone.
4. I sometimes turn off the data transfer in my phone. First, I get less notifications. Second, it's yet another barrier and it gives me a second to ask myself "do I really want to play with my phone now".
I switched to a Kyocera KY-42C specifically because you can sideload Whatsapp which I sadly need. The software is a bit crappy but enough if you just want to phone and rarely SMS, Whatsapp or e-mail.
Don't forget about the other stuff usually handled by smartphones, like music (my old Sansa Clip+ still works) or GPS (the one in my car will do).
One of the things I ironically loved about my windows phone was that it was a PERFECT Phone [0], Sms [1], and Navigation device [2], good enough for music, but SUCKED the further you went from that.
[0] - Call audio was pristine
[1] - large live tile for SMS was great
[2] - Bundled HERE Drive let you pre download map data long before competitors had the option.
I spent most of a week with no phone recently, and I have to say I enjoyed it. I mostly communicate via Signal, and have the app installed on my computer as well, so I wasn't really cut off - just less available. WhatsApp doesn't have an installable PC version that I know of, but they do have this web interface: https://web.whatsapp.com/
I learned to drive with paper maps and have never really made much use of GPS navigation, so that part was easier for me than it might be for most.
I'm not going to get rid of my phone entirely, but after that experience, I feel like not carrying it all the time anymore.
Now it's smartphones and devices, but in the past it was work. Personally I think these days kids get a lot more attention from their parents than anytime in the past. Even so much that it can be irritating/damaging (parents being "friends/playmates" instead of parents).
Give kids the freedom to make mistakes and suffer the (nonfatal, no loss of life or limb) consequences.
Yes, there are cases to intervene, but generally, you should let your kids hurt themselves more. Pain is a very important form of learning. By overprotecting them, they become very vulnerable adults, then worse things happen.
They also become dysfunctional adults, needing a replacement parent, when the parent disappears- which is mostly the state, sometimes a company - and always a example for stunted individual growth.
This is quite presumptuous. Even minor injuries can add up to long term damage. We don't need to keep our kids inside or wrapped in crazy layers to protect them. We also don't need them to get hurt a lot for them to learn what's good or bad.
It sounds like your concept of “minor” may be calibrated too high. Kids need to test boundaries to learn limits. They need to learn limits to live safely while understanding their actual capabilities. This involves getting hurt sometimes. Is it fun? No. Do you learn a lesson almost every time? Yes. This is the compounding that actually matters.
I think that's the issue in some cases though, while being totally absent is a major negative, the perception the kid has of the parent _while_ present is more improtant than when being absent if the absence is understandable, a kid in daycare will observe other parents leaving and picking up and normalize it.
I suggest that reading previously took the roll devices take today. When my parents weren’t at work they were reading as often as not; newspapers and novels.
There may always be a moral panic but that doesn't mean every moral panic is equally misplaced.
Most high school age children of the 1800s weren't inclined to read novels 12+ hours a day and neglect their sleep and hygiene to finish a few more chapters...
I remember growing up that my dad reading the papers and watching the news was pretty much sacred. Paper maybe less so, but it was his "me time" after work along with coffee and cake, with the occasional chat with mom while we'd watch tv.
Part of me misses it, part of me thinks it's the same, just different now. I do think phones capture attention more than newspapers though, and trigger more violent or faster emotional ups and downs. Scrolling through social media exposes you to something fun, worrying, horrifying, etc every few seconds, I can't imagine that's healthy.
I was getting effected by the "technoference". A few friends when visiting us at our home, are being on phones, scrolling and engaging. I decided to buy a box. Any time friends visit us, they should drop their phones in that box and pick them up while leaving.
The attention economy is a resource extraction industry. It'll claw out any bit of attention it can get and sell it, even if that attention would be needed elsewhere.
I find these studies specifically frustrating because they don't answer the most interesting question - is it damaging if your caregiver uses phone a lot but remains responsive.
This study specifically excludes it, and fair enough when being honest about the statistical inference and not overreaching, but that is the question I find most interesting as someone who uses my phone to get away from my desk but keep work going so I can spend time with my kids while doing my job.
One outcome would be this is damaging and worse than just not spending time until after work, the other result would say this is a beneficial arrangement.
Moreso they are interested in the phone because we are but I don't necessary sense frustration. Especially if you are "attentive" in that you are willing to context switch back to your kids immediately, I think they see it as another "thing" like a toy or some distraction outside.
It's not always obvious but the bit that is clear is it's hard to delineate "dad is working so don't interrupt him" for on-call incidents etc vs "dad is looking at cat videos". They look the same and it's pretty clearly confusing because it's a malleable boundary.
In terms of attention I actually find it pretty easy to identify their cues even when on my phone. It's more of a general feel of how much I've played with them vs solo play and when they want to hang out they will walk over and make it clear. Plus you are always watching them.
If you use the phone a lot, you are not generating any initiative on your own and are not reponsive to small initiations you dont notice. You are responsive to when kid explicitely comes to you.
Or otherwise said, if you are on the phone a lot, you are creating a barrier to interaction and people (both kids and adults) will eventually end up tired of trying and having less reciprocation.
If you are not physically there, it is actually less frustrating to others then if you create a barrier while being there.
The signal is also clear when interacting with adults: the people “over there” are more important.
These days I was “on call” at home and had to be able to answer my phone urgently. And I hated the fact that I needed to glance at my phone at every notification when talking with other people. Truly just having the damn thing is socially damaging.
Between the morning/evening news, a sports game or TV movie, reading the newspaper, and a bit of novel reading, my parents in the 90s were just as physically-available-but-in-their-own-world as somebody scrolling TikTok for 4-5 hours a day. I think the difference is that reading the newspaper isn't literally a dopamine-fueled addiction and turning the page in a novel isn't the psychological equivalent of pulling a slot machine lever.
We have lots of evidence about how harmful it is to have parents that are in the throes of gambling addiction. Folks, it's not good for the children. It's in fact pretty bad, even if they don't gamble away the home equity and the college fund.
We focus too much on details and not the overall picture.
If you're a parent, one factor matters more than any other: the parents' emotional health determines the children's emotional health. Whether the parents have secure attachment, any intimacy/trust issues, high or low self-esteem, anxious or not, self-aware, how repressed they are, how comfortable with their own and others' emotions...
If a parent is uncomfortable with their thoughts/emotions and compensates with digital distractions, the issue isn't the phone. The media obsesses too much over symptoms and not causes.
> is it damaging if your caregiver uses phone a lot but remains responsive.
> but that is the question I find most interesting as someone who uses my phone to get away from my desk but keep work going so I can spend time with my kids while doing my job.
This is probably more relevant to people who are using their phones for passive entertainment than work. The difference is that your kids are more engaging than your work, so your attention will naturally be pulled toward your kids, whereas parents who are scrolling social media or playing games are going to be more drawn to their phones and are going to have punctuated and shallow interactions with their kids.
Personally, I don't think I've ever observed someone who was actively engaged with their phone who was also fully engaged with the people around them.
Being ignored because someone is staring at a phone absolutely feels different from them just being busy. At the same time, asking teenagers how much their parent's phone use bothers them and then finding that the most bothered teenagers feel less secure in the relationship is not quite the same as showing that the phone caused the insecurity
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 46.2 ms ] threadThe authors hint heavily at the implication that device use damages relationships. But look at what they actually measured. They ask adolescents to answer questions like:
"My primary caregiver ignores me when they are on a device." (DAIS, their new scale)
And then also ask them to answer questions like:
"I often worry that this person doesn't really care for me." (ECR-RS)
And then act like it's a revelation that these two self-report scales are correlated.
A much more plausible causal explanation is that a single psychological variable (e.g. a bad relationship) causes both self reports, rather than the implied pathway that device use causes A, which then causes B.
Parent-child interactions, relationships, feelings are probably the hardest thing to quantify at any scale.
In the end, it's really, "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.
> "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.
I wouldn't be too sure of that actually: https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/the-secret-to-parenting-...
I think weak studies validating people's natural intuitions tend to do more damage than we give them credit for. Even if another better d signed study does way more work and comes with clear results that disprove the natural intuiton, it will be buried in the sea of low effort studies and people will already have settle the issue in their minds as "proven by science".
So many studies now a days have experiments designed to confirm a hypothesis instead of challenge it. They should be doing everything possible they can to disprove their hypothesis and only accept it after all attempts at falsification fail. But of course that's in idealized science. In reality, publish or perish means you need to get something published and negative results don't get published. And so this study, like what seems to be most now a days, is designed to prove their hypothesis - which ironically proves nothing.
Like when kids were growing up a couple decades ago they could just do whatever they wanted and those folks turned out all right. And now we've got people obsessing over where their children are and literally tracking their location, and the results don't seem to be so great.
(I heard that this difference had actually been quantified but unfortunately I don't have a link.)
I remember something about how, some percentage of children are not even allowed to leave the yard. Whereas their parents were just roaming for miles, at a much younger age.
Although I suppose at the same time, we're also less present with each other. So I guess there's at least two dimensions to that.
I guess the first one would be, are you relaxed and do you trust them to take care of themselves, even at a young age.
And the second one would be... are you actually there, or is it just your body that's there.
Are people who are very very securely attached to their parents happy later in life, or is there a ceiling? The terminology invites certain conclusions here.
Maybe the whole attention thing is more a matter of quality, rather than quantity
Why is that much more plausible? It implies that it has always been there, and that nothing has changed since the last century, which is unlikely. Unless you want to introduce some other recent factor, but that is going to be even less likely.
And why? Because other studies have shown how addictive "phone" use is, and how it isolates people. And addicts (drugs, alcohol) are bad caretakers.
So there's really nothing that makes the explanation implausible.
You may ask yourself if it's not your own addiction speaking.
Correlational overlap between self-report scales is common. It's actually so common that at decent sample sizes, almost any arbitrary self-report will significantly correlate purely on valence. For instance, one should expect a correlation between people self-reporting "I had a tough childhood" with "I frequently suffer from skin rashes". This is because trait neuroticism (the degree to which people are prone to feel negative emotion) is a major driver of how people interpret and respond to scales generally.
In contrast, psychologists mightily struggle to find replicable experimental results. That's what you need here.
But your explanation isn't "much more plausible". It is based on absolutely nothing, and the priori are against it. You only have a vague idea of correlation between answers (based on probably equally unreliable papers), but nothing on the missing factor. In this paper, however, they at least take some effort to find structure in the responses, and this factor correlated stronger than the others. Shaky, but it has a basis: phones/social media/etc. are terribly addictive.
> In contrast, psychologists mightily struggle to find replicable experimental results. That's what you need here.
No, that's not needed here. The paper might not be good, but we need to get rid of the phones. It's obvious that it's a problem. Just try to take someone's phone away. What "we" do not need here is distraction from the problem.
This study does not come without limitations. First, it is important to recognize that the present findings are correlational and cross-sectional in nature and therefore do not permit conclusions regarding directionality or causality. Although caregiver device-centric behaviors and adolescent attachment insecurity were robustly associated, it remains unclear whether perceived caregiver distraction is related to attachment insecurity, whether adolescents with higher levels of attachment insecurity are more likely to perceive caregiver behavior as inattentive or disruptive (i.e., reverse causality), or whether both reflect other unmeasured contextual or relational factors. Second, several of the DAIS items assess emotional reactions, which could conceptually overlap with anxious attachment. Thus, the relationship between the DAIS and ECR may reflect a partial overlap of the constructs. Third, both the DAIS and ECR-RS are self-reported measures at a single time point, which may have shared method variance. [...]
I definitely think some people get addicted to the phones, and that addiction is negative for the relationship with the child. I also think one can be active on a phone while also being attentive and available to the child, which would be less problematic for the relationship.
I also don't think the phone is new in this regard. I've certainly heard many stories from back in the days about parents being glued to the TV or work and not being attentive to their child. It's even the point of the quite well known song Cat's in the Cradle[1].
The main difference I guess is that the phone is so prevalent in the population, and there are a lot of apps and sites that are engineered to grab your attention.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_in_the_Cradle
So I would expect the study to find that the children of phone-overusers were more likely to be anxious/insecure.
Still, I would also expect that less phone use (subbed with more attention to kid) would help the kid with this.
It doesn’t really seem to compute how hypocritical that is.
Changing habits is hard enough on it's own.parenthood and modern life makes that even more difficult
I seriously, I feel like so many people just somehow magically forget their entire childhoods, maybe selectively?
I lack the ability to lie to myself like that unfortunately
It is possible to make changes, I would say this is one of the easier bad habits to beat. The best is to start with fixed moments where you as a family decide phones are forbidden. For example, shortly after our daughter was born, we decided "no phones during eating (breakfast/lunch/dinner)". When both parents are in, it is easy to mutually enforce. For over a decade, we have never used a phone during dinner and it's one of those moments of family time.
Now we are always surprised when we have dinner together at a restaurant that some people are on their phones half the time (sometimes doing useless stuff like checking Facebook/insta), rather than enjoying each other and dinner. It's so weird.
Another good method is to remove addictive social media from your phone. Primarily games and apps with algorithmic timelines like Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, etc. I removed all those from my phone. I noticed with apps that do not have an algorithmic timeline, like Mastodon, you catch up once and after that it's not interesting anymore.
But it strikes me that many parents don't really think about it that much, as in the original rationale. I've had a suspicion there is something unethical about this. What choice could be more significant? Then again, maybe the personal nature of it means one is not simply aware of what other people are going through. Maybe everyone is really thinking it through. I am led to doubt it though. I'm curious if other people have had the chance to ask their own parents and felt satisfied by the results. That might be one of the few occasions you might have hope for a somewhat revealing answer.
I've found this notion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism somewhat interesting in this regard.
Biology / evolution. The drive to reproduce is baked in by natural selection. Organisms that didn’t want offspring didn’t pass on genes.
Group 2 some think about it and do,
Group 3 and some don’t think about it much and are (probably) more likely to end up with a kid than group 1 because most people like having sex and this group will be less careful than group 1.
Why?
As a human being who was once born, I am extremely grateful for my existence, and how much thought my parents put into it beforehand is of practically no consequence.
You seem to imply that if parents haven't already committed to giving their kids a perfect childhood with perfect parenting then the kids are better off not living at all?
As for myself I would simply summarize that making an important choice such as bringing life into the world, without considering the consequences, is already somewhat unethical. One should think before taking an action that has irreversible consequences to anyone. In this case, the person being born. I wouldn't say I'm an antinatalist, I just find it interesting. On a rational level I'm not sure there are many good arguments against some of the conclusions there. If there are I'd be interested in hearing them. The fact that you are personally grateful for your existence is a pretty weak argument imo. If you had never been born you would not be around to know the difference. However had your existence been different it is not so hard to imagine you might feel differently. Surely your life is not so peachy that a scan of that article will be incomprehensible to you. Then again, perhaps you simply lived a far better life than I.
I'm not taking a position one way or the other. As I said, I just find it interesting.
Almost everybody's revealed preference is to stay alive rather than to not be alive, otherwise we'd see a lot more suicide.
> making an important choice such as bringing life into the world, without considering the consequences, is already somewhat unethical.
This is a view you can take, but it's not as obviously important as you seem to think.
An alternative view is "making an important choice such as FAILING to bring life into the world, given the opportunity to do so, without considering the consequences, is somewhat unethical."
If the standard was truly that you can't have kids unless you're sure they're going to have a great life, then we would have gone extinct millions of years ago.
The desire to avoid death is explicitly dealt with. The way you have thus answered it is somewhat amusing. Yes, we know people do not want to die. This is obvious. The question is then why do we keep creating people who will die? If they were never created in the first place they wouldn't know the difference. But as soon as you create them, you condemn them to that ultimate end you just acknowledged people want to avoid. You should also probably acknowledge the nature of suicide. It seems to me the antinatalists understand this better than you. After all suicide is painful because humans do not want to die. It is the ultimate suffering, not merely an escape from life. The grief associated with suicide comes from the recognition that someone has done something to themselves that they didn't really want to do. Do you really think the agony of suicide is equal to never having been born? How could that be possible? Where is the unconceived person who has been subjected to such pain? They don't exist and never did. The point of the antinatalist argument is why would you create life in a world like this? This also makes your last point sort of irrelevant for a bonafide antinatalist, as the obvious rejoinder would be, so what? If we are moral agents and not evolutionary automatons then what point are you making? The question is a moral one. Why you think evolution would provide an answer here I am not sure.
As to your middle point, it's all good to just reverse the argument. But you didn't even make an effort to substantiate it. Why would creating life be a moral imperative? Because evolution? Is the act of creation not a more deliberate and significant act than the act of abstention from such activity? To what level should parents be responsible for their children? What symmetric responsibility would you impose on non parents? It would be hard to see how it could be symmetric at all unless you think parentage is largely irrelevant. Which would imply an acknowledgement of the relative significance of having a child vs not.
As for me, I also think your last sentence betrays something. No one can be sure their kid will have a great life. That should never be the standard because it cannot exist. I generally think however it is sensible to say if a person can only provide a hand wavey answer about why they think tomorrow will be better than yesterday, in 2026, and yet still chooses to have a child one might ask if that seems unethical. You don't need to delude yourself into offering some guarantees. But I personally think it is probably unethical to create life without some conviction that at the very least, on balance your child will face more good than bad. But parents aren't responsible for everything that happens. They're human beings, like their kids. No one expects perfection. Antinatalism isn't really a question for parents it's a question for those who have not yet conceived and offers a particular moral lens from which to evaluate the option. I just think it is a somewhat interesting one. Generally I just hope people having kids are being thoughtful about it and have conviction in the future.
Thanks for the back and forth.
Considering how the vast majority of people don't actively seek to end their lives, I think it's reasonable to assume that they prefer to live.
The crown argument against these musings is that according to them the only way to realistically act ethically is to not have children at all - that is self-defeating and not sustainable.
Also it places emphasis on avoiding harm/suffering etc. Problem is, these are unavoidable parts of life and trying to minimise them at any cost is essentially attempting to not live.
I think the term sometimes used for such things is "death cult".
Selfishly, nobody will love me like my children, at least in their early years. They're also amazing playmates and students. And they give me social permission to do silly things like climb on playground structures. They're also a great excuse to get out of stuff.
Selflessly, I believe me and the mother of our children are sensible people and the world needs more sensible people. Plus someone needs to maintain the replacement rate. And it's a weird, warm, fuzzy feeling to care for one's children at one's own expense.
In the intersection, it's a fun challenge to try to achieve balance in life, work, and family. I also really appreciate the chance to get a do-over of everything my parents did, keeping the good stuff and improving on the bad.
I have the same need for cognition as my mother, but I opt not to lock myself in my office. Instead I tell my kids, "I'm around you if you need me and I'll keep an eye on you but I'm not currently a playmate; I'll be here reading on my phone."
They see it's just scanned book pages on my phone, but it's still a phone. Is it bad? Maybe.
Also the fact you’re reading and have a need for cognition is meaningless. To them, you may as well be scrolling TikTok and crushing candy.
Sorry to be harsh, it sounds like you’re proud of yourself for handling it better than your mom but I’m not convinced.
Framing it goes a long way, “I have to clean the garage, then we can go swimming or play a game”. You’re telling them about something you have to do that they won’t be interested in, then offering up something positive.
Much different than, “I’m here, staring at my phone, bother me if you must”.
Also, these things go away soon enough. They won’t want you as a playmate anymore. During these early childhood years, I do my reading and alone time activities after bedtime. Nothing wrong with having an early bedtime just to reserve it for this purpose.
I’m not a pro parent by any means but these thoughts are certainly based on my parenting philosophy. I actively try to engage as much as possible even to the detriment of my personal hobbies and interests because while they want to engage, I want to be present.
Parenting is not a one dimensional role. A kid that doesn’t see their parent as a playmate is the saddest thing I’ve heard. I hope you’re saying that out of ignorance.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Responding with denunciation, either explicit or implicit, degrades the discussion and is likely to hit the other person in a place that hurts.
Beyond that is the aggressive-internet-lashing sort of response, which is what the GP post did. That is abusive and against HN's guidelines. Saying "sorry to be harsh" doesn't mitigate that any more than it would mitigate a physical lashing.
I'm sure that the comment was posted with good intentions—people usually think it will help to post such things, which means their intention is to be helpful. However, (1) it's not actually helpful, (2) what matters is effects, not intent, and (3) it's all too easy for unconscious aggression to seep into such remarks, even when the intent is to be helpful. In fact, the feeling of intending to be helpful often creates a feeling of being justified in such aggression. That's the "for your own good" pattern, and not a dynamic we want here.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I really think people who want to feel guilty always find a reason to. Yes, don't avoid your kids over your phone, pay attention to them if they ask and need it, but you can still do other things (including looking at your phone) when around them.
In fact that's probably a big part of why offices exist in the first place. If I had kids here then for much of the day, they would be trying to interact with me and I would be either getting distracted from work or shooing them away.
What I'm actually there I would want to be fully present with them. It goes without saying that I would follow the example of the people who invented the stuff, and not give them a brainrot device in the first place.
Lol little fuckers how dare they
That's not entirely true as I have early memories of him teaching my older sister how to play chess and me occasionally participating, but makes one think about this balance that needs to be struck.
I'm doing somewhat better than my father in this regard, but I wonder what is the healthy amount of attachment really? People are saying I'm going to miss these prompts when they'll grow older, but I don't want to do this just because of FOMO.
The "jelly star" phone looks kind of fun. I just sat in a busy tram and wondered what the scene would look like if we all had phones like that. It's an innteresting thought experiment.
I think the biggest difference is actually the lack of newspapers now. Plenty of people were plugged into headphones via iPod/Walkman/whatever was era appropriate. The people who stare at their phones today were staring at newspapers in the pre smartphone era.
People with headphones looking absentmindedly straight ahead doing their best not to focus on anything, isolating themselves as much as possible to make the complete lack of personal space more bearable.
This is already what crowded subways in my city look like when you pass the threshold where people are too cramped to browse their phones. This is not a bad thing, just a coping mechanism.
I think there is much more room for behavior change if you consider people at a table (coffee or restaurant) with and without phones suitable for continuous media consumption or social network interactions.
So it's only a tiny barrier but if you need it, you turn on wifi sharing and take out the "real" phone. Otherwise it stays unconnected.
2. Try to replace parts of your smartphone with other things. Buying a clock helped me fix the habit of "I just opened my eyes, time for phone". I found my old PSP and I'm planning to run some emulator on that instead of phone to play some minigames.
3. I have my phone always completely silent. There's literally no notification that cannot wait until I decide to check the phone.
4. I sometimes turn off the data transfer in my phone. First, I get less notifications. Second, it's yet another barrier and it gives me a second to ask myself "do I really want to play with my phone now".
look at maps only in the car, mute whatsapp and then check it from time to time.
seems pretty straightforward.
There's an app for Android called "Forest" that gamifies not using your phone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=cc.forestapp
Not sure what solutions exist on Android but I'd be amazed if there are none.
Don't forget about the other stuff usually handled by smartphones, like music (my old Sansa Clip+ still works) or GPS (the one in my car will do).
[0] - Call audio was pristine
[1] - large live tile for SMS was great
[2] - Bundled HERE Drive let you pre download map data long before competitors had the option.
I learned to drive with paper maps and have never really made much use of GPS navigation, so that part was easier for me than it might be for most.
I'm not going to get rid of my phone entirely, but after that experience, I feel like not carrying it all the time anymore.
That seems like a cultural thing to me. It's common in some countries for daughters ~15yrs to ~40yrs to claim their best friend is their mom.
Give kids the freedom to make mistakes and suffer the (nonfatal, no loss of life or limb) consequences.
Yes, there are cases to intervene, but generally, you should let your kids hurt themselves more. Pain is a very important form of learning. By overprotecting them, they become very vulnerable adults, then worse things happen.
This is quite presumptuous. Even minor injuries can add up to long term damage. We don't need to keep our kids inside or wrapped in crazy layers to protect them. We also don't need them to get hurt a lot for them to learn what's good or bad.
Children need to take these risks themselves, the caregiver there is to put them in a place where the control limits the damage.
but I guess part of this "screen based society" we live in is the loss of nuance and charitable interpretation.
I suggest that reading previously took the roll devices take today. When my parents weren’t at work they were reading as often as not; newspapers and novels.
You can interpret that as either "there's always a moral panic about anything new" or (my own take) "this is how far we have fallen".
[0] https://clivethompson.medium.com/why-novels-will-destroy-you...
Most high school age children of the 1800s weren't inclined to read novels 12+ hours a day and neglect their sleep and hygiene to finish a few more chapters...
Part of me misses it, part of me thinks it's the same, just different now. I do think phones capture attention more than newspapers though, and trigger more violent or faster emotional ups and downs. Scrolling through social media exposes you to something fun, worrying, horrifying, etc every few seconds, I can't imagine that's healthy.
This study specifically excludes it, and fair enough when being honest about the statistical inference and not overreaching, but that is the question I find most interesting as someone who uses my phone to get away from my desk but keep work going so I can spend time with my kids while doing my job.
One outcome would be this is damaging and worse than just not spending time until after work, the other result would say this is a beneficial arrangement.
In terms of attention I actually find it pretty easy to identify their cues even when on my phone. It's more of a general feel of how much I've played with them vs solo play and when they want to hang out they will walk over and make it clear. Plus you are always watching them.
Or otherwise said, if you are on the phone a lot, you are creating a barrier to interaction and people (both kids and adults) will eventually end up tired of trying and having less reciprocation.
If you are not physically there, it is actually less frustrating to others then if you create a barrier while being there.
These days I was “on call” at home and had to be able to answer my phone urgently. And I hated the fact that I needed to glance at my phone at every notification when talking with other people. Truly just having the damn thing is socially damaging.
I was definitely not present or available when reading.
I think this is all a very complex topic and the desire to find a clearcut simple answer is more damaging than helpful
We have lots of evidence about how harmful it is to have parents that are in the throes of gambling addiction. Folks, it's not good for the children. It's in fact pretty bad, even if they don't gamble away the home equity and the college fund.
Tom Clancy begs to differ. Paperbacks are always exciting
If you're a parent, one factor matters more than any other: the parents' emotional health determines the children's emotional health. Whether the parents have secure attachment, any intimacy/trust issues, high or low self-esteem, anxious or not, self-aware, how repressed they are, how comfortable with their own and others' emotions...
If a parent is uncomfortable with their thoughts/emotions and compensates with digital distractions, the issue isn't the phone. The media obsesses too much over symptoms and not causes.
> but that is the question I find most interesting as someone who uses my phone to get away from my desk but keep work going so I can spend time with my kids while doing my job.
This is probably more relevant to people who are using their phones for passive entertainment than work. The difference is that your kids are more engaging than your work, so your attention will naturally be pulled toward your kids, whereas parents who are scrolling social media or playing games are going to be more drawn to their phones and are going to have punctuated and shallow interactions with their kids.
Personally, I don't think I've ever observed someone who was actively engaged with their phone who was also fully engaged with the people around them.