ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Human Developmental Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1596219
"Just a Second, Mommy's Here": The Impact of Mothers' Smartphone Use on Children's Affect Regulation and the Quality of Mother-Child Interactions
Provisionally accepted
- 1International Psychoanalytic University Berlin, Berlin, Germany
- 2Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, University Hospital Leipzig, Leipzig, Lower Saxony, Germany
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The ubiquity of smartphone devices in our everyday lives has been widely recognized as a potential challenge to the quality of parent-child interactions. The aim of this study was to experimentally examine the effects of mothers' smartphone use on their children's affect regulation and on the quality of mother-child interactions, indicated by emotional availability of the dyad and maternal responsiveness. Additionally, we investigated the associations between mothers' behaviors to maintain contact with their children during smartphone use and their children's affect regulation. The experiment consisted of two counterbalanced phases: the free play phase and the interruption phase, in which mothers were replying to standardized text messages in the presence of their children. The sample comprised 52 mothers and their children aged 5 to 6 months (24 female). The results showed that infants expressed less positive affect in the interruption phase than in the free play phase, as well as more negative affect in the interruption phase when the free play phase preceded the interruption phase. In addition, the mothers showed less sensitivity and responded to less infants' signals and in a slower way in the interruption phase than in the free play phase. Moreover, mothers showed less optimal structuring, and children showed less well involvement of their mothers in the interruption phase than in the free play phase. Lastly, more children's negative affect was associated with a shorter duration of mothers' smartphone use and more active mothers' behaviors to maintain contact with their children during the smartphone use. These results suggest that, although mothers adapt smartphone use based on their children's affective response, mothers' repeated smartphone use negatively impacts their children's affect regulation and the quality of the mother-child interactions, with potentially negative consequences for the children's social-emotional development.
Keywords: mother-infant interaction, infant affect regulation, Emotional Availability, Maternal responsiveness, Smartphone use, Technoference, Media multitasking
Received: 19 Mar 2025; Accepted: 17 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mikić, Bergmann, Perejoan Marti and Klein. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Aleksandra Mikić, International Psychoanalytic University Berlin, Berlin, Germany
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