In "Llama Llama Mad at Mama," a popular children's book from 2007, a little Llama Llama goes to the grocery with his mama and becomes overwhelmed by all the sounds, sights, smells and shopping decisions happening around him. In a scene familiar to every parent, the cartoon animal has an epic meltdown in his shopping cart, screaming and throwing the contents of his mom's shopping list on the floor. Mama Llama gets down to his level and calms him down by turning shopping into a fun game.
There are no cellphones or tablets in the world of Llama Llama, but if there were, who would blame Mama Llama if instead she handed her overwhelmed toddler a video to watch so she could carry on shopping in peace?
In real life, plenty of parents do reach for a screen to soothe a distressed child - a pattern of technology use researchers call "media emotion regulation." A new study from The Ohio State University looked how using technology to regulate young children's emotions affects their cognitive development, and found it isn't a one-size-fits-all story.
"It's not just that the effects are larger or smaller for some kids - the underlying pattern is different for different kids," said Jane Shawcroft, an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State who led the study, published recently in the Journal of Communication.
The study focused on the relationship between media emotion regulation and executive functions - a set of interrelated cognitive skills necessary for goal-directed behavior and social functioning. Two of these skills - cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control - are thought to be especially sensitive to a child's environment during their formative years.
Cognitive flexibility enables children to respond to changing demands, understand different perspectives and problem-solve. Inhibitory control allows them to suppress impulsive responses, which is important for making conscious choices and pausing before acting. Ultimately, these skills build the foundation for behavioral health, school success and healthy social relationships across a person's lifespan.
To investigate, Shawcroft analyzed data from Project M.E.D.I.A., a long-term Brigham Young University study tracking how media shapes children's development, with six waves following children from age 2½ to 7½. She tested three possibilities: that using screens to calm children affects the development of these cognitive skills; that a child's own cognitive development drives parents to offer screens more or less often; or that the two feed into each other in a loop over time.
Most children showed that reinforcing loop: the harder or easier a child was to settle, the more or less a parent hit play to calm them down - and that screen use, in turn, shaped the child's developing executive functions, which again shaped how often screens were used for calming. That was expected, Shawcroft said, because "children influence parenting, and parenting influences children's development."
For that majority, she noted, this means there's more than one way to intervene and support both healthy development and healthy relationships with technology: Parents can change how, when and why they use technology to support cognitive development, but they can also support a child's cognitive development through other means, which can in turn lead to a healthier relationship with technology for young children.
But two smaller groups of children broke from the overall pattern. In one group - about 6% of children - the two cognitive skills were related to media emotion regulation in different ways, which researchers couldn't fully explain. Shawcroft said a later wave of the ongoing study is collecting more information about these children.
For the other outlier group (roughly 7% of children), screen use appeared to shape how cognitive skills developed, but the reverse wasn't true: A child's cognitive skills didn't predict how often parents reached for a screen to manage their child's difficult emotions. What stood out about these families, the study found, was that the parents of children in this group were more likely to report higher levels of depression.
"We found that parent mental health is a strong predictor of the way parents use technology with their young kids, because technology is a lever parents can pull when parents don't have the resources to cope with their own poor mental health," Shawcroft said.
Parenting a small child is hard, she added, and a screen is sometimes one of the few tools a struggling parent has within reach, especially when their child is struggling with their own feelings. Cultural conversations around technology and child development often focus on whether parents are doing the right thing for their kids. But a takeaway of this study, she said, isn't that these struggling parents are necessarily doing something wrong, rather: "Supporting parents' mental health is a way to help them parent with technology better."
What this study tells us, Shawcroft said, is that parents need more resources at their disposal - including access to other ways to help their children regulate, like places for children to spend time outdoors, or tools to help practice mindfulness, etc. - especially when parents are struggling with their own mental health concerns. This means helping children experience healthy development in the context of technology isn't just on parents' shoulders. The children at most risk of problematic media use, she said, would benefit from broader community support and increased resources, including check-ins from family members, neighbors and friends who can help make parenting less isolating and difficult for struggling parents.
"I really wish the narrative around children and tech would be less about 'it's just a parents' job,' and more about this shared responsibility we have as a society to support children in this context we've built for them," Shawcroft said. "If we want kids to be OK, part of that is helping their parents to be OK."
Co-authors include McCall A. Booth from Georgetown University; Chris L. Porter, Megan Van Alfen, Lara A. Maximiano, Elena K. Holmes, Sarah M. Coyne, Hailey G. Holmgren and Blake L. Jones from Brigham Young University; Megan Gale from Utah State University; and Andrew Martinez from Hunter College. The research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
