Bidirectional relationships of parenting stress, media use for behavior management, and children's behavior problems...

As digital devices permeate the environments of young children, there is growing concern that media use might be displacing very young children's opportunities to cultivate important developmental skills, such as controlling their emotions and behaviors. Further, given the power of devices to capture children's attention, even when emotionally upset, parents might utilize media to both calm and distract their children, even when such use is counter to professional recommendations for very young children's media use. This study uses data from a longitudinal bilingual (English/Spanish) parenting intervention to assess how mothers' and fathers' parenting stress might be reciprocally related to their use of media to calm or distract their child from infancy to toddlerhood and how such use might be linked to young children's behavior problems from 9 to 30 months. Importantly, bidirectional relationships between the device use for behavior management and children's behavior problems are also considered. With a sample of 419 low-to-moderate income, ethnically diverse parents (210 families), we found that for mothers, parenting stress, device use to calm and distract, and children's behavior problems were reciprocally related over time. These within-subject effects indicate that the relationship between these constructs varies within mother-child dyads. For fathers, only between-subject effects were found for device use to calm and distract and children's behavior problems, indicating differences between fathers in their use of media. Such findings underscore the need to include both mothers and fathers in media research and to consider both parent and child contributions to media use and developmental processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).