Parental Smartphone Use and Children's Emotional Well-Being in Everyday Family Life: Experience Sampling Study

Over the past decade, smartphones have become an integral part of family life, shaping both daily routines and parent-child interactions. Although parental smartphone use in the presence of children is frequently framed as harmful through concepts such as phubbing and technoference, these constructs emphasize disruptive smartphone use and may bias interpretations toward negative effects. Moreover, most previous research has relied on cross-sectional self-report data, limiting insight into how parental smartphone use relates to children's well-being in everyday life.

This study examined the associations between parental smartphone use in the presence of the child and children's affective well-being, as well as perceived threats to children's fundamental needs, using both self-reported and device-logged measures of smartphone use.

Individual parents (N=131) participated in a 10-day daily diary study. Each evening, parents reported their smartphone use in the presence of a selected target child, their child's positive and negative affect, and perceived threats to their child's fundamental psychological needs. In addition, Android users who provided consent installed a mobile sensing app that continuously recorded objective smartphone use throughout the study period. Multilevel models were used to examine both within-person (day-to-day fluctuations) and between-person associations separately for mothers and fathers while controlling for day of study, weekday vs weekend, and daily working hours.

Higher parental smartphone use was largely unrelated to children's affective well-being. However, mothers who, on average, reported greater overall smartphone use perceived greater threat to their child's fundamental needs. Similarly, on days when fathers reported using their smartphones more than usual, they also perceived greater threats to their child's fundamental needs. In regard to positive affect, no significant associations were found for children's positive affect perceived by their parents, indicating that parents who, on average, used their smartphones more frequently around their child did not report lower child positive affect. Regarding negative affect, fathers who reported higher overall smartphone use also reported higher child negative affect. Additionally, on days when mothers used their smartphone more than usual, they perceived their child as displaying more negative affect. None of these associations emerged when parental smartphone use was assessed using device-logged data.

Taken together, these findings suggest that perceived child need threat may be linked to parents' subjective perceptions and interpretations of their smartphone use rather than to their digitally traced smartphone behavior. This discrepancy underscores the importance of distinguishing between subjective and objective assessments of parental smartphone use and highlights the need for future research that integrates children's perspectives and interactional context to clarify when and how parental smartphone use may impact children's well-being.