New Study Says Parents’ Phone Use Might Be Giving Kids Attachment Issues Later On

If you’re a parent, you’ve felt it: at the very least a fleeting, guilt-inducing moment in which your kid is getting jealous of your phone. Well, a study published last month says that guilt was there for a reason; kids who feel like their parents are phone addicts may experience a lack of attachment that lingers into adolescence, according to these findings.

The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Psychology, looked at 600 12- to 17-year olds rounded up on Qualtrics, a company that gathers test subjects for online surveys. It found a correlation between kids who regard their parents as distracted by their phones, and kids who self-report more indicators of what’s known as “insecure attachment.”

Insecure attachment is a term in widespread use that comes from observable phenomena in babies. It’s been studied and studied over the years, and has become a bedrock principle in guidance for parents. If there’s an attachment issue, then later in life, there are, according to attachment theory, “avoidant” kids who avoid attachment, and “anxious” kids who crave attachment.

The study linked reports of phone-distracted parents to both kinds of kids: anxious and avoidant.

The researchers who performed this latest study didn’t have access to their subjects as babies, and used a survey they themselves designed with teens in mind, along with a standard survey on attachment issues in teens, used in many other experiments. Their bespoke study was called the Device Attachment Interference Scale (DAIS).

The paper describes the DAIS like this:

“Items assess adolescents’ perceptions that their caregiver’s attentional availability ‘negatively affects our relationship,’ that their caregiver ‘does not pay enough attention to me because of their device use,’ ‘ignores me when they are on their device,’ and ‘seems inattentive due to their device use.’”

They used a regression analysis to check the findings of that survey against the findings of the standard attachment survey in order to find a correlation, and they say there was one, and it isn’t just statistical noise. Kids who reported phone junky moms or dads scored higher for both avoidant and anxious attachment.

The results can’t, and don’t, claim that being a phone junky will make your kid into an insecure person. The opposite is just as plausible: insecure teens might be more annoyed that their parents are phone junkies. This is something the authors acknowledge.

There’s been a whole wave of lawsuits lately against social media companies, largely over issues related to kids and mental health. With that in mind, one of the authors of the study, media psychologist Don Grant, told Bloomberg, “We know that they got the kids[…]. Bravo, you got us too.” Parents, he said, “were not immune to the psychological motivations and manipulations.”