A new systematic review and meta-analysis published in JAMA Pediatrics finds that parental technology use in their child’s presence — referred to as “technoference” — is consistently linked with poorer developmental outcomes in children under the age of five.
Reviewing 21 studies involving 14,900 participants across 10 countries, the researchers report that parental device use is associated with lower cognitive abilities, weaker attachment, fewer prosocial behaviors, increased emotional and behavioral problems, and increased screen time among children.
The study was led by Marcelo Toledo-Vargas, a researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia, along with colleagues Kar Hau Chong, Claudia Maddren, and Anthony Okely, all affiliated with the university’s Faculty of the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities. In summarizing their findings, the team wrote:
“Parental technology use in their child’s presence was significantly associated with poorer cognition and prosocial behavior, lower attachment, higher levels of internalizing and externalizing problems, and higher levels of screen time.”
The findings highlight how everyday parenting is being shaped by broader social and technological forces, not just individual choices. By framing “technoference” as a developmental risk, the study underscores how industry-driven attention economies place structural burdens on families while pathologizing their effects in children.
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The problem with these alleged clear cut cause-effect relations (technology vis a vis developmental outcomes) is that developmental outcomes are never exclusive responses to a particular aspect of the social and psychological environment like the use of technology, but is a response to the whole social and psychological environment. Moreover, children are not behaviourally free agents who use technology, and therefore their behaviour isn’t the true starting point of a true understanding of the actual. The true understanding needs to penetrate the environmental and familial factors that are driving and conditioning the technology use, because the problem is deeper then behaviour this study starts with the behaviour as a causal factor, when it is itself caused by other social and environmental factors. All the human beings in their social environment are undergoing the adaptive change to a radically transforming social environment and are conditioning each others behaviour, and we need to understand the whole picture as it is, something these studies don’t allow us to do. To flesh out a bit more of this full picture, and to extend our penetration into the problem, we can consider the obvious point that the most powerful players in shaping the activities of the child, which are responses to environment, are typically the parents and siblings, or any other cohabitees, and also to varying extents teachers and class mates and friends. And the quality of the parenting, which is shaped by their own social and emotional and intellectual conditioning, will be a driver in the use of technology in their children, obviously. Some parents are fine with their kids using technology, others aren’t. Some parents create a tense and unpleasant atmosphere at home which would drive technology use and some would provide a richer and more free atmosphere for the child, so the association you describe is a fact but the simplistic cause-effect relationship creates an illusory sense of reality because reality is seeing and understanding things as a whole, not isolating elements and over-stating the extent and significance of their relationships.
As critics of psychiatry and medicine you need to step back from the microdetails or the trees so you can actually see the forest as a whole, and all the dynamics taking place within. Really everything you dramatize here is a small part of a profoundly more devastating circumstance for the whole of our societies and all of our children, and so no matter how important these research findings seem to you, in the face of the true urgency and magnitude of everything in our society and world being as it is, treating such isolated study results as the whole story, a study which merely confirm what any intelligent person has themselves observed, is petty, and always pales in significance when one sees the whole devastating picture as a whole. The whole picture defies all analysis and intellectual dissection. It can be described as it is using words, but the truth of all things in our reality is in the whole, and intellectual analysis is mere fragmentation and isolation of parts and therefore can never reach the understanding of the whole. Only in the urgency that demands only real perception can we see and understand and therefore act intelligently and radically, as you would if you were suddenly confronted by a tornado. You see clearly, no thought, and act intelligently, without limitation on energy. Seeing the true gravity and peril of every one of our lives and that of all of our children is the thing that shifts you from intellectual analysis to a passionate, living perception and enquiry into life. Enervating activities such as obsessing over the minutia of the data saps this energy and keeps us locked into a mechanical, repetitive treatment of the issues and the data we devote ourselves to.
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The system is broken and encourages people so socially disengage. Screen addiction is very real, I work with kids who have it. They have very weak self soothing skills. I don’t see how that’s not real.
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Who said screen addiction wasn’t real? Amazing how we read into things phantoms that were never there. But screen addiction may nonetheless be a false framing of the real problem. Desperation, the need for escape, all these other dimensions of such behaviour are every part as important as the behavioural response that everybody notices. The only real solution is in the understanding of the whole picture, but conceptualizing it solely in terms of behavioural or psychological factors prevents the full apprehension of the picture hence prevents the perception of the real solution, which is to provide security, affection, support, freedom from judgement, patience and understanding in order to encourage a child to discuss what is happening in the whole life, not just before, during and after an identified ‘problem behaviour’. Because the self-understanding generated in the child helps the child to function in life with a greater and more sensitive understanding of themselves, and will also enable carers to provide more intelligent and appropriate support because they will have a better understanding of the actual problem. I know it seems wrong to state all this as fact but I honestly feel it’s one of those things that will become very very obvious one day, and we will see our insanity for not recognizing what has always staired us in the face. Healing and being healthy should never have even had to become a vast social effort. External medicine is for the inner injuries inflicted by the blind and ignorant processes and structures operating on the harmonious and infinitely complex life systems of the human body and the human species and the natural world without any deep and penetrating understanding of what they are doing, or the extent to which they are patching up the injuries of our own insane and unhealthy way of living.
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