Parental Screen Time: How Your Phone Use Affects Your Child, and Why Presence Matters

We often talk about children’s screen time. How many hours are they spending on tablets? Are they watching too much YouTube? Should they have access to social media?

These are important conversations. Yet there is another question that receives far less attention: what about parental screen time, the time adults spend on screens in front of children?

This is not because parents or caregivers intentionally choose screens over relationships. Most are simply trying to keep up with modern life. Emails arrive constantly. Messages need replies. Work follows us home. Life feels busy.

Somewhere between school pick-ups, extracurricular activities, dinner, and bedtime routines, we find ourselves sharing only a few precious hours with our children each day. Within those limited hours, what does it feel like for a child when the person they love most is physically present, yet emotionally elsewhere?

As a therapist, this is a question I find myself thinking about more and more.

“Are You Still With Me?” What Children Notice in the Therapy Room

One of the things I have come to appreciate deeply through working with children is how sensitive they are to presence. My phone is always on silent and face down during sessions. Occasionally, however, I forget to mute the sound on my laptop, and an email notification arrives.

What surprises me is not the sound itself. It is what happens next. Even when they are deeply engaged in play, many children immediately pause. They ask, “What was that?” Or they quickly glance toward my face, almost as though they are asking a much bigger question:

“Are you still with me?” “Did I lose you?” “Has something else become more important?”

Children rarely say these words directly. Yet their eyes often communicate them. Each time, I am reminded that my presence means something to them. Children are constantly scanning their relationships for cues of safety, connection, and availability. They notice much more than we think.

Why Children Notice When a Parent Is Distracted

According to attachment theory, children develop a sense of security when caregivers are emotionally available and responsive (Bowlby, 1988). Relationships themselves become a source of safety and regulation.

This does not mean parents need to be perfectly attentive every moment of every day. Still, when interruptions become chronic, children may experience something quieter: the feeling of competing with a screen.

How Parents’ Phone Use Affects Children: What the Research Shows

For previous generations, interruptions certainly existed. Adults had responsibilities, chores, and stress. But smartphones introduced something unique. Notifications do not simply take our time. They take our attention. And attention is one of the ways children experience love.

Researchers have described a phenomenon called technoference: the interruption of relationships by technology. Studies suggest that parental phone use and digital distractions may negatively affect parent-child relationships and may be associated with emotional and behavioural difficulties in children (McDaniel & Radesky, 2018). An observational study of caregivers and children during meals also found that children often responded to caregivers’ phone use with bids for attention or increased emotional intensity (Radesky et al., 2014).

More recent research points in the same direction. A 2025 review in JAMA Pediatrics combined 21 studies of nearly 15,000 children under five. Parents’ technology use in a child’s presence was linked with poorer cognitive and social-behavioural outcomes, and with more screen time for the child. The links were small, but they were consistent across studies (Toledo-Vargas et al., 2025).

Another 2025 study followed 284 children in Croatia and asked them how they felt when parents used phones during conversations. Children who more often felt angry or sad in those moments reported lower well-being, and so did children who said they sometimes simply gave up trying to get their parent’s attention (Bodrožić Selak et al., 2025).

None of this means a single text message harms a child. The research describes patterns, not moments. And it reminds us that children are not trying to be difficult. Sometimes they are simply trying to reconnect.

Screen Time, Presence, and Emotional Regulation in Children

Many children are brought to therapy because they struggle with emotional regulation, and emotional regulation certainly matters. But perhaps there is another question worth asking: how often does this child experience the calming presence of a regulated and emotionally available adult?

Not an adult who is teaching. Not an adult who is correcting. Not an adult who is multitasking. Simply an adult who is with them. Who notices. Who listens. Who laughs. Who delights in them.

Connection itself is regulating. Through repeated experiences of emotional safety, children gradually develop stronger self-regulation skills of their own. In many ways, regulation begins as a relational experience before it becomes an individual skill. If worry is also part of the picture for your child, our article on CBT for child anxiety explains another way children can be supported.

You Don’t Have to Be a Perfect Parent

This article is not about guilt. Parents are tired. Modern life is demanding. Most adults are trying to balance careers, caregiving, household responsibilities, and the endless stream of notifications that accompany life today.

Perfection is neither possible nor necessary. Children do not need perfect parents. They need “good enough” parents who repair moments of disconnection and return to connection again and again (Winnicott, 1965).

The goal is not perfection. The goal is awareness. Children are not asking us to entertain them every hour of every day, nor are they asking us to abandon technology altogether. What they often need most is surprisingly simple: eye contact, warm attention, shared laughter, curiosity, listening, and the feeling that they matter.

And perhaps most importantly, the feeling that they do not have to compete with a device to be seen.

5 Ways to Reduce Phone Distraction and Be More Present With Your Child

1. Create small screen-free moments. Build them into the day, even if they are only ten minutes long.
2. Protect bedtime. Keep bedtime routines free from notifications and scrolling.
3. Name it when you are distracted. Let your child know when you are temporarily busy, and reassure them that you will come back to them.
4. Repair when distraction happens. Relationships are strengthened not by perfection, but by reconnection.
5. Choose quality over quantity. Small moments, repeated consistently, become lasting memories.

When to Reach Out for Support

Sometimes a child’s big feelings, withdrawal, or constant bids for attention are hard to understand, or family life feels stretched in ways that changing phone habits alone does not solve. Talking it through with a therapist can help. Parenting support gives parents space to reflect on their own stress and patterns, child therapy offers children a safe place to express what they may not yet have words for, and family therapy can help everyone find their way back to each other.

You do not need to wait for things to reach a breaking point. Reaching out early is often the gentlest place to start.

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A Final Thought: “Yes. I’m Here.”

Every time a notification sound appears in my therapy room and a child quickly looks up to see whether I am still with them, I am reminded of something profound. Children are not only paying attention to what we say. They are paying attention to whether we are still there: whether our eyes are still warm, whether our bodies are still turned toward them, whether our attention has wandered elsewhere.

And perhaps beneath many behaviours, questions, and bids for connection, there is a deeply human hope: “Are you still with me?”

Maybe one of the greatest gifts we can offer children in a distracted world is a simple answer: “Yes. I’m here.”

References

• Bodrožić Selak, M., Merkaš, M., & Žulec Ivanković, A. (2025). Effects of parents’ smartphone use on children’s emotions, behavior, and subjective well-being. European Journal of Investigation in Health, Psychology and Education, 15(1), Article 8. https://doi.org/10.3390/ejihpe15010008
• Bowlby, J. (1988). A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development. Basic Books.
• McDaniel, B. T., & Radesky, J. S. (2018). Technoference: Parent distraction with technology and associations with child behavior problems. Child Development, 89(1), 100-109. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12822
• Radesky, J. S., Kistin, C. J., Zuckerman, B., Nitzberg, K., Gross, J., Kaplan-Sanoff, M., Augustyn, M., & Silverstein, M. (2014). Patterns of mobile device use by caregivers and children during meals in fast food restaurants. Pediatrics, 133(4), e843-e849. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2013-3703
• Toledo-Vargas, M., Chong, K. H., Maddren, C., Howard, S. J., Wakefield, B., & Okely, A. D. (2025). Parental technology use in a child’s presence and health and development in the early years: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Pediatrics. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamapediatrics.2025.0682
• Winnicott, D. W. (1965). The maturational processes and the facilitating environment. International Universities Press.