What is parental phubbing, and how does it harm families?

No need to point fingers, because we’ve all done it: Ignoring people around us while we focus on a technological device. When we ignore or snub folks with our smartphones, it’s called “phubbing,” and since many of us carry our smartphones everywhere, phubbing has become very common. But — no surprise! — phubbing can erode trust, undermine our relationships, and even interfere with learning. And parental phubbing is particularly concerning, because kids may have the most to lose.

phubbing father is ignoring young son next to him, son is trying to get his attention

Let’s start with some acknowledgments. There’s nothing intrinsically harmful about using technology to communicate, educate, or entertain ourselves. On the contrary, computers and smart phones are valuable tools, and tools that can actually help us stay connected with people who are far away.

But there is a time and place. If we are in the middle of a social interaction, and we suddenly turn our attention away from the people present in order to focus on a technological device, this is socially disruptive.

It might be something we didn’t choose. Maybe it’s an urgent message from the boss we have to answer. Or maybe we’ve developed a habit, an ingrained, knee-jerk response. Hear a ping, check the phone.

But either way, the act of turning away from our social partners — at a time when we are supposed to be sharing or interacting — causes a disconnect. The live, in-person, real-time communication we’ve been having goes on hold.

We become distracted, less attuned to what is going on with our social partners, which can lead to missed cues and mistakes. And if our social partners perceive us to be ignoring them, we’ve also caused bad feelings — feelings of frustration, irritation, rejection, invisibility, or offense.

So using smartphones and other technology doesn’t make us bad, antisocial, or pathological. But using them at the wrong time — in contexts where we need to be socially engaged with the people in our immediate presence — can cause harm.

That’s what we need to watch out for: the tendency for technological devices to derail the normal, live interactions that humans need in order to thrive.

What is phubbing? Some definitions…

Phubbing, or “phone snubbing”, has been defined by researchers as “the act of ignoring someone present in favor of a mobile phone” (Lv et al 2022), or “using a smartphone in a social setting of two or more people, and interacting with the smartphone rather than the person or people present” (Chotpitayasunondh and Douglas 2016).

“Parental phubbing” refers to phubbing by a parent during a parent-child interaction (e.g., Jiang et al 2023).

Phubbing versus “technoference”

Sometimes people use an alternative word, “technoference” to mean the same thing as “phubbing”. But Brandon McDaniel, the researcher who first coined the term, defines technoference as “everyday interruptions in interpersonal interactions or time spent together that occur due to digital and mobile technology devices” (McDaniel and Radesky 2018).

In other words, “technoference” covers interruptions caused by a variety of devices, not just phones.

In addition, “technoference” doesn’t necessary come with the connotation that somebody is feeling ignored. You and your friend might hold an emotionally satisfactory conversation while multitasking on the phone. The phone stuff interferes with communication, but neither of you feel snubbed or left out (McDaniel and Coyne 2016a).

And parental technoference? Researchers have defined that as “regular interruptions to real-time face-to-face communications, interactions, or time spent together between family members because of parental use of technology” (MacKay et al 2022).

Who engages in phubbing?

Studies suggest that phubbing is strongly linked with problematic internet use or internet addiction. Phubbing is also substantially more common among folks struggling with self-control issues, as well as those who experience high levels of FOMO (the fear of missing out), and/or who feel bored. Other factors that contribute to phubbing include feeling depressed, anxious, or lacking in well-being (Arenz and Schnauber-Stockmann 2023).

But the truth is that phubbing is now practiced by almost anybody with a smartphone – not just those of us with mental health problems.

Indeed, as far back as 2016, two researchers working in the United Kingdom — Varoth Chotpitayasunondh and Karen Douglas – warned that phubbing had been accepted as normal behavior. And in a 2015 Pew Research Study survey, more than 65% of people under the age of 50 said they had sent messages on their phones while attending a social gathering. Among people under 30, the rates were even higher (Rainie and Zickuhr 2015).

Phubbing and technoference is very common among parents

mother on the phone, ignoring todder in the background, while toddler looks on sadly

Parents are people, too, of course, so we should expect them to feel the same motivations and pressures that lead the general population to “phub”.

Moreover, the parents of young children may find the lure of the phone to be strong, especially if their caregiving duties leave them feeling socially isolated, or cut-off from other adults (McDaniel 2019).

As I’ve noted in my article about hunter-gatherer parenting, this lack of adult contact and social support was not a normal feature of parenting for most of human history. On the contrary, new parents worked and socialized with friends and neighbors — in person — throughout the day. Yet in places like the United States, some parents may spend long hours alone without this type of contact.

Under these circumstances, a phone might feel like a life-line. Then it can become pretty easy for phone use to start disrupting one-on-one communication within the family — especially if you suffer from one of the many risk factors mentioned above

In a 2020 Pew survey of more than 3600 parents, 68% of parents said “they at least sometimes feel distracted by their smartphone while they are spending time with their children, including 17% who say they feel this way often” (Auxier 2020).

And in a smaller study of more than 200 mothers living in the United States, 96% of them said that at least one technological device (usually a mobile phone) has caused interference with family interactions between co-parents and children (McDaniel and Coyne 2016b).

So it’s clear that phubbing and technoference is changing the way we interact with each other, and that’s worrying, because there is ample evidence that this interference is causing harm.

What are the effects of phubbing?

Phubbing triggers negative feelings, and it can harm relationships – both personal and professional

young man phubbing young woman, while she looks at him, feeling rejected

We know from everyday experience that folks feel excluded, ostracized, or disrespected by phubbing. And studies indicate that this harms relationships:

In experiments, people indicated they feel less trust for someone who has “phubbed” them (Knausenberger et al 2022), and they have shown less empathy when attempting to interact in the presence of a mobile phone — even if nobody is currently using it (Misra et al 2016).
Individuals who get phubbed are at higher risk for feeling lonely (Ergün et al 2020). When our romantic partners phub us, we perceive our relationship to be lower in quality and less satisfying (Yam 2023).
When bosses phub their staff, they reduce employee trust and job satisfaction – which then reduces employee engagement and work performance (Roberts and David 2020; 2017).

But perhaps the most concerning effects are those linked with parental phubbing.

**What are the specific effects of parental phubbing?**

Parental phubbing is associated with less sensitive caregiving

In a review of studies on the effects of smartphones on parenting, researchers found “clear indications that parental sensitivity and responsiveness can be negatively impacted” during the caregiving of young children (Braune-Krickau et al 2021).

For instance, in one study, researchers watched families in both the United States and Israel as they spent time public parks and restaurants. Parents in both countries were similarly zoned-out when they were on their phones – “to the point of sometimes being inattentive to their [young children’s] safety and emotional needs” (Elias et al 2020).

Parental phubbing is linked with emotional difficulties and externalizing behavior problems in kids

What happens kids experience parental phubbing on a regular basis? Some investigators have tried to answer this question by performing correlational studies. In these studies, researchers ask kids to report on how often their parents phub them. Then researchers compare the parental phubbing reports with information about children’s emotional and behavioral functioning. The results are concerning.

For example, when researchers reviewed more than 40 studies conducted on school-aged kids in China, they found that parental phubbing was linked with poor child adjustment. Children and teens reporting higher levels of parental phubbing were more likely to experience depression and anxiety, and less likely to have developed a positive self-concept. They were also more likely to experience externalizing behavior problems (which include aggression and defiance), and they were less likely to meet minimal standards of socio-emotional competence (Zhang et al 2023).

To the degree that kids interpret parental phubbing as rejection, it may also lead them to feel more alienated from their peers (Wu et al 2022), so we might except parenting phubbing to have a detrimental effect on child’s levels of loneliness and their ability to make friends.

It’s harder to find similar studies addressing parental phubbing on school-aged children in Western countries. But at least one study has examined the impact of “technoference” on adolescents in the United States, and the results were generally consistent with research in China. Higher levels of parental phubbing were linked with greater depression and anxiety (Stockdale et al 2018).

Adolescents who report frequent, parental phubbing are more likely suffer from mobile phone “addiction”

Call it “cell phone addiction,” “smartphone dependency”, or “mobile phone overuse.” Either way, the general concept is the same: Some of us feel compelled to engage with our phones, and we use our phone so often that it interferes with other aspects of our lives.

Studies suggest that it’s a trend among adolescents (Sahu et al 2019), and while it’s a complex problem with many causes, parental phubbing may be one of the risk factors. When adolescents perceive that their parents are frequently phubbing them, these kids are themselves more likely to show signs of mobile phone dependency (Chen et al 2023; Mi et al 2023).

Academic or learning “burnout” is more common among kids who experience parental phubbing

Once again, this evidence comes from China, where investigators are interested in the way that phone-based, parental withdrawal (keeping your head down, being glued to your phone) impacts students’ feelings about school. Reseach there shows that kids who feel lots of learning burnout — kids who feel mentally tired, demotivated, academically incapable, disconnected from school — are more likely to experience high levels of phubbing (He et al 2022; Wang et al 2022).

Why? Some of it may stem from the association between parental phubbing and problematic phone use by kids: If you get “phubbed” by your parents a lot, you are more likely to engage in problematic phone use yourself…which, in turn, interferes with school and your feelings about school (Wang et al 2023).

Parental phubbing is also predictive of lower levels of adolescent self-control and higher levels of social anxiety, both of which can obviously contribute to school problems (Jiang et al 2023).

In addition, some of the effect is connected with kids’ feelings about the parent-child relationship. When parents phub their kids frequently, kids are more likely to view parents as unsupportive, and these perceptions are themselves predictors of “learning burnout” in children (He et al 2022).

**How can we be sure that parental technoference causes these problems?**

Isn’t it possible that causation works the other way? Maybe it’s just that parents are more likely to bury themselves in their phones if they have kids with emotional difficulties or behavior problems.

There’s no doubt about it. As researchers like Brandon McDaniel and Jenny Radesky have demonstrated, children’s behavior problems can drive stressed-out parents to seek escape through their phones. But when McDaniel and Radesky tracked these parents over time, they confirmed that parental phubbing is also predictive of worsening child behavior (McDaniel and Radesky 2018). So it’s a two-way street.

It’s also possible, even likely, that some of the links reflect shared genetic factors. For instance, parents and children may share genes that put them at higher risk for both problematic phone use and behavior problems.

What’s needed is experimental research to help tease apart causation. And while there hasn’t been a lot of experimentation about parents and children, there has been some.

Consider, for instance, an experiment that tested the effects of parental technoference on parent’s own perceptions and feelings.

Researchers sent families to visit a museum, but they randomly assigned participating parents to one of two conditions. Some parents were instructed to use their phones a lot during the museum visit. Others were instructed to use their phones as little as possible. Then researchers monitored parents’ perceptions and feelings.

After the visit, the researchers checked in with parents, and the phone use clearly had an impact. Not only did the “high phone usage” parents report feeling less attentive to their kids. They also reported feeling less socially connected, and they judged their lives to have less purpose or meaning (Kushlev and Dunn 2019).

What about experimental effects on children? Do we have data on that? Yes indeed.

Babies and toddlers: Experimental evidence that parental phubbing interferes with communication and learning

parents phubbing child at dinner table, ignoring child in favor of their phones

First, there is experimental evidence that phubbing disrupts emotional communication between parents and babies

For example, when mothers have been instructed to interrupt a play session with their babies – by interacting only with a mobile phone – infants immediately displayed worsened mood, and they were slow to recover when their mothers put the phones away (Stockdale et al 2020; Myruski et al 2018).

In fact, babies react to this situation in much the same way that they react when their mothers are told to adopt a “still face” – ceasing to show any emotion or responsiveness to their children.

So this suggests that babies notice when their mothers disconnect with them, and they find it stressful. Indeed, in one study, maternal phubbing was linked with an increase in infant heart rate, consistent with the interpretation that the babies were experiencing a physiological stress response (Rozenblatt-Perkal et al 2022).

In addition, there is reason to think that technoference derails “brain-to-brain synchrony” between parents and kids

As I note in this Parenting Science article, caregivers and children can experience synchronized patterns of brain activity – a sign that they are communicating well. But an experiment on young children (24-42 months old) found that this “brain-to-brain” synchrony was disrupted when, during storybook reading, mothers paused to use their phones (Zivan et al 2022).

We also have experimental evidence that parental phubbing can interfere with language learning

Have you ever been working on something – trying to take in new information – only to have your progress ruined by an interruption? The interruption might be brief, and of course you try to delve back into what you were doing. But you find that you’ve lost your train of thought, and you can’t get it back on track.

This might be what it’s like for young children when we allow technology to interrupt our conversations with them. To see what I mean, picture the following experiment.

“Learning on hold” – a clever study by Jessica Reed and colleagues

Imagine that you are supposed to teach your 2-year-old toddler a couple of new words. Researchers have invented these words for you, so we can be sure your child will have never heard of them before. And they also provide you with a mobile phone to hang onto.

The procedure will work like this: You will be given 60 seconds to teach your child the first word, at which point an experimenter will phone you to tell you to move onto the second word. Then you’ll be given another 60 seconds to teach your toddler about Word #2.

What happens? Does your child end up learning something about the new words? Or do the lessons just “go in one ear, and out the other”?

This experiment was conducted by Jessa Reed and two world experts in language development and learning – Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Goliknoff. And the results – based on data from 38 mother-toddler pairs – depended on that mobile phone.

For you see, the experiment had a twist. In addition to the phone call between lessons, mothers also experienced an interruption — a 30 second phone call that happened right in the middle of one of the two lessons.

Mothers didn’t know ahead of time that this was going go happen. Moreover, the researchers had randomly assigned mothers to different conditions, so that half received the interrupting call during their first lesson, and half got the call during their second lesson.

And each condition — uninterrupted and interrupted — included the same amount of instruction time. That’s because mothers immediately continued the last 30 seconds of their lessons after the interrupting phone call ended. In both cases, teaching sessions lasted for a total of 60 seconds.

But despite the random order of the interruption — and despite the equal amounts of total instruction time — toddlers showed differences in learning. When they were tested later, kids only seemed to have learned about the words presented in the uninterrupted lessons.

When lessons were interrupted by a phone call, the children didn’t seem to remember these words at all.

Again, this was true despite the fact that interrupted mothers had resumed teaching immediately after hanging up the phone. And while mothers varied in the way they handled the incoming call (with some mothers telling their kids something like, “Hold oh, sweetie, I need to answer this call”, and other mothers simply picking up the phone), it didn’t make a difference in learning outcomes.

Nor were the interrupted lessons inferior in the sense that mothers provided less coaching. Mothers in both conditions repeated the new word frequently, with no significant differences.

Nor did it matter what the child did when his or her mother was on the phone. Some kids stayed nearby to wait. Others wandered off. Either way, kids exposed to the interrupted lesson performed the same when they were subsequently tested for evidence of learning. They didn’t seem to have absorbed anything (Reed et al 2017).

In summary, there wasn’t anything notably different between the two conditions except for the episode of phubbing, and that difference was associated with a major impact on word learning.

Is this the last word on the disruptive nature of phubbing for young children?

Definitely not. No single experiment should stand on its own. Studies need to be replicated, and there are many questions left to answer. For instance, does phubbing have different effects on children’s learning depending on their age? We should also keep in mind that these experiments address immediate effects only. They don’t tell us anything about the possible long-term effects of technoference or phubbing.

But meanwhile, the research provides us with much food for thought

We’ve got several important take-aways here. Being phubbed makes people feel bad, and it can harm relationships, including friendships, romantic partnerships, and work relationships. When kids are phubbed by parents, there are added risks. Children are more likely to experience emotional and behavioral problems. And young children may have more difficulty connecting with caregivers, and learning language from them.

None of this means that the occasional phone interruption is going to cause lasting damage to your relationships or your child. But if technoference is chronic – if you are frequently engaged in phubbing – that could spell trouble. And young children are just as much at risk as anyone else. In some ways, they might be at greater risk.

Is this something else that parents should feel blamed about — and guilty over?

Researchers like Brandon McDaniel — who coined the term “technoference” — has been explict about this. He doesn’t want parents to feel guilty. Parents already haven’t enough trouble with guilt and self-blame. Instead, he wants us to start becoming more conscious of the extent to which technoference has crept into our lives…and then take steps to scale it back.

What are good ways to prevent phubbing and technoference at home?

Dr. McDaniel has made recommendations himself, which you can hear in this interview on YouTube. The highlights?

Realize that having a phone with you means you are risk of phubbing.
Be conscious of the context before you pull out your phone.
Think about setting aside “tech free” times or zones. For instance, you might decide that you will never use your phone when you are in your child’s bedroom. Or you might set aside meal times as “no phone use” part of the day.
Do you underestimate how often technoference occurs in your family? Try installing an app on your phone that tracks your use, and then see if you have any patterns of using your phone at times when you need to be paying more attention to your kids.

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Image credits

image of father phubbing son while they sit at a table together by Kleber Cordeiro / shutterstock

image of mother using phone with toddler face in the background by yamasan / istock

image of young woman looking excluded by man on phone by Cast of Thousands / istock

image of family at mealtime, parents phubbing young child by Ollyy / shutterstock

Content last modified 1/5/2024