Why it’s a bad idea to soothe your child with a smartphone ... and parents, you should stop scrolling too

It’s a situation dreaded by every parent: how do you distract your child when a tantrum’s brewing?

Whatever you do, don’t hand them a smartphone or tablet.

Doing so means they won’t learn to regulate their emotions, experts have warned.

A team from Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary asked 265 parents to fill out questionnaires on their child’s behaviour.

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Their children were, on average, 3.5 years old and follow-up questionnaires were completed a year later.

Analysis revealed that the more parents used phones or tablets as a pacifying tool, the worse their children were at anger and frustration management skills a year later.

Dr Veronika Konok, the study’s first author, said: “Here we show that if parents regularly offer a digital device to their child to calm them or to stop a tantrum, the child won’t learn to regulate their emotions.

“This leads to more severe emotion-regulation problems, specifically anger management problems, later in life.

“Tantrums cannot be cured by digital devices. Children have to learn how to manage their negative emotions for themselves.

“They need the help of their parents during this learning process, not the help of a digital device.”

The findings, published in the journal Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, also revealed that children who had poorer baseline anger management skills were more likely to be given digital devices.

“It’s not surprising that parents more frequently apply digital emotion regulation if their child has emotion regulation problems,” Dr Konok said.

“But our results highlight that this strategy can lead to the escalation of a pre-existing issue.”

The team said it is important not to avoid situations that could be frustrating to the child. Instead, it was recommended that parents coach their children through difficulties, help them recognise their emotions and teach them how to handle them.

Professor Caroline Fitzpatrick, from the Universite de Sherbrooke in Canada and senior author of the study, said: “Based on our results, new training and counselling methods could be developed for parents.”

And mums should stop scrolling too!

New mothers who spend hours on the phone may hamper their child’s language development, according to a study.

Researchers from the University of Texas found that mothers speak to their children up to 26 per cent less when they are on the phone, and have advised them to ‘be attuned’ to youngsters’ needs while making calls or scrolling through social media.

Using audio recorders on the children and smartphone logs on the mothers’ devices, phone use was linked to a 16 per cent decrease in the number of words mothers said per minute.

Shorter bursts of phone use – up to two minutes – were linked to a decrease of 26 per cent.

Previous research shows chatting with infants improves their language skills.