Giving your kids screens can only delay their tantrums

Giving a child a screen during a tantrum may calm them down temporarily, but it could cause more serious anger management problems as they get older, according to new research.

Study published in Frontiers in child and adolescent psychiatry, found that children who were more often soothed by digital devices had more difficulty controlling their emotions a year later.

“What we show here is that if parents regularly offer a child a digital device to calm them down or stop a tantrum, the child will not learn to regulate their emotions,” says lead author Dr. Veronika Konok, a researcher at Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary.

“This leads to more serious emotion regulation problems, particularly anger management problems, later in life.”

Researchers surveyed 265 parents of children aged 2 to 5, both in 2020 and one year later in 2021. Parents were asked about their and their child’s media use, including how often they gave their child a device. digital when he gets angry.

“We often see parents using tablets or smartphones to distract their child when he or she is upset. Children are fascinated by digital content, so this is an easy way to stop tantrums and is very effective in the short term,” says senior author Professor Caroline Fitzpatrick, a researcher at Université de Sherbrooke in Canada.

Researchers found that parents who used this “digital emotion regulation” more frequently in 2020 also reported poorer anger management and self-control in their children in 2021.

“Tantrums cannot be cured with digital devices,” says Konok.

“Children need to learn how to deal with negative emotions on their own. In this learning process, they need help from their parents, not from a digital device.”

Scientists emphasize that parents need support to help their children’s emotional development.

“Based on our results, new methods of training and counseling parents can be developed,” Fitzpatrick says.