Children given digital devices when they’re having tantrums don’t learn to regulate emotions, study finds

Some parents regularly use phones or tablets to clam their child during a tantrum. Photo: Getty

Nina Massey

Handing a child a mobile phone or tablet when they throw a tantrum may be damaging their ability to manage their emotions, new research suggests.

According to the study, if parents regularly use digital devices to calm their children, that child could have issues with emotion regulation, which could lead to anger management problems in later life.

Children learn a lot about self-regulation – affective, mental, and behavioural responses to certain situations – during their first few years of life, and this is mainly done through their relationship with their parents, researchers say.

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In recent years, it has become more common to give children digital devices to control their responses to emotions, especially if they are negative.

But researchers suggest that if people knew digital devices were not appropriate for dealing with tantrums, the mental health and well-being of children would benefit.

Dr Veronika Konok, the study’s first author and a researcher at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary, said: “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.”

She added: “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.”

Senior author, Professor Caroline Fitzpatrick, a researcher at the Universite de Sherbrooke, Canada, added: “We frequently see that parents use tablets or smart phones to divert the child’s attention when the child is upset.

“Children are fascinated by digital content, so this is an easy way to stop tantrums and it is very effective in the short term.

“If people’s awareness about digital devices being inappropriate tools for curing tantrums increases, children’s mental health and well-being will profit.”

In 2020, the researchers conducted an assessment and a followed-up one year later.

More than 300 parents of children aged between two and five years old completed a questionnaire that assessed child and parent media use.

According to the findings, published in Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, when parents used digital emotion regulation more often, children showed poorer anger and frustration management skills a year later.