Can You Use Screens to Calm Children Down?

All parents have been there– your child is absolutely losing it and you are at a loss for what to do. Then you give the child a tablet with a show or hand them your phone and the tantrum instantly ends. It almost seems too good to be true. You can’t help but wonder if maybe it is. Is this practice a simple parenting hack or could it have unintended negative effects?

A study published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Pediatrics examined whether giving a child a device to calm down was associated with the children's later executive functioning (a set of skills including working memory, attention, and impulse control) and emotional reactivity (having intense or rapidly changing moods). This study included 422 children aged 3 to 5 years. Parents reported how frequently they used electronic devices, such as phones or tablets, to calm children when they were upset. The researchers then followed up with the children for six months.

The researchers found that for boys and children with high levels of surgency (children with intense positive emotions) the use of devices to calm a child was associated with higher emotional reactivity three months later. For boys, the opposite association was not found to be significant (higher emotional reactivity did not predict greater use of devices to calm children down three months later). However, for children with high surgency, the opposite association was significant (higher emotional reactivity also predicted greater use of devices to calm children down three months later).

Yet, the results were inconsistent across children and time periods. No relationship was found at any time between using devices to calm children down and emotional reactivity in girls or children with low levels of surgency. It was also not found for boys or children with high levels of surgency in the first three months of the study (only in the second three months of the study).

The researchers did not find evidence that the use of devices to calm children down predicted executive functioning at a later time. However, at the start of the study, the researchers found that using devices to calm children down was actually associated with improved executive functioning in boys (giving your child a device to calm down is linked to better working memory, attention, and impulse control skills). The same positive relationship between this practice and executive functioning skills was found for children with low surgency.

The study had some important limitations. The measures were all parent reports and based on an online survey; it is unclear the extent to which they reflect "real life." For example, parents who see their children as more emotionally reactive may be more likely to give them a device to calm down. It does not mean their child is actually more emotionally reactive, only that parents perceive them to be. In addition, the measure of using devices to calm down children was based on a single question and researchers did not ask about what content the parents used on the device to calm their child. This is a major issue since one could imagine that it might make a difference if parents, for example, used a meditation app versus a violent game. Finally, the study included mostly White and middle-class families.

What does this mean? This study found that for some groups of children and at some time periods using devices to calm down was associated with increased emotional reactivity. Although this study suggests that parents may want to be cautious in using this strategy, these results are not consistent enough to really suggest that this strategy causes problems in emotional reactivity for most children.

This research does not suggest that parents should feel guilty if they have occasionally used this strategy. However, giving your child a device to calm down does not teach them about emotions or coping strategies, and parents may not want to use this as their go-to strategy.