Smartphone use and parenting: re-stratifying the multiverse for families of young children

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Now in press at Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

 

DOI: 10.1111/JCPP.13433

 

In this invited commentary, we focus on 800+ families, with young children (ages 2 and under) and show that time on smartphones has no significant negative associations with parent-child relationship quality.

 

Here, we recreated a “new” multiverse of feasible research paths focused on 48 possible associations with parenting. In this case, only 2 paths were significant, and neither negatively implicated parental time on smartphones (see supplementary plots).

 

In this invited commentary, we articulate three major logical issues that have plagued the family-technology literature more broadly (base rate fallacy; misinterpretation of published effects; and conflation of constructs) and provide a “call to action” for research moving forward.