Children given “digital pacifiers” to calm tantrums fail to learn how to regulate emotions, a study has found.
Researchers have found that when children are given digital devices to calm tantrums, they don’t learn how to regulate their emotions, which can lead to severe problems later in life.
The study was conducted by researchers led by Dr. Veronika Konok from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary, and was published in the journal Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and was written about by the EurekAlert website.
Tantrums are part of growing up. However, how these tantrums or frustrations are managed can affect children’s emotional development.
The researchers investigated how giving children digital devices as “digital pacifiers” to avoid or manage tantrums affected children’s anger management skills later on.
They found that children who were routinely given digital devices when they had a tantrum had greater difficulty regulating their emotions.
The researchers also stressed the importance of allowing children to experience negative emotions and the crucial role parents play in this process.
Self-regulation
Children learn a lot about self-regulation—their emotional, mental, and behavioral responses to certain situations—during the first few years of life.
Some of these behaviors relate to children’s ability to choose a deliberate response rather than an automatic response. This is known as effortful control, which is learned from the environment, first and foremost through children’s relationships with their parents.
In recent years, it has become common to give children digital devices to control their responses to emotions, especially if they are negative.
Now, a team of researchers in Hungary and Canada has investigated whether this strategy, referred to as parental digital emotion regulation, leads to children being unable to regulate their emotions effectively later in life.
“Here we show that if parents regularly offer their children a digital device to calm them down or stop a tantrum, the child will not learn to regulate their emotions,” said Dr. Veronica Konuk.
“This leads to more serious problems with emotion regulation, specifically, anger management problems, later in life,” she added.
distract the child
“We often see parents using tablets or smartphones to distract a child when the child is upset,” said researcher Professor Caroline Fitzpatrick.
The study included more than 300 parents of children between the ages of 2 and 5, who filled out a questionnaire to assess the child’s and parent’s use of electronic media.
The researchers found that when parents used digital emotion regulation more often, children showed poorer anger and frustration management skills a year later.
Children who were given devices more often while experiencing negative emotions also showed less control.
Anger Attack Treatment
“Children need to learn how to manage their negative emotions on their own,” Konuk said. “They need their parents’ help in this learning process, not digital devices.”
The researchers also found that poor basic anger management skills meant that children were more likely to access digital devices as an anger management tool.
“It is not surprising that parents frequently implement digital emotion regulation if their child has problems regulating emotions,” Konuk said.
But she stresses that their findings “highlight that this strategy can escalate a pre-existing problem.”
The researchers noted that it is important not to avoid situations that may be frustrating for the child. Instead, it is recommended that parents coach their children through difficult situations, help them recognize their feelings, and teach them how to deal with them.
To equip parents of children with anger management problems to succeed, it is important that they receive support, the researchers said.
For example, health professionals who work with families can provide information about how parents can help their children manage their emotions without giving them tablets or smartphones.