A study suggests that texting while parenting has a great impact to your child's thinking and emotions. He or she feels neglected and conditioned to be in a competition against your smartphone. Such attitude gives birth to some behaviors that you surely do not want to see.
Dr. Jenny Radesky of Boston Medical Center specializes in child development, and she started out a study about the impact of getting glued to smartphones when she began noticing how most parents ignore their kids in favor of a mobile device. Some of these parents get busy with chatting, browsing Facebook, or watching YouTube instead of attending to their kids more intently.
Radesky said that kids learn more through face-to-face interactions. Upon completing her research, Radesky concludes that kids who have parents eaten up by their phones are more likely to be attention-seekers. And these kids' life get screwed up later in life.
Catherine Steiner-Adair, author of Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, validates Radesky's findings through her own observations of parents in Massachusetts. She said that parents who also get so busy with their phones, laptops, and other gadgets tend to be irritable because they get more engaged with the agenda that hook them up in the virtual world. And kids, on the other hand, increase their silliness and get irritated as well. Steiner-Adair even found a kid calling his dad's phone the "stupid phone."
The first seven years of a child is very critical as what they learn in this stage will most likely become retained in their brains for the rest of their lives. What a parent gives to the child during this period should be of utmost consideration. Love is the ultimate ingredient and for some kids, it is expressed by uninterrupted time for them.
