Culture Post: Kids Given ‘Digital Pacifiers’ to Calm Tantrums Fail to Learn How to Regulate Emotions

The following is excerpted from an online article posted by MedicalXpress.

Tantrums are part of growing up. How these outbursts of anger or frustration are managed, however, can impact children’s emotional development.

An international team of researchers has investigated how giving children digital devices acting as “digital pacifiers” to avoid or manage tantrums impacts children’s later anger management skills. They found that children who were routinely given digital devices when they threw a tantrum had more difficulties regulating their emotions. The researchers also stressed the importance of letting children experience negative emotions and the crucial role parents play in the process.

Children learn much about self-regulation—that is, affective, mental, and behavioral responses to certain situations—during their first few years of life. Some of these behaviors are about children’s ability to choose a deliberate response over an automatic one. This is known as effortful control, which is learned from the environment, first and foremost through children’s relationship with their parents.

In recent years, giving children digital devices to control their responses to emotions, especially if they’re negative, has become common. Now, a team of researchers in Hungary and Canada has investigated whether this strategy, referred to as parental digital emotion regulation, leads to the inability of children to effectively regulate their emotions later in life. The results appear in Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

“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,” said Dr. Veronika Konok, the study’s first author and a researcher at Eötvös Loránd University. “This leads to more severe emotion-regulation problems, specifically, anger management problems, later in life.”

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 as they experienced negative emotions also showed less effortful control at the follow-up assessment.

“Tantrums cannot be cured by digital devices,” Konok pointed out. “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.”

Source: MedicalXpress
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-06-kids-digital-pacifiers-calm-tantrums.html

Find more culture news on HomeWord’s Culture Blog, named in 2024 for the ninth consecutive year as one of the top 50 culture blogs on the planet (#19 of  50)!