Associations among socioeconomic status, maternal stress, and infant screen exposure at 6 months of age.

• In Event: Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Topic - Technology, Media & Child Development

Abstract

Evidence suggests that increased use of screens early in life has negative developmental consequences for children. However, few studies have focused on infants, and specifically, which parental factors predict initial screen exposure and increased incidence of usage in infant samples, a time of particularly rapid brain development.

The primary goal of this study was to examine whether socioeconomic factors (e.g., family income, average parental education) and maternal stress predict infant screen exposure at six months of age.

A socioeconomically diverse sample of mothers was enrolled in a longitudinal study during their third trimester of pregnancy, with follow-up visits at 1-month of age and planned approximately every 6 months thereafter. The current analysis concerns data collected prenatally and when infants were 6 months of age. As of this writing, 93 mother-infant dyads are enrolled in the longitudinal study, with 74 having participated in the 6-month assessment, providing the data in the present analysis.

Socioeconomic status (SES) was operationalized as income-to-needs ratio (ITN) and average parental educational attainment in years. The Perceived Stress Scale (PSS; Cohen, 1994), was used to measure maternal stress when the infant was 6 months old. Infant screen exposure at 6 months was measured using the ScreenQ (Hutton, Huang, Sahay, DeWitt, & Ittenbach, 2020). First, mothers reported whether they had exposed their infants to screens (yes or no). Parents who answered “yes” then completed the ScreenQ, a comprehensive set of questions about screen exposure and usage (e.g., duration of screen exposure, occasions screens were provided, interaction between parent and child). Analyses involved both the dichotomous yes/no data for the full sample, as well as the more detailed data for the infants who had been exposed to screens.

A logistic regression indicated that maternal stress (B = 0.124; p = 0.041), but not average parental education or ITN, predicted whether or not the child was exposed to screens by 6 months of age. Among families whose infants were exposed to screens, neither ITN (β= -0.135,p=0.434), nor lower average education (β= -0.191,p=0.220) were significantly associated with an increased incidence of screen exposure. However, maternal stress (β= 0.243,p=0.062) was marginally significant and trended in the hypothesized direction. Implications for identifying children at-risk for screen exposure in infancy are discussed.

Authors

• Cynthia Arraya Wiltshire, The University of Texas at El Paso
  Presenting Author

• Melissa A Giebler, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Sonya V. Troller-Renfree, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Kimberly G Noble, Teachers College, Columbia University
  Non-Presenting Author