Parent Depression and Phone Use Around Their Children: A Phone Tracking and Daily Survey Study

• In Event: Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Topic - Technology, Media & Child Development

Abstract

Background: Parents have expressed how emotionally connected they feel to their phone (Radesky et al., 2016) and may turn to mobile phone use (MPU) to regulate negative emotions (Newsham et al., 2018; Radesky et al., 2016). Although MPU could assist parents with emotion regulation, it may cause interruptions in parenting which can negatively impact children (McDaniel & Radesky, 2018). To inform prevention/intervention efforts, it is important to understand parent MPU and mood. We examined associations between MPU and depression at the within-person level to understand whether changes in MPU are linked with changes in depression from day-to-day. Additionally, as parents are inaccurate in reporting their MPU (Barr et al., 2020; Yuan et al., 2019), we objectively measured their MPU (via a tracking app). We hypothesized that days when MPU around their child was greater depression would also be greater.

Method: Participants included 30 U.S. mothers with a child age 5 years old or younger, who had their phone use tracked continuously for 5 days via an app installed on their phone and who also completed 5 nights of daily surveys—which included a measure of depression (6 items; CES-D-SF) and a time diary, where they marked the times they were physically with their child that day in 15-minute intervals. We matched passively tracked phone use with their time around their child to produce estimates of MPU around their child. As the amount of time participants are around their child differs across participants as well as across days, we converted this variable into a proportion of time each day on their phone while around their child. Participants completed an average of 4.86 days (SD = 0.35 days), with 100% completing 4 or more, for a total of 141 days of data. On average, participants were 30.8 (SD=4.1) and children 2.6 years old (SD=1.7). Yearly household income ranged from $20,000 to $145,000.

Results: We first examined descriptives. Then, we tested our hypothesis by running a multilevel model utilizing SAS Proc Mixed with daily MPU around their child predicting daily depression. Multilevel modeling was utilized to properly account for the nesting in the data (i.e., individuals across time points). We split daily phone use into its between-person and within-person portions (as is common practice; Bolger & Laurenceau, 2013).

On average, mothers spent 3.48 hours on their phone (SD=2.17; Range=0.29-10.23) and 1.58 hours of MPU was while with their child (SD=1.39; Range=0.05-7.13). They rated spending about 6.81 hours with their child on the time diary (SD=2.98; Rang =0.50-14.75). On average MPU occurred during 24% of their parent-child time (M=0.24, SD=0.19; Range=0.02-1.00). The within-person model results revealed greater daily MPU around their child was linked with greater daily depressive symptoms (b=0.54, p=.04). Figure 1 presents MPU and depression for a simulated participant.

Conclusion: Our results suggest that depressed parent mood is tied to greater MPU during parent-child time. These results are important as we did not rely on parent self-reports of MPU as self-reports are inaccurate. We will expand the sample by conference time.

Author

• Brandon T. McDaniel, Parkview Mirro Center for Research and Innovation
  Presenting Author