June 25, 2015

A story on my Face Book newsfeed a couple of weeks ago caught my attention. The mother of a former client of mine, Stephanie*, wrote about being at a restaurant and seeing another mother on her cell phone the entire time while ignoring her daughter, with whom she was having lunch. The child was doing all she could to gain her mother’s attention, including waving her hands in front of her mother’s face, but nothing worked to get her mother away from her smartphone. Stephanie desperately wanted to say something to the mother, but didn’t have the nerve. One of Stephanie’s friends sarcastically commented that the woman was probably texting her friends to say what a great mom she was for taking her daughter out for lunch!

We see this all the time and sociologists, psychologists, doctors and other child development experts are starting to study and write about this issue. A 2014 study by Dr. Jenny S. Radesky, a fellow in developmental behavioral pediatrics at Boston Medical Center, revealed that parents in 40 of the 55 families observed in 15 fast food restaurants were absorbed in their mobile devices and almost a third of the parents used their devices continuously throughout their meal. Some children appeared unaffected and ate their meals in silence. Other children were more challenging, with one set of siblings singing "Jingle bells, Batman smells" to get their dad's attention.

The concern is that mealtime is one of the times for families to connect and for parent-child bonds to be formed. If parents are on their phones, quality interactions with their children are not happening. And it’s not just at restaurants that parents ignore their children in favor of their phones, it is happening everywhere. Instead of parents interacting socially and playing with their children, they spend time on their smartphones and ignore the kids. Not only are children being exposed to less speech and language stimulation, fewer interactions, and genuine face-to-face communication, but what example is the parent setting for their child? Is this the type of behavior you want your child to be engaging in? Childhood is a fleeting stage of development, and an extremely important time for children to learn all kinds of behaviors, such as how to form relationships with people, how to converse, develop social skills, play and think critically about ideas. They won’t learn these things by watching their parents text and email, or listen to them talk to their friends.

Stephanie is a parent who understands the importance of interacting and communicating with her children, and also how precious it is to have children to begin with. One of her three children is Shaine*, whom I saw for speech and language therapy for a couple of years. Shaine is a brain cancer survivor and nearly lost his life at the age of one! It was an extremely traumatic time for Stephanie and her family. So she is not one in favor of ignoring her children through overusing her smartphone, to say the least! For those who are interested in Shaine’s amazing and touching story, it can be found on Face Book under Shaine’s Fight.

My parting words: Put down your smartphones and iPads! The really amazing thing about technology is that the stuff on your phone doesn’t disappear. It will still be there when the kids are in bed. But your children won't always be children....

Thanks for reading and thank you to Stephanie for allowing me to share her story!

Cindy McCallum, M.Sc., SLP(C), CCC-SLP

Speech-Language Pathologist

Founder, WiseOwlSpeech

*First names used with permission