A new study published in the journal Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry finds that children who are offered tablets, smartphones and other digital devices when they throw a tantrum will not learn to regulate their emotions.
These ‘digital pacifiers’ may lead to worse behavioural issues and impact their ability to manage anger later in life. Children learn about emotional regulation and affective responses to different situations in the first few years of life.
To find out the impact of the recent trend of giving children digital devices to calm them, researchers from Hungary and Canada asked more than 300 parents of two to five-year-olds to complete questionnaires on their media use, first in 2020 and again one year later. Children whose parents used digital devices more often to calm them down had worse anger and frustration management skills a year later.
“Tantrums cannot be cured by digital devices,” the lead researcher said. “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.”