By Quentin Fottrell, Marketwatch
May 31, 2019 | 12:50pm | Updated May 31, 2019 | 1:27pm
Swipe as I do, not as I say.
That could be the mantra of parents who teach their children how much time to spend on their iPhones Androids, tablets, computers and watching television.
More than one-third of teenagers and over one-quarter of parents wake up and check their mobile device for something other than the time at least once a night, according to a new report by Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based organization that examines the impact of technology and media on families. The organization surveyed 1,000 parents and their children.
“There is no respite from the glow of the screen and the day’s stress and social pressures,” Common Sense Media CEO and founder James Steyer said in a statement. Parents and kids said mobile devices were affecting family life, said their families sometimes fought over mobile devices and reported that mobile devices were encroaching into mealtimes.
“With studies linking poor sleep to a number of mental and physical health problems, as well as diminished academic and cognitive performance,” Steyer added, “I urge parents to consider these findings as a wake-up call that device use might truly impact the health of their children and themselves.”
Here are some key takeaways:
Most parents (55 percent) and children (72 percent) in the survey say that the use of mobile devices has had no impact on their relationships with each other, but almost one-third of parents think that their child’s use of a mobile device has hurt their relationship with their child (28 percent).
And all of that swiping is expensive: iPhone users spend nearly $33 per transaction on their iPhones versus just over $11.50 spent by mobile shoppers with their Android phone, according to an E-Commerce Benchmark KPI study.
It’s hard to get kids not to do something if their parents do it all the time. Role-modeling is a great start to promoting a healthy digital lifestyle and parents can help establish good habits through family rituals like device-free dinners and media activities that strengthen relationships, experts say.
Of course, smartphones have their uses. Children use social media to connect with friends and develop their identities, Yalda Uhls, a Los Angeles-based child psychologist and author of “Media Moms & Digital Dads: A Fact Not Fear Approach to Parenting in the Digital Age.”