Digital pacifiers and the threat to the development of secure attachments

Abstract

The rise of technology and its growing accessibility has changed the screen media environment drastically. Screen media devices. are displacing enriching activities and essential interactions necessary for the development of a secure parent-child attachment. The study aims to answer the research question ‘does technology use have an impact on the parent-child attachment?’, thus, it investigates whether there is a significant relationship - using Pearson’s correlation- between children’s and parents’ respective quantity of leisure time spent on screen-based activities per day and the parent-child attachment quality. The study used data collected from a random sample of 132 participants who were parents of children aged 2-10 years old. The study adopted a quantitative methodology, which required participants to fill out an online questionnaire which included a demographic characteristics section, Pianta’s (1992) Child Parent Relationship Scale (CPRS) which assessed the parentchild attachment, and finally the SCREENS-Q (Klakk et al., 2020) which measured different tenets of screen media use. The study found a significant positive correlation between the quantity of time children spent watching movies, TV shows, YouTube video clips and entertainment programs per day during leisure on weekdays and weekends, as well as the time spent playing screen-based games on weekends. and the ‘conflicts’ subscale. A significant positive correlation was also found between parents’ quantity of leisure time spent per day using social media on the weekend, and the ‘conflicts’ subscale. The same correlation was found for the parents’ leisure time spent ‘surfing the web’. On the contrary, a significant negative correlation was found between parents’ quantity of leisure time spent per day video calling on weekdays, and the ‘conflicts’ subscale. Therefore, the study revealed several correlations between parents’ and children’s respective quantity of time spent per day on particular screen media activities during leisure time, and the parent-attachment quality.