A Closer Look at Parental Phubbing: Examining Different Contexts of Parental Phubbing on Adolescent’s Phone Use and the Potentially Moderating Effect of Age

Abstract

Introduction: Adolescents, and their parents, are heavy phone users. Excessive phone use is associated with a variety of mental health problems, and is thus a serious public health concern. Adolescent behaviors are partly learned in the home environment, so this study considers the role of parental phubbing behavior (parents who are using their phone during social interaction with their children) in adolescent phone use behavior. The study considers three different phubbing contexts: phubbing during a conversation, during a meal or a during fun activity and examines the potential moderating role of the adolescent’s age. Method: This study used data from The Digital Family Project which studied adolescents aged 9-19 years old in Utrecht (n = 266). A correlation, regression and moderation analysis has been conducted for each phubbing context separately. Results: The study shows that parental phubbing during a conversation has a small positive effect on adolescents’ mobile phone use, but no such effect for the other phubbing contexts. There was no moderation by age, such that the association between parental phubbing and phone use did not depend on adolescent age. Discussion: These findings show that parental phubbing during a conversation correlated with slightly higher adolescent phone use. Further research could investigate the causal direction of this effect. The finding that age did not moderate this association should be interpreted in the light of the fact that this study took place during Covid times where adolescents were spending relatively more time with their family and less with their peers.