Poster Session 2: The Influence of Technology on Families

Presenter: Brandon McDaniel

Summary
Parents sometimes seek for an escape from stress, emotional/social support, and parenting ideas/resources via phones. This use may also impact emotional availability to their child's needs. In the current work, we used latent profile analysis to examine parents' frequency of phone use around their child, frequency of positive and negative impacts of use, and associations with stress, depression, and child behavior problems. We found four latent classes: Rare, positive, heavy, and very heavy users. Very heavy users showed greater stress, depression, and child behavior problems, while rare users showed the lowest levels. Phone use is an important part of parents' lives and implementing simplistic programs (aimed at reducing phone use) while not addressing the reasons for and benefits of use could backfire.

Objectives
-- To examine parent phone use for positive reasons around their child.
-- To examine parent perceived negative impact of phone use around their child.
-- To examine linkages between different typologies of parent phone use and parenting stress, depression, and child behavior problems.

Subject Codes: technology, parenting, parent-child relationships
Population Codes: early childhood, U.S.
Method and Approach Codes: latent variable modeling, quantitative methodology