Smartphone Addiction Passed Down... 78% of Children with Highly Dependent Parents Are Addicted

Research on Health and Society for 6th Grade Children
'Parent High-Dependence Type - Child Low-Dependence Type' Accounts for Only 9.7%

A study has revealed that smartphone addiction is transferred from parents to their children.

On the 28th, Yonhap News introduced the contents of the paper titled "The Transfer Relationship Between Parents' Smartphone Dependence and Children's Smartphone Dependence" (Kim So-yeon et al.) published in the recent issue of 'Health and Social Research' by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs. This paper analyzed the research results examining the correlation between smartphone dependence of sixth-grade elementary school children and their parents.

Child looking at a smartphone
[Image source=Getty Images]

The research team targeted 2,229 sixth-grade elementary school students who responded to smartphone-related questions in the third-year data of the Korea Child and Youth Panel Survey by the Korea Youth Policy Institute, along with their parents (2,051 mothers and 178 fathers), and classified them into low-dependence, average, and high-dependence groups regarding smartphone use.

The degree of smartphone dependence was assessed through responses on a 4-point scale (not at all true to very true) to 15 questions such as: ▲ Excessive smartphone use reduces work efficiency (school grades) ▲ There were times when I could not concentrate on work (studying) because of smartphone use ▲ I feel like I have lost the whole world if I cannot use my smartphone ▲ I become restless and anxious without my smartphone ▲ Spending a lot of time on smartphone use has become a habit.

As a result, parents were classified as ▲ low-dependence 33.9%, ▲ average 49.5%, and ▲ high-dependence 16.6%. For children, the distribution was ▲ low-dependence 36.4%, ▲ average 40.3%, and ▲ high-dependence 23.3%.

When examining how much the parents' dependence level transferred to their children, it was found that if parents were in the high-dependence group, most of their children (78.6%) were also in the high-dependence group. In contrast, if parents were in the average or low-dependence groups, the proportions were 11.8% and 9.7%, respectively. This contrasts with the case where only 7.6% of children were in the high-dependence group when their parents were low-dependence. When parents were low-dependence, 54.4% of children were also low-dependence, and 37.9% were average. When parents were average, the largest proportion of children (51.5%) were also average, with 32.9% low-dependence and 15.6% high-dependence.

Children's smartphone dependence was also related to the parent-child relationship and the parents' economic status. Children tended to belong to the low-dependence group when parents had a positive parenting attitude, spent more time together with their children, engaged in frequent parent-child conversations, and when parents perceived their economic status as high. The research team noted that critical and negative interactions from parents might lead children to feel insufficient emotional support, which they may try to compensate for through smartphone use. They advised that increasing family time and activities together helps reduce children's smartphone dependence.

Regarding the study results, the research team explained, "The type of parents' smartphone dependence is highly likely to be transferred to children in the same form," and suggested, "To reduce children's smartphone dependence, parents themselves must also reduce their smartphone use." They further stated, "Smartphone education should be proactively conducted at home during children's initial smartphone experiences," and recommended, "Systematic parent education and the development and dissemination of family practice-oriented online education materials that can be used for home education should be activated."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.