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Your Brain on Computers: The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In

Jun 2010 🇺🇸 The New York Times PAYWALLED — LINKED, NOT HOSTED

This early entry in the New York Times' 'Your Brain on Computers' series looks at parents' own smartphone and laptop use rather than children's, reporting on emerging researcher interest in whether a parent's frequent device-checking during family time is associated with reduced attention to young children and altered parent-child interaction. Julie Scelfo, then a Times staff writer, surveys child-development researchers who were beginning to study constantly available email and social apps as competing for the same attention parenting moments require. TechKids Foundation includes this 2010 piece as an early mainstream signal — well before today's phone-ban debates — that adults' own screen habits, not only children's, were already drawing research attention as a family-wellbeing question worth tracking over time.

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CITATION

Scelfo, Julie. "Your Brain on Computers: The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In." The New York Times, June 10, 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/10/garden/10childtech.html

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