If you own a smartphone and aren’t addicted to it, I sincerely salute you from afar. It’s so easy to grow obsessed with the passive dopamine rush of browsing internet headlines and scrolling our social feeds.
In any brief moment of everyday silence—sitting in the dentist’s waiting room, riding in the passenger seat during an argument with my wife, even waiting for commercials to end during a TV show—I find my hand unconsciously reaching for my pocket. That feels…not normal, and I often think about the effect it must have on my relationships with friends and family. It’s not like magically rewinding the clock to the dial-up era would fix everything, but maybe certain situations call for leaving our phones undisturbed.
Actor Aaron Paul, best known as the co-star of the acclaimed series Breaking Bad, explored this subject during a recent video interview with The Wall Street Journal. Paul recalls that he was checking his email via iPhone when his daughter excitedly entered the room—and their interaction (or, at least initially, lack thereof) led him to make a profound personal change.
“I wanna say I’m sorry”
“I try not to use my phone in front of my kids,” he said. “My daughter comes running in, and she’s asking me a question, something, and I’m trying to just finish this quick email. And then she stopped asking, and she kind of went and started playing. And she’s 7 [now]—this is when she was 6. And I put my phone down and I went to her. And I go, ‘You know, I wanna say I’m sorry for not being responsive to you…I wanna make a pact with you right now. I wanna promise daddy’s not gonna be on his phone when he’s with you anymore.’”
Her “one-word response” wound up leveling him. “She looks at me and she goes, ‘Really?‘ You know, just, ‘really?‘” he recalled. “And it broke my heart, you know what I mean? It really did break my heart. I go, ‘I promise you I won’t.’ And she just jumped up and threw her arms around me like she won the biggest prize. We owe it to our kids to at least give it a shot…[With] technology as a whole, you can choose whether the technology controls you. You should control the technology.”
Can smartphone usage impact parent-child relationships?
It appears there’s some data to support these ideas. Robin Nabi, a professor of communication at UC Santa Barbara, led a study analyzing how parents’ various media usage—including smartphones—can impact the “emotional intelligence” of their children. The findings suggested there’s a link.
“We know that how parents express, reflect, and talk about emotions with children influences their EI (emotional intelligence) development,” she said in 2023. “And we know how easy it is for parents to be absorbed in their own phones, which could limit the interaction and feedback they give to their children. So we thought it would be important to see what role parents’ screen time and phone use around their child might play in their child’s EI development.”
The research, which involved 400 parents of children between the ages of 5 and 12, found that “parental use of cell phones” around their kids was the only activity associated with “lower child emotional intelligence.” Nabi noted, “Kids respond to their parents. And no matter what type of content a parent may be viewing on their phone, the outward appearance to the child is a lack of responsiveness.”
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