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Six hundred teenagers were asked a blunt question for a new study: does your parent love their phone more than you? The answers, published this month in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, describe kids who feel dismissed mid-sentence, ignored at the dinner table, and left waiting while a parent finishes scrolling. Researchers now say that pattern, repeated often enough, can shape how securely a child attaches to the adults raising them.
The Study
The research, titled “Mommy, do you love your phone more than me?”, comes from a team at Newport Healthcare led by Don Grant, the organization’s national advisor of healthy device management, alongside chief clinical officer Barbara Nosal and senior research director Michael Roeske. The team surveyed 600 adolescents in the United States, ages 12 to 17, about how they experience their parents’ phone habits.
The teens described a recurring moment: they’d approach a parent to share something, ask a question, or simply be near them, and get a distracted half-response while the parent’s eyes stayed on a screen. Researchers call these moments “bids for connection,” a term from attachment research describing the small, constant ways children reach toward a caregiver throughout the day. When those bids get repeatedly brushed aside, teens in the study reported feeling devalued, dismissed, or unimportant.
The researchers connected this pattern to a concept called insecure attachment, a well-established framework in child development describing what happens when a child can’t consistently count on a caregiver’s attention and responsiveness. Kids who grow up without that consistency tend to carry lower self-esteem and less confidence into adolescence and adulthood, according to the study’s authors.
What Experts Say
Don Grant, the study’s lead author, put it directly: a parent’s phone use can leave a child with an insecure attachment that “could really unfavorably impact their attachment security, which they will carry for life.” That’s a strong claim, and it echoes decades of attachment research showing that a caregiver’s responsiveness in early childhood shapes how a person forms relationships for the rest of their life. What’s new here is the focus on phones specifically as the interruption, rather than distraction in general.
Other researchers who study parent device use have found similar patterns. A related study covered in a related report found that teens don’t necessarily object to their parents having phones. What bothers them is the sense that a screen wins over their presence, most of all in moments that felt important to the child, whether or not the moment looked minor to the adult.
The study’s authors are careful to draw a line between occasional distraction and a chronic pattern. Every parent glances at a phone mid-conversation sometimes. The research is about the accumulated effect of a child repeatedly not being seen, not a single missed moment at the dinner table.
What This Means for Parents
The fix the researchers propose isn’t “delete every app and never look at a screen again.” It’s smaller and more workable: acknowledge the bid for attention right away, even when you can’t act on it immediately. A quick “I hear you, give me one minute and I’m all yours” does something a silent, screen-locked face doesn’t. It tells your child they registered, even when the follow-through has to wait.
For younger kids, this might look like putting the phone face-down through a meal, a story, or the fifteen minutes after school when a child is most likely to want to talk. For teenagers, who tend to approach parents less often and with more hesitation than younger kids, that first response counts for even more, as a distracted brush-off can be the reason a teen decides not to bring up the next thing on their mind.
Parents don’t need to track every glance at a screen. What counts more is the pattern a child notices over weeks and months: do they generally feel like they can get their parent’s attention when it counts, or do they generally feel like they’re competing with a screen and losing?
How This Shows Up Day to Day
The study’s teenage participants weren’t describing dramatic moments. Most of the examples were small: a parent glancing down mid-sentence while a teen explained something that happened at school, a parent typing a reply to a work message while a younger sibling asked a question at the same table, a parent scrolling through news while a child waited to show them a drawing. None of these moments look like neglect from the outside. Strung together over weeks and months, though, teens in the study described a running sense that their turn for attention rarely comes first.
Part of what makes this pattern hard to notice from the parent’s side is that phone checking rarely feels like a choice in the moment. A notification arrives, a habit takes over, and the glance down happens before a parent has consciously decided anything. Researchers who study device use point out that this automatic quality is exactly what makes the pattern hard to break through willpower alone. It usually takes a structural change, a phone left in another room through dinner, a charging station outside the bedroom, rather than a resolution to simply pay more attention.
It Goes Both Directions
Parents aren’t the only ones with a phone habit, and the researchers were careful to note that kids’ own screen time is a separate, well-documented concern with its own body of research. What this study adds isn’t a claim that parents are worse than their kids about phones. It’s a reminder that the conversation about screens in a household usually runs one direction, parent worried about child, when the child’s experience of the parent’s phone use counts for something too.
A few of the teens interviewed for related coverage of the study described feeling like they couldn’t complain about their parents’ phone use: they’d get the obvious response, “well, look at your own screen time.” That exchange can quietly shut down a conversation that both generations in a household would benefit from having openly, without either side using the other’s habits as a shield.
Small Changes That Make a Difference
Researchers and family therapists who work on this pattern generally point to a short list of changes that don’t require giving up a phone altogether. Putting the phone away, not just face-down but out of reach, in specific windows: the first fifteen minutes after school, dinner, and bedtime routines, gives a child a predictable stretch where they know they have full attention. Turning off non-essential notifications cuts down on the automatic glance that interrupts a conversation before a parent even registers doing it. And narrating the switch, saying “let me finish this message and then I’m all yours” instead of silently typing through a child’s question, closes the gap between what a parent intends and what a child actually experiences.
None of these changes ask a parent to be available every second of the day, which isn’t realistic and isn’t what the research is asking for. The goal is a child who generally feels like they can get a parent’s attention when it counts, not a parent who never looks at a screen.
The Bigger Trend
Most conversations about kids and screens focus on the child’s device use, not the parent’s. This study flips that lens, and it lands at an uncomfortable moment for a lot of families, as phones have become the default way adults handle downtime, work emails, and the low hum of anxiety that comes with being reachable at all hours. Kids notice the hierarchy of attention in a household long before they can name it, and this research gives that feeling a name and a body of evidence behind it.
There’s also a generational layer worth naming. Many parents raising kids today grew up before smartphones existed, so there’s no inherited playbook for how to handle a device that buzzes constantly with things that feel urgent but rarely are. Older generations of parents dealt with distraction too, television, phone calls tethered to a wall, a newspaper at breakfast, but nothing that traveled into every room and every quiet moment the way a phone does now. That’s part of why this pattern crept up on so many households at once: the tool changed faster than the habits around it could catch up.
Why Teens Specifically Notice
Younger children tend to protest a distracted parent loudly and immediately, tugging a sleeve or repeating themselves until they get a reaction. Teenagers usually stop doing that. By adolescence, most kids have learned that repeating a request to a distracted adult rarely works, so instead of escalating, they quietly stop bringing things up. That’s part of what makes this pattern easy for parents to miss: a teenager who’s stopped sharing details about their day isn’t necessarily going through a typical phase of pulling away. Sometimes they’ve just concluded that the phone usually wins, so why bother competing with it.
Researchers who study adolescent development note that this withdrawal can look a lot like normal teenage independence from the outside, which makes it easy for a parent to misread. The distinction counts: a teen choosing privacy is different from a teen who’s given up trying to get a parent’s attention, though both can look like the same quiet distance at the dinner table.