Tablet use among children associated with increased anger, frustration | Image Credit: © Arkady Chubykin - © Arkady Chubykin - stock.adobe.com.

Background

As tablet use continues to increase among preschool-aged children, and with associations to child emotional dysregulation, investigators of a recent study sought to estimate how tablet use contributes to anger and frustration expressions among these youth.¹

Investigators of the study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, asked "Do higher levels of early-childhood tablet use undermine emotional regulation or is it the other way around?"¹

Study details and findings

To determine this, the investigators, led by Caroline Fitzpatrick, PhD, of the Department of Preschool and Elementary School Education, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec, Canada, used a prospective, community-based study design. The study featured a convenience sample of 315 parents of preschool-aghed children from Nova Scotia, Canada, who were studied repeatedly at the ages of 3.5, 4.5, and 5.5 years of age, during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2022).¹

"An important strength of modeling within person change is that each person is compared with themselves over time; thus, serves as one’s own baseline control, reducing the need to account for stable, nontime varying individual, and family-level preexisting confounding factors," the Fitzpatrick and authors wrote.¹

"As such, the purpose of our study is to examine the extent to which within-person change in preschooler tablet use contributes to expressions of anger/frustration and vice versa across the ages of 3.5 to 5.5 years. We hypothesized bidirectional prospective associations between early-childhood tablet use and proneness to anger and frustration."¹

Using the Media Assessment Questionnaire², parents reported the average amount of time the child spent using an iPad, tablet, LeapPad, iTouch, or similar mobile device, not including smartphones. Parents reported average time for weekdays and weekend days separately at the aforementioned ages. According to the study, response options included¹:

1. Never
2. Less than 30 minutes
3. 30 minutes to 1 hour
4. 1 to 2 hours to 3 hours
5. 4 to 5 hours
6. More than 5 hours

"Our approach involved using the midpoint for each response range, with the exception of “never” where a score of 0 was used and “5 or more hours a day” where a more conservative score of 5 was used," stated the authors.¹

Temperament was measured by the Children's Behavior Questionnaire-Short Form, with anger and frustration based on the mean of 7 items ranging from 0 to 7, for example, a child getting angry when told they have to go to bed. Cronbach α coefficients were 0.79, 0.80, and 0.83 for waves 1, 2, and 3 of the study, respectively, with higher scores indicating greater intensity and duration of the child's angry or frustrated response to environmental stimuli.¹

According to results, the study sample was equally distributed across child sex (171 boys and 144 girls). A random-intercept cross-lagged panel model demonstrated that a 1-SD increase in tablet use at 3.5 years of age (corresponds to 1.15 hours per day), was associated with a 22% SD scale increase in anger or frustration at age 4.5 years ((standardized coefficient = 0.22; 95% CI, 0.01-0.44)).¹

Similarly, a 1-SD increase in anger and frustration at 4.5 years was associated with a 22% SD increase (corresponds to 0.28 hours per day) in tablet use at the age of 5.5 years (standardized coefficient = 0.22; 95% CI, 0.01-0.43).¹

Conclusion

After evaluation, the study authors found that child tablet use at 3.5 years of age was associated with more expressions of anger and frustration by the age of 4.5 years, with frustrations at 4.5 years then associated with more use of tablets by the age of 5.5 years.¹

"These results suggest that early-childhood tablet use may contribute to a cycle that is deleterious for emotional regulation," stated the investigative team.¹

References:

1. Fitzpatrick C, Pan PM, Lemieux A, Harvey E, Rocha FDA, Garon-Carrier G. Early-childhood tablet use and outbursts of anger. JAMA Pediatr. Published online August 12, 2024. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2024.2511
2. Barr R, Kirkorian H, Radesky J, et al. Beyond screen time: a synergistic approach to a more comprehensive assessment of family media exposure during early childhood. Front Psychol. 2020;11:1283. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01283