Parental phubbing: is it associated with parents’ coping strategies and preschoolers’ emotional and behavioural problems? A pilot study

Early infancy and childhood are the golden age period. The brain in this period grows very rapidly and is very sensitive to any kind of stimulation. The more stimulation, the more the brain will grow. Every person who interacts with a child should be aware of this, especially his parents, who should provide an environment capable of stimulating his development (Khansa Fauziyah et al., 2022). Several studies show that the combination of attention, relationship and care from parents can have a positive and significant impact on the child's development (Frosch et al., 2021; Higgins, 2014.; Lanjekar et al., 2022). In an era when smartphones have rapidly overtaken any other form of electronic device and are changing our social interaction structure (Nazir & Bulut, 2019), parents should pay even more attention to their actions, since they are responsible of shaping their child’s development (Bandura, 1978; Darling, 2007). These are the core assumptions driving this research and my thesis. Phubbing can be defined as “the act of snubbing someone in a social setting using one’s phone instead of talking to the person directly in one’s company” (Chotpitayasunondh & Douglas, 2016). Phubbing has detrimental effects on various sphere of human life such as relationship (Halpern & Katz, 2017; Roberts & David, 2016) and work (Roberts & David, 2017, 2020; Tandon et al., 2022). Furthermore, a negative correlation was found between phubbing behaviours and coping strategies, too (Venugopal & Fenn, 2021). The study on parental phubbing has demonstrated that such behaviour has negative consequences on children and adolescents, such as depression, low self-esteem, social- withdrawal and social-emotional adjustment (Wang et al., 2020; Wang et al., 2022; Xiao & Zheng, 2022; Xie & Xie, 2020; Zhang et al., 2023). To date, only a limited number of studies have examined the potential impact of parental phubbing on the developmental outcomes of preschool children. This study aims to investigate the relationship between parental phubbing and the developmental outcomes of preschool children.