Tantrums are part of growing up and show how children struggle to handle strong emotions.  How caregivers manage these outbursts however, can affect children’s emotional development.

Frontiers reports on a study in which a team of researchers investigated how giving children digital devices acting as “digital pacifiers” to avoid or manage tantrums may not be the best solution.  They can impact on children’s development of anger management skills and consequently fail to learn to regulate their emotions.

 The researchers also stressed the importance of letting children experience negative emotions and the crucial role parents play in the process.

Self-regulation involves emotional, mental and behavioural responses to certain situations. Children learn much about this during their early years of life. Some of these behaviours are about children’s ability to choose a deliberate response over an automatic one. This is known as effortful control, which is learned mainly through children’s relationship with their parents.

In recent years, giving children digital devices, or ‘screens’ to control their responses to emotions, especially if they’re negative, has become common.  This  study shows that children who are regularly given a digital device to calm them fail to learn to regulate their emotions   Dr Veronika Konok, the lead researcher, writes that if parents regularly offer a digital device to their child to calm them or to stop a tantrum, the child won’t learn to regulate their emotions.  “This leads to more severe emotion-regulation problems, specifically, anger management problems, later in life.”

More devices, less control

While giving a child a device to distract them is an easy and effective way to stop tantrums, in the long run, the practice has little benefit.  The researchers carried out an assessment in 2020 and a follow-up one a year later.  More than 300 parents of children aged between two and five years old completed a questionnaire that assessed child and parent media use.

They found that when parents used digital emotion regulation more often, children showed poorer anger and frustration management skills a year later. Children who were given devices more often as they experienced negative emotions also showed less effortful control at the follow-up assessment.

They concluded that tantrums cannot be cured by digital devices but children have to learn how to manage their negative emotions for themselves.  For this, they need the help of their parents rather than a device.

How to support children

The researchers also found that poorer baseline anger management skills meant that children were given digital devices more often as a management tool, rather like a vicious circle. The more frequently parents used devices to calm their children, the more pre-existing issues escalated.

It is important not to avoid situations that could be frustrating to the child, the researchers pointed out. Instead, it is recommended that parents coach their children through difficult situations, help them recognize their emotions, and teach them to handle them.

To equip parents of children with anger management problems for success, it is important that they receive support, the researchers said. For example, health professionals working with families could provide information on how parents can help their children manage their emotions without giving them tablets or smartphones.

Image supplied by Freepik.

More information: Cure for tantrums? Longitudinal associations between parental digital emotion regulation and children’s self-regulatory skills, Frontiers in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (2024). DOI: 10.3389/frcha.2024.1276154