A new study suggests the relationship between using screens to soothe upset children and the development of their cognitive skills often runs in both directions, though the pattern varies from child to child. Published in the Journal of Communication, the research finds that for most youngsters, screen time and cognitive development influence one another over time, while a small minority show patterns in which media use drives cognitive outcomes more strongly.
Executive functions, the mental skills that enable planning, sustained attention and juggling multiple tasks, are central to the study. Two core components—cognitive flexibility, the ability to shift thinking or adapt to new rules, and inhibitory control, the capacity to resist impulses—develop rapidly in early childhood and underpin later academic and social success.
Parents often turn to smartphones, tablets or television to calm a child during a tantrum or moments of intense emotion. This practice, termed media emotion regulation, has repeatedly been linked with developmental challenges in past research. Earlier PsyPost coverage noted that high screen time in infancy can indirectly hinder emotional regulation later, and more recently problems with media use in toddlers have been associated with subsequent social and emotional difficulties.
In examining how these dynamics unfold over time, the researchers confronted a longstanding question in media and child development: what causes what? Some theories posit that media exposure directly shapes development, others argue that a child’s own traits drive their media use, and a third view sees a feedback loop between the two. Lead author Jane Shawcroft, an assistant professor in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University, emphasises the challenge of proving causality in such queries.
“When we talk about issues related to children and media, usually the questions people are asking is about cause,” Shawcroft said. “‘IsTikTok causing mental health problems for my teen?’ ‘Will giving my child a tablet cause developmental issues?’”
“But cause is a tricky if not impossible thing to prove from a scientific perspective,” Shawcroft told PsyPost. “This study was really about trying to think carefully about one of the conditions for causality – that the cause has to come before the effect.”
To tackle this, the team sought to identify whether the ordering of events differed among children when parents used media to soothe their offspring. “In this study we were trying to see if there was evidence that the answer to the question ‘does giving a child media to calm them cause changes in their cognitive development’ is different for different children,” Shawcroft said. The researchers suspected that a one-size-fits-all conclusion might miss important developmental nuances.
The analysis drew on data from Project M.E.D.I.A., a long-running study of child development. The sample included 87 children whose parents provided annual information from the age of two and a half to seven and a half. Each year, parents reported how often they used media to help manage their child’s emotions, with responses scaled from 0 to 100.
When the children reached five to seven years old, they undertook computer-based tasks to assess executive functions. To test inhibitory control, they completed a game requiring them to identify the direction of a central arrow while ignoring surrounding arrows pointing in other directions. For cognitive flexibility, a card-sorting task required children to sort pictures first by one rule and then switch to a new rule.
The researchers also gathered family background information at the study’s outset, including household income, child temperament, parent stress and parent depressive symptoms. Using a statistical approach designed to group individuals with similar developmental trajectories, they then examined how each child’s use of media to soothe them and their executive functions predicted one another across years.
The analysis uncovered three distinct temporal patterns. The majority, comprising 87.36 per cent of the sample (76 children), fell into what the researchers termed the Bidirectional class. For these children, how often parents used media to soothe them predicted later executive function skills, and their executive function abilities likewise predicted future levels of media-based soothing by parents.
A smaller group, representing 7 per cent of the sample (six children), formed the Media Emotion Regulation Driven class. In this cohort, parental media soothing strongly forecast later cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control, while the reverse influence was minimal.
The third group, making up 6 per cent (five children), showed Diverging Temporal Ordering. For these youngsters, media use strongly predicted changes in cognitive flexibility, but inhibitory control predicted media use rather than the other way around.
Looking at what might predict a child’s membership in these groups, the researchers found that higher initial parent depressive symptoms increased the likelihood of falling into the Media Emotion Regulation Driven class. Conversely, greater parent depression at the outset was linked to a lower chance of being in the Bidirectional group. Other factors such as household income, parent stress and child temperament did not show a statistically significant relationship with group membership.
Shawcroft underscored the study’s nuanced conclusions: “The relationship between using media to calm children and development is different for different children.” She noted that most children followed a bidirectional pattern, while a minority did not, highlighting the need for personalised approaches in parenting and paediatric care when considering technology use.
She further stressed that the findings should be interpreted with caution. The study involved a relatively small sample over five years, and the minority groups comprised only a handful of children, meaning the percentages are provisional estimates subject to testing in larger cohorts. “This study is a little weird because we weren’t looking at effect sizes or the direction of effects, just the underlying patterns in the order of effects,” Shawcroft said. “This study doesn’t tell us if using media to calm children results in poorer cognitive development (although other studies do), or vice versa.”
Despite these caveats, the researchers advocate a more personalised approach to technology use in the home. They argue that clinicians and parents should consider a child’s unique context and family dynamics rather than adopting a universal rule about screen time and development. The authors of the study—Jane Shawcroft, McCall A. Booth, Chris L. Porter, Megan Van Alfen, Megan Gale, Lara A. Maximiano, Elena K. Holmes, Sarah M. Coyne, Hailey G. Holmgren, and Blake L. Jones—conclude that “from a parenting perspective, understanding how to support children in relationship to their technology use is going to be more about understanding your child and your family’s unique situation rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.”
The work thus points to a future in which guidance around media use for soothing children is tailored to individual developmental paths, rather than applying a single standard to all families.
