Temporal Associations Between Parents’ Daily Reports of Media Motivations, Infant Affect, and Parenting Behavior

Growing evidence linking media use to worse child outcomes highlights a need to understand mechanisms driving media use. Past research links media use to infant negative affect, and parents report using media to cope. However, trait-level measures can mask within-person effects that reflect mechanisms more directly. In the current study, 401 predominantly White (70.32%), college-educated (88.03%) parents (75.56% mothers) of an infant 12-24 months old (M=16.43 months, 51.37% boys) completed daily diaries reporting the frequency of parent and child activities, behaviors, and affective states each day for 21 consecutive days. Temporal network modeling was used to examine associations among parents’ daily reports of infant affect, media motivations, and parenting behavior. On days when infants were fussier, parents reported more frequent yelling and more frequent media use to occupy children, regulate children, and regulate parents’ own emotions the same day, and more media to occupy children the next day. The reverse was not true: Media use did not predict negative affect the next day. Using media to relax alone and to regulate children predicted more parent comforting the next day, while using media to connect with children predicted more infant positive affect the next day. Again, the reverse was not true. Thus, temporal effects suggest media use may be an adaptive strategy, at least in the short term. Critically, short-term (i.e., same-day and next-day) within-person effects were not found at the between-person level, underscoring the importance of examining fluctuations within individuals to identify mechanisms and potential intervention targets.