Absent While Present? Parental Smartphone Use and Children’s Emotional Well-Being in Everyday Family Life

Smartphones are deeply embedded in everyday family life, yet parental smartphone use is often framed as harmful for children’s well-being. Moving beyond moralized perspectives, the present study examined how parental smartphone use in the presence of the child relates to children’s affective well-being using a 10-day experience sampling design. Parents (N = 131) repeatedly reported their smartphone use around their child, their child’s positive and negative affect, and perceived child fundamental need threats, alongside device-logged measures of smartphone use. Across analyses, higher parental smartphone use was largely unrelated to children’s affective well-being. Parents who, on average, used their smartphones more frequently around their child did not report lower child positive affect. Only mothers who reported higher overall smartphone use also reported higher child negative affect. In contrast, on days when parents reported using their smartphones more than usual, they also perceived greater threats to their child’s fundamental needs. None of these associations emerged when parental smartphone use was assessed using device-logged data. Taken together, these findings suggest that perceived child need threat may be more closely linked to parents’ subjective experiences and interpretations of their smartphone use rather than to objectively measured smartphone behavior itself. This discrepancy underscores the importance of distinguishing between subjective and objective assessments of parental smartphone use and highlights the need for future research that integrates children’s perspectives and interactional context to clarify when and how parental smartphone use may matter for children’s well-being.