Your teen does it, and you do too. How 'phubbing' hurts your relationship

SALT LAKE CITY — The behavior we worry about most in our kids may actually be hurting our relationship with them when WE'RE the ones doing it. New research is shining a light on "parent phubbing:" when a text, email or social media scroll pulls our attention away.

KSL Parenting Contributor Heather Johnson said it's affecting our connection and communication, even how kids feel valued at home.

"Phubbing is when you're looking at your phone instead of looking at the person in front of you," she explained.

The effects of phubbing have been studied for years, and Johnson explained that new research shows the impact goes deeper than we realize.

"We know that when parents are phubbing, meaning parents are the ones with phones in front of their faces, that there's a disconnect with their kids," she said. "We know that there's more emotional and behavioral problems in young kids when their parents have phones in front of them all the time."

Johnson also explained that children learn what they see. Kids grow up to be teenagers who have a hard time managing their phones when they've watched their parents phub as they've been raised.

A recent study involved more than 1,000 families. It found that when parents phub, it weakens family intimacy, which is the warmth and closeness felt in a home.

"As that weakens, then it weakens attachment amongst family members," Johnson said. "We have kids who turn into teenagers who have less capacity to manage emotions socially, emotionally."

She explained why we're all so vulnerable to phubbing and gave five things we can do differently.

Understand and manage the emotional gaps

"Recognize why you're picking up your phone," Johnson said. "Recognize why you're phubbing in the first place."

You could be relying on your phone for legitimate reasons. Calendars, schedules, school emails, grocery lists and family communication all live on those devices. But there's often another reason.

"We feel overwhelmed. We feel bored. We feel anxious, and so we pull it up just like our kids do," Johnson explained.

Understanding the emotional reason behind the habit makes it easier to address.

Have phone free mini moments

Johnson said some moments are just too important to share with a screen.

"We wanna create mini moments or these micro moments," she said. "It's so important that phones aren't in front of us as parents when kids wake up, when we drive them to school, when we pick them up, dinner, when we put them to bed."

She explained that these transition points are the most important moments in our day. Protecting these daily touchpoints helps children feel connected, seen and valued.

Narrate your phone use

Sometimes you genuinely need to use your phone. Johnson said to communicate when that's the case.

"When we don't explain to our kids why, what we're doing on our phones, they make up their own story," she explained. "The story that they make up is that what they're saying doesn't matter or that they're not important."

Johnson said to narrate your phone use. Explaining why you're picking your phone up tells kids what is actually happening.

"Hey, I'm getting directions to your soccer game. Give me just a minute," she suggested. "I'm checking the grocery list to make sure I have everything on it."

Have a one minute rule

"The one-minute rule is this important rule that we wanna have where every time a kid walks into the room, we pause everything for one minute," Johnson explained. "You hear them start to talk to you, put your phone down."

She said that one-minute creates a safe space so that they can choose to speak up or not. When kids see that they have access to your attention, they're more likely to share what's happening in their lives.

Repair when there are moments of distraction

No parent is going to get it right every time. We're going to mess up, but what matters more is what happens afterward.

"What we wanna do is repair it," Johnson explained. "I'm sorry I got distracted. I wanna hear what you have to say. Tell me again."

The important part is communicating that the child still matters. Without the repair, kids can walk away thinking they aren't important.

"It's not even so much that we do it as much as when we don't repair," Johnson emphasized. "That's where the damage hits."

When you repair, kids learn that relationships can handle mistakes.

This story originally aired on KSL Newsradio/KSL TV and has been reformatted for a digital audience using artificial intelligence.