Does my phone affect my baby?
By Adam Linmore · October 30, 2026
Start with what the research does not say. It does not say that a parent who looks at a phone is harming her child, or that the phone is the enemy of the family. Parents have always had something in their hands: a newspaper, a sewing basket, another child. What the research says is narrower and more useful: what a baby does when the face she is looking at is looking at a screen, what a particular kind of interruption costs, and which minutes of the day the costs fall in. A parent who knows which minutes matter can protect them, without putting the phone away for ten hours.
The face that stops answering
The best-known experiment on a non-answering face is almost fifty years old. In the still-face experiment, a mother plays with her baby normally, then, on a signal, holds her face expressionless and stops responding. The baby tries everything, smiles, reaches, shrieks, and then turns away and slumps. Laboratories around the world have repeated it, and babies respond in much the same way.
In 2018 researchers replaced the blank face with a phone. Fifty infants of seven to twenty-four months played with their mothers, watched them turn to a phone for a few minutes and then had them back. As a group, the infants showed more negative and less positive emotion during the phone minutes, as in the classic experiment. The infants of mothers who reported using devices more in daily life showed less positive emotion and explored the room less during those minutes, and bounced back less when their mothers returned. The study cannot say why.
What was observed in ordinary places
Restaurants. In a 2014 study, researchers watched 55 caregivers eating with young children in fast-food restaurants. Forty took out a mobile device. The children of the caregivers most absorbed in a screen made bids for attention, talking, reaching and climbing, and many went unanswered; when the children escalated, some caregivers answered sharply without looking up.
Playgrounds. Among 466 caregivers watched at Seattle playgrounds, most used their phones briefly or not at all: more than four in ten never touched one. But a caregiver absorbed in a phone was much less likely to answer a child’s bid than one talking with a friend or tending another child.
These are small studies in particular places. They show what went with the phone in the next five minutes: fewer turns.
What one call cost
The most precise measurement came from an experiment with two-year-olds. In a laboratory, 38 mothers taught their toddlers two made-up verbs, “blicking” for bouncing and “frepping” for shaking, one at a time. During the teaching of one of the words, the mother’s phone rang, by arrangement, and she took a short call. The toddlers learned the word that had not been interrupted. They did not learn the word whose teaching was broken by the call, even though the mother went back to it and used it as many times in total.
The lesson is not that a short call is dangerous. It is that learning a word is an exchange with a beginning and an end, and in this experiment the exchange did not survive being interrupted. The turn is the unit, and the number of words said is the wrong measure.
Over time
Researchers call all this technoference, interference by technology. In a study of 183 American couples with a child of five or under, surveyed four times over six months, parents who reported more technoference reported more behavior problems in their children later, and children’s behavior problems went with more parental stress and then more technoference. Each fed the other. The largest review so far, of 21 studies from ten countries, found parents’ device use in front of children under five going with weaker thinking skills and more emotional and behavioral problems: small links, but consistent ones. Almost all of it rests on what parents reported, and none of it proves cause.
Why the phone is there
The researchers who ran the restaurant study also interviewed 35 parents and grandparents of young children about their own devices. They described tension, not a verdict. The phone let some of them work from home and spend more hours with their children, and it relieved stress as well as causing it. The study’s title named it: “the excitement and exhaustion of parenting while connected.” The phone is often in a parent’s hand because the parent is alone with a small child for many hours, and the phone is the only adult in the room. That is not a failing. It is the situation the plan below is built for.
The minutes that matter
The costs in these studies fall in particular minutes: when a child is making a bid, when a word is being taught, when a child has just looked for a face, when a meal is eaten together. A parent who answers a message while a toddler is absorbed in a pile of blocks has lost nothing the research can measure. A parent who answers a message while the toddler holds up a stone to show her has lost the turn, and the turn was the lesson. So the rules are about which minutes, not how many hours:
Four places without the phone: the floor, the bath, the table and the stroller, where many of a young child’s turns happen.
A spot for the phone, the same spot as the other screens, out of reach and out of sight from the floor. A charging spot in the kitchen works.
Sounds off for everything that is not a person calling. In the laboratory, one ordinary call was enough to break a lesson, so the fewer sounds the phone makes, the fewer lessons it breaks.
One phone-free hour, at the same time every day: the first hour home together, or the hour before bed, because a bedtime routine is a sequence and a phone in the middle breaks it.
A time for being absorbed, which everyone is sometimes: when the child is asleep or with someone else.
A cheap watch, so the phone is not the clock.
That is all. It is not a program, and it takes less willpower than a ban. A video call with family is a different thing: a person on a call can answer. Do video calls count? explains why.
If you are worried
If anything about your child’s looking, pointing, talking or play worries you, or she has lost a skill she had, talk with your child’s doctor now, and ask for a hearing test first. No parent is to blame for a child’s development, and the loop between a struggling child, a tired parent and a screen is nobody’s fault; it can be interrupted at any point. “Virtual autism” is not a medical diagnosis; if that phrase brought you here, read what it means.
Sources: Tronick et al. 1978; Myruski et al. 2018; Radesky et al. 2014b; Hiniker et al. 2015; Reed, Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff 2017; McDaniel and Radesky 2018b; Toledo-Vargas et al. 2025; Radesky et al. 2016. Full references are in chapters 4, 15 and 17 of Virtual Autism; the sources page lists the key studies behind this site.
Want the full picture? Virtual Autism sets out the research, its limits and a practical plan for home.
General information, not medical advice. If you are worried about your child, talk to your child’s doctor.