‘Emotion regulation through media’ is a new technical term for a phenomenon that researchers are encountering with increasing frequency. It involves an upset child who cannot control their emotions, a tired mother who is unable to calm her child down, and a mobile phone that solves the problem by capturing the child’s attention and calming them down. It really does work, but little is known about the impact this has on children.
Researchers at Ohio State University have now set out to find the answer – with results showing that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. “It’s not just that the effects are greater or lesser in some children – the underlying pattern varies completely from child to child,” said Jane Shawcroft, who led the research.
Shawcroft’s team studied the relationship between ‘media-induced emotional regulation’ and a number of skills that underpin social functioning and cognitive functions, which enable people to perceive the world around them, learn, retain information and respond to stimuli.
One of these functions is known as ‘cognitive flexibility’. It refers to children’s ability to respond to changing demands, understand different points of view and solve problems. Another is ‘inhibitory control’, which in turn enables them to suppress impulsive reactions – something that is important for conscious decision-making and planning. These are therefore the fundamental building blocks not only for the development of a healthy personality, but also for success at school and the ability to build meaningful social relationships throughout life.
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The researchers were interested not only in whether using screens to calm children down affects the development of these cognitive skills, but also in whether and how parents think about offering their children a mobile phone or tablet screen.
In most children, psychologists found the pattern they had anticipated. The harder it was to calm a child down, the more often their parents turned on a screen to soothe them. And the reverse was also true: for children aged between two and seven who were easier to calm down, parents offered screens less frequently. However, this is only the first part of the cycle; the second is more significant – screen use was linked to a negative impact on the children’s attention spans, which in turn made them harder to calm down. For parents, this led to further use of screens to calm them down.
This answer may seem logical and universally applicable, but unfortunately it is not that simple. It has emerged that there are two not entirely small groups for whom these rules did not work – in slightly different ways for each – and together they account for around thirteen per cent of all children. In one group, no negative effects were observed; in the other, ‘emotional regulation through media’ did not lead to parents using this strategy more frequently. This is likely to be linked more to certain characteristics of the parents than to the children themselves. In fact, the researchers observed higher rates of depression in the second group. However, this aspect has not yet been fully described, precisely because the results deviated so significantly from the ‘norm’.
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However, the hypothesis for further research focuses precisely on the parents’ mental health. “We found that parents’ mental health is a strong predictor of how they use technology with their young children, because technology acts as a tool that parents can turn to when they lack the resources to cope with their own poor mental health,” said Shawcroft.
The research also revealed that parents feel they are sorely lacking in useful and practical tools to calm their young children and help them with self-regulation. According to experts, the problem is exacerbated among groups of parents who themselves are struggling with mental health issues or feelings of insecurity. Rather than seeking more complex but long-term solutions, parents tend to resort to the simplest options, which, paradoxically, tend to make the problem worse in the long run.
Link to the study
An article written by Tomáš Karlík (CT), initially published on 15 July 2026, 14:15 (CEST)