Are you a phubber? Or maybe you have been a phubbee? It’s not nice being phubbed, is it?
If you are sat reading this with not a scooby doo what I’m going on about, you’re not alone.
When I first heard the term ‘phubbing’ from a colleague, I feared the conversation had taken an unexpected turn in a rather awkward direction. Thankfully, I was wrong.
Phubbing is described in the Oxford English dictionary as:
“The act of ignoring someone you are with and giving attention to your mobile phone instead”
The name comes from smashing together the word phone and the word snub. You are snubbing someone using your phone, hence, phubbing.
There’s no use denying it, we have all been guilty of this.
It made me think about the times I told my kids to “just hold on” as I finished a Facebook post. It made me think about the times my kids ignored questions about their day in favour of staring at the ipad. It made me think of the evenings my partner and I spend blanking each other on our phones.
Phubbing might sound like a funny word, but does it have a serious impact on our familial relationships?
If I want to be the best Dad I can be, I need to find out more.
Impact on Emotional Development
After I looked into this a little bit more deeply, what I found was genuinely upsetting.
We all know we should use our phones less, especially around our children. I like to think I’m pretty good at putting it down and engaging with my kids. After doing some further reading though, I may have to rethink.
When parents make their children compete with phones for their attention, they don’t realise the damage they cause:
- Lower emotional intelligence levels
- Inability to regulate emotions
- Difficulty forming social and professional relationships in later life
- Increased instances of acting out
- Feelings of unimportance
- Diminished quality of parent-child interactions
- Lack of family cohesion
Has your child ever done or said something, and your partner commented: “It’s you he/she gets it from”. It’s probably true. Because children don’t learn so much from what we tell them, but what we show them. Shouty parents? Shouty kids, etc.
When parents are with their children but focusing on their phones, they are showing them something alright. How to disengage. How to detach. How to ignore.
A study of 6,000 children aged between 8 and 13 found that 32% of them felt ‘unimportant’ when parents used their phones during family time. Over 50% thought their parents spent too much time on their phone.
What’s more, the way they react to this can lead to behavioural problems. This isn’t a child being ‘naughty’, it’s a child desperate for their parent’s attention. They just haven’t learned how to regulate their emotions to be able to communicate that yet. And they won’t do if their parents keep phubbing them.
So kids grow up alongside their parents but also disconnected from them, without learning the social skills to build meaningful relationships in other walks of life either.
It’s desperately sad.
The Impact of ‘Still Face’
Another associated phrase I hadn’t come across before, was ‘still face’.
This is the face you make when you have been staring at your phone for a long time. It’s sort of expressionless, no emotion, no life, just kind of empty.
It’s a bit like being in a trance. The parent is there but not there. They may be reading something incredibly stimulating for their mind, but on the outside, they display nothing.
When children see this a lot, it gives them the impression their parents are depressed, upset, emotionally withdrawn. This can make children feel uneasy or distressed and stunts the child’s emotional development.
An initial experiment into this idea took place back in the 1970s, way before smart phones were invented. But smart phone use creates a very similar set of circumstances and has the same negative consequences.
Look at this:
Even babies recognise when their parent is giving more attention to their phone than to them. It takes very little time for the baby to become distressed.
Younger children learn from our facial expressions. Therefore, if we spend a lot of time expressionless they will struggle to read emotions in others, because they never learned it from us. They are also more likely to grow up with stunted emotional responses themselves. They are less likely to enjoy life to the full because they haven’t been shown how to.
Still face is something we all need to be more aware of. It’s insidious. Subtle but with profound long term implications.
Stop Your Family From Phubbing
Since finding out about phubbing, I have had a chat with my missus about it.
We both agree that we should make a huge effort not to phub our kids. Equally important though, we don’t want them phubbing us either. This doesn’t mean they aren’t allowed to bury themselves in their phones and ipads sometimes. It just means we need to be clear about when it’s ok and when it isn’t.
So we have made some new rules.
When you think about it, our days are split into different sections. We have a getting ready section in the morning, a going to work/school section, a learning/working section in the morning, a dinner break, and so on. However, the evening can become one long unfocussed part of the day where we are basically just killing time until bed.
So we split it into sections.
We have:
- After school decompress: 3.30 – 4.30
- Homework: 4.30 – 5.00
- Cooking/Free time: 5.00 – 6.00
- Family meal time – 6.00 – 7.00
- Family time – 7.00 – 8.00
- Bedtime – 8.00
It’s not as rigid as it seems when written in a list like this, but that’s the loose structure we follow. For example, it doesn’t take us an hour to eat, so while we are washing up and clearing things away the kids can use their devices if they want, but not during the meal. However, at 7.00 we spend an hour together with no phones, whether we play games, watch TV or whatever else. We are a bit more free and easy right after school.
We also have a game called Doom Scroll. It’s just for fun, but it discourages mindless scrolling. If one of us catches another doom scrolling on our phone, we take a picture (on our phones, ironically) and shout “Doom scroll!”. We’ve got a chart in the dining room. Whoever is caught doom scrolling most often at the end of the week gets a forfeit. If there are any protests about what was and wasn’t doom scrolling, we refer to the picture and judge it on the accused’s ‘still face’.
It’s early days but phubbing has seen a significant decrease in our household since this was implemented. I will remain on my guard though, because the phub can sneak back in surprisingly quickly.
