Screen time and cognitive skills often predict each other over time, but the pattern varies by child

A new study provides evidence that the relationship between using screens to soothe upset children and the development of their cognitive skills is often a two-way street, though this pattern can vary from child to child. The research, published in Journal of Communication, suggests that for most children, screen time and cognitive development influence each other over time, while for a small group, screen use primarily drives cognitive outcomes.

Executive functions are mental skills that help us plan, focus attention, and juggle multiple tasks. Two key parts of this cognitive system are cognitive flexibility, which is the ability to shift thinking or adapt to new rules, and inhibitory control, which is the capacity to resist impulses and stop an automatic behavior. These skills grow rapidly during early childhood and form a foundation for academic and social success.

Parents sometimes use smartphones, tablets, or television to help calm their children when they are throwing a tantrum or struggling with strong feelings. This practice is known as media emotion regulation. Research has generally pointed to a relationship between heavy screen use and developmental challenges. For instance, a study covered by PsyPost earlier this year suggested that high screen time in infancy might indirectly lead to poorer emotional regulation later in childhood. Similarly, another study covered by PsyPost in 2024 indicated that problematic media use in toddlers is linked to an increase in emotional and social difficulties a few years later.

But how exactly do these things influence each other over time? In communication and media research, there is an ongoing debate about what causes what. Some theories propose that media use directly causes changes in an individual. Other theories argue the reverse, proposing that a person’s individual traits and struggles cause them to seek out specific media. A third perspective proposes a cycle, where media use and individual traits continuously feed into each other.

“When we talk about issues related to children and media, usually the questions people are asking is about cause,” said lead author Jane Shawcroft, an assistant professor in the School of Communication at The Ohio State University. “‘Is TikTok causing mental health problems for my teen?’ ‘Will giving my child a tablet cause developmental issues?’”

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“But cause is a tricky if not impossible thing to prove from a scientific perspective,” Shawcroft told PsyPost. “This study was really about trying to think carefully about one of the conditions for causality – that the cause has to come before the effect.”

Specifically, the research team wanted to understand this temporal ordering, or which event happens first, in the context of parents using media to soothe their children. “In this study we were trying to see if there was evidence that the answer to the question ‘does giving a child media to calm them cause changes in their cognitive development’ is different for different children,” Shawcroft said. The researchers suspected that if the pattern varies, looking at group averages might hide important differences in how children actually develop.

To explore this, the researchers analyzed data from Project M.E.D.I.A., a long-term study following child development. They focused on a group of 87 children whose parents provided information over several years, spanning from when the children were two and a half years old to seven and a half years old. Each year, parents completed surveys detailing how often they used media to help manage their child’s emotions, with responses converted to a scale from 0 to 100.

When the children were between five and seven years old, they completed computer-based tasks to measure their executive functions. To test inhibitory control, children played a game where they had to identify the direction of a middle arrow while ignoring surrounding arrows pointing in different directions. To test cognitive flexibility, they completed a card-sorting task that required them to sort pictures by one rule, such as color, and then suddenly switch to a new rule, such as shape.

The researchers also gathered information on the family’s background at the beginning of the study. This included household income, child temperament, parent stress, and parent depressive symptoms. Using a statistical approach designed to group individuals with similar developmental paths, the researchers looked at how each child’s media emotion regulation and executive functions predicted each other from year to year.

The analysis identified three distinct patterns of temporal ordering among the children. The vast majority of the children, 87.36 percent or 76 kids, fell into a group the researchers called the Bidirectional class. For these children, the process was a two-way street. How often parents used media to soothe them predicted their later executive function skills, and their executive function skills equally predicted how often parents would use media to soothe them in the future.

A much smaller group, making up 7 percent of the sample or six children, fell into the Media Emotion Regulation Driven class. In this group, parental use of media to regulate emotions strongly predicted the children’s later cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control. The reverse was not true, as the children’s cognitive skills had almost no predictive power over how much media their parents used to soothe them.

The third group, making up 6 percent of the sample or five children, showed a Diverging Temporal Ordering. For these kids, media use strongly predicted changes in cognitive flexibility, but the pattern flipped for inhibitory control, with inhibitory control predicting media use.

When the researchers looked at what family factors might predict which group a child belonged to, they found that a parent’s mental health played a role. Higher levels of parent depressive symptoms at the start of the study were linked to a higher probability of a child being in the Media Emotion Regulation Driven group. Higher parent depression was also linked to a lower probability of a child being in the Bidirectional group. Other factors like household income, parent stress, and child temperament did not have a statistically significant relationship with group membership.

“The relationship between using media to calm children and development is different for different children,” Shawcroft explained. “Most kids we found a bidirectional pattern – using media to calm them was related to their cognitive development, and their cognitive development in turn was related to how often their parents used media to calm them down.”

“But there were children who were exceptions and showed different patterns,” she added. “This means that from a parenting perspective, understanding how to support children in relationship to their technology use is going to be more about understanding your child and your family’s unique situation rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.”

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study relied on a relatively small group of 87 children, largely because collecting detailed behavioral data over a five-year span is difficult. The small number of children in the two minority classes means these specific group percentages should be treated as estimates that need further testing in larger groups.

“This study is a little weird because we weren’t looking at effect sizes or the direction of effects, just the underlying patterns in the order of effects,” Shawcroft noted. “This study doesn’t tell us if using media to calm children results in poorer cognitive development (although other studies do), or vice versa.”

It is also important to note that establishing the timeline of events is only one part of finding a cause-and-effect relationship. Just because one behavior happens before another does not mean it is the sole cause. The researchers point out that future work needs to explore other hidden variables that might influence both a family’s media habits and a child’s brain development.

Despite these constraints, the findings point toward a more personalized approach to technology and parenting. Rather than assuming screen time affects all children in the exact same way, pediatricians and parents might need to consider a family’s unique context. For some families, reducing the use of screens as a soothing tool might directly improve a child’s cognitive development. For most, however, a child’s developing brain and a family’s media habits are locked in a continuous loop, influencing one another year after year.

The study, “Media emotion regulation and executive functions: individual differences in temporal ordering among young children,” was authored by Jane Shawcroft, McCall A. Booth, Chris L. Porter, Megan Van Alfen, Megan Gale, Lara A. Maximiano, Elena K. Holmes, Sarah M. Coyne, Hailey G. Holmgren, and Blake L. Jones.