Has the “electronic nanny” handled the child’s emotions well?

When children are still young, how to properly deal with their emotions and crying is always a headache for parents. But in recent years, this matter seems to have become simpler. The adults are chatting about something, and the children get impatient, so the parents take out their mobile phones to play games for them; when they go out in the car, and the children are bored, the parents turn on the tablet and let them watch videos; sometimes the children want their parents to come over and play with them for a while, and the parents will switch to their mobile phones for various reasons such as being busy or tired. Electronic screens seem to be more and more like a kind of “electronic nanny”, responsible for comforting children when they are emotional.

“Electronic nanny” makes children quiet for a while but makes them more noisy later

The world that children experience is often different from that of adults. Adult topics may not be attractive to them; the waiting, boredom and inconvenience that adults are accustomed to may be extremely long for them. So in these moments, they have emotions.

As they grow up, children will explore and experience methods of emotion regulation from events, learn various emotion regulation strategies from books and people around them, and with the development of their prefrontal lobes, their emotion regulation abilities will become stronger and stronger. For example, while waiting for adults to chat at the dinner table, the child may start playing with napkins and do some small crafts. The original boredom and irritability will be replaced by involvement and a sense of accomplishment. After a while, you might find the menu on the table interesting, or start observing the people at the next table.

But if a mobile phone appears at this time, the situation will be completely different. Cartoons can provide immediate stimulation, games can provide continuous feedback, and short videos can automatically deliver the next content to you. Emotions such as boredom that children originally need to deal with on their own are directly overridden by strong external stimulation. This can of course help the child calm down quickly in the moment, divert attention away from the original discomfort, and stop disturbing the adults.

But calming down and learning to regulate emotions are not the same thing. A 2023 study published in “JAMA Pediatrics” tracked hundreds of preschoolers and found that parents’ more frequent use of digital devices to help their children regulate negative emotions is related to children’s weaker executive functions, and may also make children’s emotional changes when encountering problems more intense after a period of time. And for those children who already have strong emotional changes, the more emotional they are, the more parents will use mobile phones as a means of comfort, which further aggravates their emotional variability, which may form a vicious cycle.

Over-reliance on “electronic nannies” and lack of practice in regulating emotions

The process of emotional regulation requires children to learn gradually: first feel the emotion, and then slowly learn to stop, think about it, and then decide what to do next. For example, if the same toy is taken away by others, a younger child may cry immediately; an older child may first tell himself “He will give it back to me”, or turn around and play another game. This is because the development of emotional regulation ability is inseparable from the development of the brain, including the emotional system itself and the development and maturity of advanced cognitive control systems involving brain areas such as the prefrontal lobes. Abilities such as attention control, impulse suppression, and re-understanding of events are all related to the latter.

But these abilities do not appear automatically as the brain grows. They also need to be practiced in real life experiences again and again. When a child feels bored, find something to do by himself; when he loses a game and is angry, try to look at the result from a different perspective; when he has a conflict with a child, first control the urge to hit someone, and then think about how to solve it… These seemingly ordinary experiences actually provide children with opportunities to practice emotional regulation and cognitive control.

If the electronic nanny always steps in too quickly, opportunities for these exercises may be reduced because new stimuli draw attention away immediately. Over time, children may become more accustomed to relying on external stimulation to quickly change their emotional state, rather than gradually developing more of their own regulation methods.

Moreover, the prefrontal lobe is involved in more than just emotion regulation. It is also associated with executive functions such as attentional control, working memory, impulse inhibition, and planning. If a child is used to new content appearing at any time, it may become more difficult to delay gratification and focus on learning. “Electronic nannies” may also plant the seeds for future addiction. From a psychological point of view, this is not difficult to understand. After all, watching screens can quickly eliminate current uncomfortable emotions, and children will want to watch screens more and more.

Children need more than just an “electronic nanny”

However, it is not completely unfeasible to occasionally find an “electronic nanny” for your children. A 2025 study published in the “Journal of Child and Family Studies” gave parents an interesting reminder that parents’ response to their children’s negative emotions and the quality of the parent-child relationship are particularly important for children’s emotional regulation, which may weaken the impact of “electronic nannies”. Researchers even discussed that if parents and children use electronic devices to learn emotion regulation strategies together, will “electronic nannies” have a longer-term positive effect? In other words, perhaps the atmosphere of the family and the needs of the children need to be taken more seriously than whether or not the “electronic nanny” itself is used.

When children have emotions, parents can not rush to hand over the mobile phone, but try to understand and accept the emotions with their children. Get close to your child, squat down and ask him if he is tired, bored, or feels left out, and then repeat his feelings. Even if you just say “you don’t want to be alone,” you are helping your child understand his own feelings. This is the first step to regulate emotions and an important step to bring the child closer to the parent. As for accepting emotions, it means allowing these emotions to exist without having to worry about solving them immediately, but treating them as common, normal, situations that everyone will have and will encounter when they grow up.