Study: Smart Phone Distracted Parenting May Make Kids Reckless

A study on “fragmented” caretaking of rodents has given UC Irvine researchers a window into the effect that parents’ usage of devices such as smart phones can have on babies, according to a study published this week.

A study of rats subjected to chaotic and disruptive caretaking showed issues with brain development that the UCI scientists have extrapolated to the effects of smart-phone use, Dr. Tallie Z. Baram said.

“We didn’t set out to study cell phones,” Baram said, but the conclusions of the study could be applied to how the devices can make caretakers absent from much-needed nurturing of infants.

“We set out to find out what are the important signals from mother or father that the baby’s brain needs to be at its best when he grows up, which is what every parent wants,” Baram told City News Service.

Baram and her team at the Conte Center on Brain Programming in Adolescent Vulnerabilities studied adolescent rats subjected to predictable and unpredictable maternal care.

The adolescent rats reared in unpredictable environments showed issues with the pleasure center of their brains, Baram said.

“We gave them the choice between water and sugar water and these guys couldn’t care,” Baram said of the rodents subjected to a chaotic upbringing. “We let them play with slightly smaller mates and these guys interacted with them, but didn’t do all the fun stuff. This is how we know the pleasure system is messed up.”

The disjointed environment, which included limiting bedding and nesting materials in cages for a week, affected the development of the brain’s dopamine- receptor system, Baram said. Infants need predictability to help that part of the brain develop normally.

“There’s a critical period when these connections in brain cells have to happen,” Baram said.

An improperly developed pleasure center system could lead adolescents to engage in risky behavior, Baram said.

“If you can’t get nice pleasure from riding a motorbike at 40 miles per hour, then you might try it at 140 miles per hour,” Baram said. “So it’s associated with risk-taking behavior.”

The scientists found that it leads to a condition called “anhedonia,” which is difficulty in feeling happy and can lead to depression.

“In analogy, we speculate that patterns of maternal-derived sensory input, specifically unpredictable and fragmented patterns, might influence the maturation of emotional systems within the developing brain,” the study says. “While the mechanisms for this speculated process require further study, its implications are profound: identifying optimal nurturing environments for emotional outcome may help reduce the high and increasing prevalence of emotional problems during adolescence.”

Baram’s team is about a year and a half into studying the influences on fragmented caretaking for humans. There is data on some youths taken over the past decade that the team is building on.

The study was published in Translational Psychiatry.

City News Service