The Associations Between Parents’ Smartphone Usage And Preschool-aged Children’s Physical Activity

PURPOSE: Little is known about the relationship between parents’ smartphone usage and young children’s physical activity (PA). Therefore, we examined whether parents’ logged smartphone usage associates with 3- to 4-year-old children’s device-measured PA. METHODS: Data were from the cross-sectional SUNRISE Finland Pilot Study conducted in 2022. Parents reported smartphone usage time for each day from the past week by accessing the data on their phones, from which we calculated an average usage time (min/day). Children wore ActiGraph accelerometers on their waist for five days to measure sedentary time (SED), light-intensity PA (LPA), moderate- to vigorous-intensity PA (MVPA), vigorous-intensity PA (VPA) and total PA, for which we used average min/day. We used Spearman’s correlation to examine associations between smartphone usage and PA, and Mann Whitney U test to compare parents’ smartphone usage between children who met and did not meet the World Health Organization guideline for PA in this age group (≥180 min of total PA including ≥60 min of MVPA per day). RESULTS: Thirty-six child (mean ± SD age 4 ± 0.5 years, 56% girls) parent pairs had accelerometer and smartphone usage data available. Parents’ sex (89% mothers), education or income did not associate with their smartphone usage time (mean 150 ± 67 min/day), and thus were not used as covariates in the analyses. Twenty-seven (75%) of children met the PA guideline. Parents’ smartphone usage correlated negatively with children’s MVPA (rs = -0.36, p = 0.031), VPA (rs = -0.33, p = 0.047) and total PA (rs = -0.34, p = 0.044). In addition, parents of children who did not meet the PA guideline spent more time using their smartphones compared to parents of children who met the PA guideline (208 ± 75 vs. 130 ± 53 min/day, p = 0.007). Parents’ smartphone usage did not correlate with children’s SED or LPA. CONCLUSION: Results of this pilot study suggest that higher amounts of parents’ smartphone usage associates with lower PA levels among their 3- to 4-year-old children. Given the low statistical power, these results need to be verified using a larger sample from the SUNRISE Finland Main Study or other studies. Supported by Samfundet Folkhälsan, Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland, Juho Vainio Foundation and Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation.