[irjustin]

I largely agree this is a weak study, but it also feels like no matter how you run this study it's going to be flawed.

Parent-child interactions, relationships, feelings are probably the hardest thing to quantify at any scale.

In the end, it's really, "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.

[andai]

I forget the terminology but I read something recently about how people are paying too much attention to their kids and it's making their kids neurotic.

Like when kids were growing up a couple decades ago they could just do whatever they wanted and those folks turned out all right. And now we've got people obsessing over where their children are and literally tracking their location, and the results don't seem to be so great.

(I heard that this difference had actually been quantified but unfortunately I don't have a link.)

I remember something about how, some percentage of children are not even allowed to leave the yard. Whereas their parents were just roaming for miles, at a much younger age.

Although I suppose at the same time, we're also less present with each other. So I guess there's at least two dimensions to that.

I guess the first one would be, are you relaxed and do you trust them to take care of themselves, even at a young age.

And the second one would be... are you actually there, or is it just your body that's there.

[dinfinity]

It's an interesting question:

Are people who are very very securely attached to their parents happy later in life, or is there a ceiling? The terminology invites certain conclusions here.

Maybe the whole attention thing is more a matter of quality, rather than quantity

[makeitdouble]

There is always a question of whether a bad study is better than no study.

I think weak studies validating people's natural intuitions tend to do more damage than we give them credit for. Even if another better d signed study does way more work and comes with clear results that disprove the natural intuiton, it will be buried in the sea of low effort studies and people will already have settle the issue in their minds as "proven by science".

[somenameforme]

100%. I completely agree with this study's 'findings' but also agree the study is garbage.

So many studies now a days have experiments designed to confirm a hypothesis instead of challenge it. They should be doing everything possible they can to disprove their hypothesis and only accept it after all attempts at falsification fail. But of course that's in idealized science. In reality, publish or perish means you need to get something published and negative results don't get published. And so this study, like what seems to be most now a days, is designed to prove their hypothesis - which ironically proves nothing.

[rmunn]

This (experiments only designed to confirm a hypothesis and not trying to falsify it) is also part of the reason why so many studies can't be reproduced later, the "reproducibility crisis". One of my relatives, a medical doctor who just recently retired, has often lamented the incentive structure that results in negative results not getting published. (She has also said that she wants to see about seven studies pointing in the same direction before she starts to take it seriously).

[paytonjjones]

A better version of this study would be to run an experiment where you take away (or heavily restrict) parental phone access over a month or two and measure the parent-child relationship vs. a control group.

> "Pay more attention to your kids", which is a pretty good universal message to put across.

I wouldn't be too sure of that actually: https://www.archbridgeinstitute.org/the-secret-to-parenting-...