Family chat? Sorry, we’re busy checking our phones

FAMILY time used to be spent at the dinner table discussing the events of the day.

But now relatives spend nearly 40 per cent of shared time checking phones and tablets.

And parents rather than children are the worst culprits, being most likely to look at their devices during time together.

A study has found that families spend half an hour longer under the same roof every day than at the turn of the Millennium. But almost all the extra time is ‘alone time’ – and often spent staring at screens.

The results, using diaries from more than 2,500 British children and their parents, suggest smartphones may have made it harder for parents to escape the office. For children, they have created a ‘bedroom culture’ where it is tempting to break away from parents and siblings to watch films or use social media alone. Dr Stella Chatzitheochari, a co-author of the study from the University of Warwick, said: ‘While we did not find any significant changes in the time family members spend interacting and doing things together, it is certainly possible that mobile devices distract people’s attention during family activities, leading to feelings that the quality of family relationships is under threat.’

More than two-thirds of British adults and children own a smartphone. Researchers looked at ‘time-use’ surveys from 2000 and 2015. Results for 2015 show children and parents spent 379 minutes a day in the same location – up from 347 minutes in the year 2000. But those extra minutes were made up almost entirely of ‘alone time’ and most of this was spent on devices. Surprisingly, families spent about the same amount of time eating and watching television together in 2015 as they did in 2000. But the 2015 poll, which asked about technology use, found parents spent almost a fifth of shared family time checking devices – worse than children who spent 13 per cent of the time doing the same.

The findings, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, show parents and children spend 38 per cent of family time looking at screens, and that older children were worse than younger ones.