Digital Screen Exposure of Children During Complementary Feeding: The Role of Maternal Social Media Addiction.
Bahise Aydın, Hatice Sarı, Dilara Kurt and 1 others
PMID 41817092WHAT IT FOUND
A quarter of children (25.1%) were exposed to screens while being fed.
Mothers who used screens during feeding, had children with more screen time, or rated their feeding confidence low scored higher on social media addiction. The study cannot show cause and effect.
Key findings
01The mothers' average score on the Social Media Addiction Scale was 44.11 on a scale running from 20 to 100, which the authors describe as a moderate level of social media addiction.
02About a quarter of the children (25.1%) were exposed to digital screens during complementary feeding, 27.6% had more than an hour of screen time a day, and 52.3% of mothers used screens for more than an hour a day themselves.
03Mothers scored higher on the social media addiction scale if they used screens while feeding their child, if their child spent more time in front of screens, if they used screens for over 3 hours a day themselves, if they found complementary feeding difficult, or if they rated their own feeding confidence as low.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
All the mothers were recruited at a single hospital in one region of Türkiye, so the numbers may not hold in other settings or countries. More than half of the mothers had a university degree, far above the general population. The authors call this a sampling bias that limits how far the findings generalise. Everything came from mothers' own reports, which can be shaped by wanting to give the expected answer, by misremembering, or by not understanding a question. Each variable was looked at on its own. Education, employment, income, number of children and the child's age travel together, and the analysis did not separate their effects. The authors state that potential confounding was not controlled. Everything was measured at one point in time, so the study cannot show that screen use causes anything, in either direction. The social media addiction scale has no clinical cut-off point, so 'moderate' is a comparison with the middle of the scale, not a diagnosis. The data come from a form the researchers wrote themselves for this study, not from a previously validated feeding questionnaire.
Declared interests
Funded by the Türkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Araştırma Kurumu (TÜBİTAK) 2209-A student project programme (2023 second-term application, 1919B012333354). The authors declare no conflicts of interest, and there is no indication that the funder designed the study or wrote the report. Permission was obtained by email from the scale's authors to use the Social Media Addiction Scale-Adult Form.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that a mother's social media use causes her child's screen exposure or harms feeding. The study is a single-point survey from one hospital, everything was self-reported, and no factor was adjusted for any other. One result even runs the other way: using screens during feeding was linked to lower, not higher, addiction scores.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →