This is Life Kit for Parenting Screen Time Guide, part three, parents and screens.

I'm your host, Anya Kaminets, an NPR education reporter, and the author of a book called

The Art of Screen Time. And I want to start by telling you about this small study that came

out a few years ago, and it kind of went viral. How viral? Well, I'll let the host on the

today's show tell you about it. We're starting for something that a lot of parents will relate to,

want to listen to some sobering advice for distracted parents, and the advice says put down the

cell phone. A new study out just this morning's all. In a nutshell, the researchers went out to

fast food restaurants all of her Boston, and they found that out of 55 family groups observed

at the restaurants, in 40 of them, the grown-up was on their phone or tablet at some point during

the meal, 40 out of 55, that's 73%. And the more all these grown-ups were sucked into their phones,

the more the kids seemed to act up to get their attention. And the moms and dads responded to the

kids not so great. In a quote, harsh, quote, robotic manner, one little boy put his hands on a woman's

face just to try to get her to look up from her tablet for a second, and she pushes little hands out

of the way. This study really struck a nerve. The news response to it was amazing. It was so enormous.

Dr. Jenny Rideski, a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at the University of Michigan,

did the study when she was still a research fellow. People wanted to cover this because they

wanted some sort of like empiric evidence, something to say like, what is going on? Science is

worried about this. Up to now, our screen time series for LifeKid has been full of tips on how to

improve your children's relationship with technology. But in this episode we zero in on the most

important part of the equation. You. Yes, you. The mom taking pictures of the playground, the

dad swiping through Twitter at dinner, the caregiver possibly listening through one earbud

in front of your kids right now. We did a call out to get your questions and we also have some

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