Connections between Parental Phubbing and Electronic Media Use in Young Children: The Mediating Role of Parent–Child Conflict and Moderating Effect of Child Emotion Regulation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I had the pleasure to read the paper entitled "Connections Between Parental Phubbing and Electronic Media Use in Preschoolers: The Mediating Role of Parent-Child Conflict and Moderating Effect of Child Emotion Regulation". This article analyzed the mediating effect of parent-child conflict between parental phubbing and electronic media use, and the moderating effect of Child emotion regulation between parental phubbing and parent-child conflict, using data from a sample of 612 parents of preschoolers. The topic was very interesting and informative. But I had several concerns about this manuscript.

1. Line 231-243. This study included 612 cases in Beijing. The empirical study did not give sufficient information on sampling methods. The representativeness of the sample is unclear yet. Further discussions related to the recruitment of respondents are needed and the sampling problem should be discussed in more detail.

2. Line 227. this study provided with a clear theoretical model linking preschoolers’ electronic media uses and the parental phubbing. But only those parents were interviewed. The observations of parents might be problematic. In addition, this model did not include the variable of age of the children, which showed in the analysis. More specific discussions are needed here.

3. Lines 242, this study examined the determinants of preschoolers’ electronic media uses. But those children aged from 1.09–6.93 years. It is recommended to exclude those cases with children aged younger than 3.

4. Lines 349-385, the part in the article needed more discussions. The structural equation model had been fully discussed in the existing research. The authors should tell us more about the correlations between phubbing behaviors and emotion regulation.

The quality of English language is quite fine. There are just several minor revisions required.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a rich article that contains a good deal of information about the inter-relationships among several test scores. It would be of interest to readers.

I mentioned an ethical concern in the checklist because, although informed consent was sought, it was not clear if a review board of any kind had approved the research project.

I confess that I had to look up phubbing online before reading the paper. Given this, the authors might try defining it briefly in their abstract.

Here are my comments in order of reading through the paper.

1. I applaud the title which is phrased in correlational (not causational) language.

2. The abstract is weakly worded and the first sentence is unclear. Actual measures taken and models employed to analyze relationships are not mentioned. The word "exacerbated" in line 16 suggests causality. A shorter and clearer abstract would be more useful. This abstract should signal the use of SEM and concerns with mediation.

3. Strong Point: Possible biases associated with gender of child and parent were well explored.

4. Strong Point: Using factor analysis to ensure the presence of more than one big factor in the data was a good idea.

5. Line 329-330: The relationship between parental phubbing and emotion regulation and electronic media use was significant but very weak. This should be mentioned. 

6. I have a bit of a problem with causal language creeping into discussions of findings from this study. For example, in line 355 the authors suggest that more phubbing led to increased electronic media use. This is a causal conclusion and there is no evidence for it, based on a correlation (or even based on an SEM model). Similarly, the word "increases" in line 403 should be phrased as "higher scores" or "more time".

7. Line 423. The data in no way suggest "a shift toward more equitable parenting roles". The authors did not assess parenting roles in any way. They simply know that in their data there were no big differences associated with gender of parent.

8. Line 498 forward. I cannot imagine a longitudinal study with the same variables as the authors employed. This research is based largely on individual differences, not differences across time. This is not a very good suggestion.

9. Lurking tone of the discussion. (I will let you know that I feel very strongly about causal statements made on the basis of correlational analyses. This led to my comments below):

There seems to be a suggestion of phubbing as wrong, and certain children's variables as unacceptable. None of this was established in the data. No clinical cutoffs were employed. And, more importantly, there is no evidence of causality. Maybe phubbing is good. Maybe it leads to more independent children who integrate better into society. Maybe children's phubbing leads to parents' phubbing. The authors mention internet addiction and then suggest that their study "fills in a gap" for that research. This was not a study on internet additiction. The authors should not just jump into talking about unrelated (or tangentially related) variables on the basis of their research.

What to do about it? Avoid causal language and the suggestion of clinical treatment in the discussion and elsewhere.

This research should be published. I will recommend acceptance of the article with minor revisions: these revisions should answer the points raised above.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf