Nearly half of British families with children text in the home when they want to communicate, insurance company says
Almost a third of people living together in homes no longer converse face-to-face and text as a substitute, says a British insurance company who polled random consumers.
Insurance giant Aviva found that a massive 32 percent of respondents text each other “in the same house, rather than actually speaking face-to-face,” it claims in a news release.
That statistic soars to almost half (45 percent) when the homes contain kids. One of the reasons, the company believes, is that folks don’t put down their smartphones, and other devices when they’re having meals. Smartphones, or mobiles as they are called there, are in use at mealtime in about a third of homes.
Not everyone in the house has embraced the mealtime smartphone, though. Many don’t like the idea of the things proliferating at the table. Forty-one percent of parents feel meals are getting interrupted by finger-jabbing family members poring over their absorbing devices.
Part of that vocalized winging from some is likely due to much cold-shouldering. Forty-four percent reckon conversations get ignored by household phone users who are distracted because they are using the devices.
Aviva’s work, performed by Censuswide Research in late 2016, looked at close to 2,800 people for the study. It included 931 children.
The questioning found contention in numerous cases, with nearly half of all the respondents (48 percent) griping that members of the household are spending an excessive amount of time looking at the devices in general, including the aforementioned mealtimes.
Smartphones’ affect on sleep, stress levels
Loss of sleep and laziness was also widely reported. Detrimental staying up too late at night, primarily through social media use, was uncovered in 38 percent of homes with children. A quarter of households overall experienced the same sleepiness issues.
Video games and general online life were vexing many. It causes family members to be bone-idle, according to 32 percent of the respondents in homes with children. Just 25 percent of homes overall reported the same idle behavior.
Further trouble is that feelings of not being able to switch off was discovered in 18 percent of overall households and almost a quarter (22 percent) of homes with children.
And stress too was revealed by some of the respondents. Around 18 percent of homes with children, and 13 percent of homes overall thought that being always connected and or contactable “has made someone in the house feel stressed.”
Interestingly the report is a bit vague about who in the family is actually being the smartphone villain. Could it indeed be the parents? Only one of the questions asked, and reported on, by the insurance company actually affirms that it’s the device-wielding kids who are causing the anti-social problems (mealtimes getting interrupted). The other answers aren’t broken down by age in the press release.
MailOnline, who has also written about the Aviva report, quotes a family therapist who says she’s seeing children coming in to see her grumbling about their parents’ mobile device use. “Children complain it is their parents who are on the phone too much,” therapist Dipti Shah is quoted by MailOnline as saying.
