Heavy users, mobile gamers, and social networkers: Patterns of objective smartphone use in parents of infants and associations with parent depression, sleep, parenting, and problematic phone use.

Smartphone use during parenting is common, which may lead to distraction (also known as technoference). However, it is likely that some phone activities are less disruptive to parents and children. In this study, we explored smartphone use (via passive sensing across 8 days) within 264 parents of infants, measuring parents' application use on their phone (e.g., messaging, social media, mobile gaming, video chat) and phone use across contexts (e.g., during feeding and at bedtime). We utilized latent profile analysis to identify profiles of users, revealing five user types: (37%), followed by (20%), (17%), (15%), and (11%). Parents varied in their use, from , who used their phone approximately 2.4 hours each day, spent only 13% of their child time on their phone, and used their phone for about 18 minutes at bedtime, to , who spent approximately 8 hours a day, about 50% of their child time on their phone, and about 1 hour at bedtime. Heavy Users showed higher depressive symptoms and poorer sleep (although not poorer sleep than Moderate User Gamers). Surprisingly, we found no differences between groups in of parenting stress, responsiveness to their infant, or problematic phone use and distraction. We also explored demographic differences across groups. We call for future work to examine parent phone use more comprehensively and holistically and to view specific phone use activities as simultaneously interconnected with other types of use activities.