View article

Parental regulation of children’s smartphone use is typically associated with conflict. To explain conflict, this paper focused on parents’ own smartphone use. A panel survey among parent-child pairs (N_T2=384) revealed that parents’ excessive smartphone use at T1 was associated with a lack of control over children’s smartphone use at T2. Lack of control over children’s smartphone use, in turn, was related to conflict about the smartphone from children’s and parents’ perspectives over time. The relations with conflict were independent of whether parents thought that smartphones have negative effects on children. Overall, findings stress that both, children’s and parents’ smartphone use, need to be considered when explaining technology-related family conflicts.