Sleeping with the smartphone: a panel study investigating parental mediation, adolescents’ tiredness, and physical well-being

This article seeks to explain the longitudinal associations of taking the smartphone to bed on adolescents’ daytime tiredness and physical well-being. We examined whether parents’: (a) active mediation; and (b) restrictive mediation determines whether children and adolescents have their phones within reach in bed or not. We used longitudinal data from a two-wave panel survey (NTime2 = 384) of early adolescents (10–14 years, MTime2 = 12.37, SD = 1.48, 46.4% girls) and one of their parents (=parent–child dyads) in Germany. A polling company collected the data in a four-month interval in 2018 and 2019, using a quota-sample procedure based on parents’ age and gender. Structural equation modelling revealed that active but not restrictive parental mediation at Time 1 (baseline) negatively predicted adolescents having their smartphones in bed at Time 2 (follow-up). We found that having a smartphone in bed increased adolescents’ daytime tiredness. Daytime tiredness was associated with decreased physical well-being over time. The findings indicate that parents should use active mediation to reduce their children’s use of their smartphones at nighttime to protect their physical well-being from tiredness.