How Do Daily Parenting Practices with Food and Screens Relate to Parent–Child Interactions and Emotional Development? An Ecological Momentary Assessment Study

Early childhood is a period of rapid development in emotion regulation, during which children rely heavily on caregivers to scaffold frustration, sadness, and anger. A large body of research links warm, responsive caregiving with stronger regulatory skills. Yet far less is known about how everyday regulatory shortcuts—particularly the use of food or screens to manage children’s distress—shape moment-to-moment interactions and longer-term emotional development.

In the MRI-funded project How Do Daily Parenting Practices with Food and Screens Relate to Parent–Child Interactions and Emotional Development? An Ecological Momentary Assessment Study, Dr. Anita Fuglestad and Dr. Paul Fuglestad (University of North Florida) examine these questions through a real-time, ecologically grounded lens. The project integrates developmental theory on emotion socialization with research on feeding practices and technology use, advancing a process-oriented account of how regulatory strategies unfold in daily family life.

A central conceptual distinction guiding the study is between responsive support and coercive control. Responsive practices involve acknowledging emotions and helping children navigate them. Coercive strategies, by contrast, may rely on pressure, distraction, or external control of behavior. In feeding research, coercive control can include using food as a reward, threat, or emotional comfort. The present study extends this framework to screen use, testing whether digital media functions similarly as a tool to quickly regulate distress—and whether such use may displace opportunities for emotional coaching.

Methodologically, the study employs Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) to reduce retrospective bias and capture behavior in context. Over a two-week period, parents of children from birth to age five receive mobile prompts throughout the day when they are with their child. These brief check-ins assess recent child emotions, parental responses, and whether food or screens were used in the interaction. This design allows for fine-grained analysis of within-person variability across daily stressors, rather than relying solely on global parenting reports.

Baseline surveys assess parent and child emotion regulation, parenting stress, child temperament, feeding practices, and technology use. By combining these trait-level measures with repeated in-the-moment data, the project can model how contextual factors—such as parental stress or child reactivity—predict the likelihood of using food or screens in emotionally charged situations.

Analytically, the study aims to identify patterns that are both developmentally meaningful and clinically actionable. For example, it can examine whether repeated reliance on food or screens during distress is associated with fewer responsive emotion-coaching behaviors, or whether certain family contexts moderate these associations. The goal is not to pathologize common parenting strategies, but to clarify when these tools may inadvertently replace relational moments that support emotional skill-building.

The translational implications are direct. Findings may inform parent-facing guidance and early childhood interventions that emphasize flexible, developmentally informed alternatives to coercive regulatory strategies. By identifying the conditions under which food and screens are most likely to substitute for emotional engagement, practitioners can design supports that align with real-world parenting demands.

This project situates emotion regulation within the relational micro-interactions of daily life. By examining how small, repeated practices accumulate over time, it contributes to a nuanced understanding of how early caregiving environments shape children’s developing capacity to tolerate, name, and manage their emotions.