Loneliness and Distress Intolerance Shape Mothers’ Problematic Smartphone Use

A study of more than one thousand mothers of preschool-aged children has revealed that the path from casual entertainment scrolling to problematic smartphone use is not the same for everyone. According to new research published in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, the link between using a smartphone for fun and developing compulsive, dysfunctional habits with the device becomes significantly stronger when a mother feels lonely or finds her child’s distress difficult to bear. The findings, drawn from one of the largest samples of its kind in southeastern Europe, offer fresh insight into why some parents seem to lose control over their screen time while others do not, and they point toward emotional vulnerability as a key moderating force behind problematic smartphone use.

Problematic smartphone use, commonly abbreviated as PSU, has been studied for over a decade and is increasingly recognized as a public health concern. Researchers define it as the dysfunctional and compulsive use of smartphones that interferes with daily activities and negatively affects physical and mental health. Importantly, there is no official diagnosis for the condition, and although terms such as “smartphone dependence” and “smartphone addiction” circulate widely in popular discourse, the scientific community generally prefers the more cautious label of PSU, since it remains too early to classify the phenomenon as a formal behavioral addiction in the same category as gambling or gaming disorders. What is well established, however, is that the pattern is real, measurable, and associated with meaningful consequences for the person using the phone and for the people around them, particularly young children who observe and internalize their parents’ device habits from an early age.

The new study, led by Aleksandar Vujić of Széchenyi István University in Hungary together with colleagues at the University of Novi Sad and Eötvös Loránd University, focused specifically on mothers of preschool children in Serbia. The choice of population was deliberate. Prior research has shown that children as young as two are already skilled at using smartphones and tablets, and longitudinal studies have demonstrated that maternal smartphone addiction predicts the later emergence of problematic smartphone use in children. Mothers were selected because they are frequently the primary caregivers involved in decisions about children’s media use, and experimental work has shown that mothers who frequently use their smartphones are less likely to respond promptly to their child’s emotional needs, may fail to notice their child’s bids for interaction, and engage less in conversation, patterns that could contribute to insecure attachment. In Serbia, where gender equality indicators remain below the European Union average, caregiving demands continue to fall disproportionately on mothers regardless of employment status, making maternal coping strategies especially relevant to family wellbeing.

The theoretical backbone of the study is the Compensatory Internet Use Theory, which proposes that individuals turn to smartphones and the internet to soothe or distract themselves from everyday challenges and negative emotions. From this perspective, entertainment-oriented smartphone use, such as watching videos, scrolling social media, listening to music, or browsing the web, is not inherently harmful. Its psychological function, however, may differ dramatically depending on the user’s emotional and interpersonal circumstances. For a well-connected, emotionally regulated person, entertainment use may remain just that: entertainment. For someone who is lonely, or who experiences their child’s crying and distress as unbearable, the same behaviors may serve as a compensatory escape hatch, and it is this compensatory pattern that researchers believe can gradually harden into problematic use. Previous studies have found, for example, that emotion dysregulation mediates the relationship between psychological distress and PSU, and that distress tolerance, the perceived capacity to withstand negative emotional states, is negatively associated with problematic smartphone use.

To test these ideas, the researchers recruited participants through Viber messaging groups connected to 74 kindergartens in Novi Sad, Serbia, ultimately retaining a sample of 1,062 mothers of preschool-aged children after applying exclusion criteria. The mothers had a mean age of 36.3 years, most had one or two children, and the majority were employed. Their average self-reported daily smartphone use was about two and a half hours. Problematic smartphone use was measured with the six-item Smartphone Application-Based Addiction Scale, which is grounded in the Components Model of Addiction and captures salience, mood modification, tolerance, withdrawal, conflict, and relapse. Loneliness was assessed with the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale, and maternal intolerance of child distress was measured with a parent-adapted version of the Distress Tolerance Scale. Because the Serbian adaptation of this latter instrument had not been formally validated, the team conducted exploratory factor analyses, which distinguished an internal emotional component of intolerance, reflecting a mother’s negative emotional reactions to her child’s distress, from a behavioral component reflecting action tendencies to stop the distress. The internal dimension correlated moderately with PSU and was used in the main analyses.

The statistical approach centered on two moderation models, both run in the R programming environment using the PROCESS macro. In each model, entertainment-related smartphone use served as the predictor and PSU as the outcome, with loneliness in one model and intolerance of child distress in the other acting as moderators. Predictor and moderator variables were mean-centered, and the researchers went well beyond ordinary least squares: they reported percentile bootstrap confidence intervals, wild bootstrap confidence intervals with 5,000 resamples to address heteroskedasticity, heteroskedasticity-consistent HC3 standard errors, and robust regression using MM-estimators to guard against the influence of outliers. A Bonferroni correction was applied to the interaction p-values to account for multiple hypothesis testing, and sensitivity analyses with alternative loneliness scoring approaches and covariate adjustments for maternal age, education, and daily smartphone use confirmed the stability of the results.

The results were consistent across both models. Entertainment use was strongly and positively related to problematic smartphone use, but the strength of that relationship depended on the mother’s emotional context. In the loneliness model, which explained 33 percent of the variance in PSU, the moderation effect was small but statistically significant, with an unstandardized coefficient of 0.083 and a fully standardized effect of β = .07. In plain terms, among mothers reporting higher loneliness, the same amount of entertainment-oriented phone use translated into a stronger association with problematic patterns. The distress intolerance model told a parallel story: the interaction coefficient was 0.046, significant both in the original analysis and under HC3 standard errors and robust estimation, indicating that entertainment use was more tightly linked to PSU among mothers who found their child’s distress emotionally unbearable. Simple slopes analyses showed that the entertainment-to-PSU relationship remained significant at low, median, and high levels of each moderator but grew steeper as the moderators increased.

The authors are careful to frame these moderation effects as modest. The confidence intervals, particularly under the wild bootstrap procedure, were relatively wide with lower bounds close to zero, and the single-item measure of entertainment use, asking mothers how often they use their phone for fun, out of boredom, or out of habit, may not capture the full multidimensional nature of the construct with adequate reliability. All variables were positively skewed, meaning most mothers reported relatively low levels of problematic use, low loneliness, and generally high tolerance of child distress. The cross-sectional design also prevents any causal claims: loneliness might drive problematic use, or problematic use might deepen isolation, and a recent meta-analysis of longitudinal studies suggests the relationship between loneliness and problematic media use is indeed bidirectional. Unmeasured third variables such as parenting stress or depression could likewise be shaping the observed associations.

Even with these caveats, the study is the first of its kind conducted with a Serbian sample and offers tentative but actionable directions for intervention research. If the findings hold up in more rigorous designs, programs aimed at reducing maternal problematic smartphone use might benefit from directly targeting loneliness through behavioral activation and structured opportunities for offline social connection, such as regular in-person contact and group activities. On the distress intolerance side, techniques such as cognitive reappraisal, distress-tolerance training, and parenting-focused emotion-regulation strategies could help mothers remain engaged and supportive when their children are upset rather than disengaging into their screens. Such approaches could carry a double benefit, since mothers who use smartphones to regulate both their own and their child’s negative emotions may inadvertently deprive children of opportunities to develop self-regulation and delay gratification, thereby raising the risk that the children themselves develop problematic media habits.

The broader takeaway resonates far beyond Serbia. In an era when the smartphone is simultaneously a social lifeline, a babysitter, a boredom killer, and a source of guilt for millions of parents, this study suggests that the question “how much is too much” cannot be answered by screen time alone. The same two hours of scrolling may be harmless recreation for one mother and a warning sign for another, depending on how isolated she feels and how capable she is of sitting with her child’s tears. As the researchers conclude, entertainment-related smartphone use may more easily tip into problematic territory among mothers with elevated emotional risk factors, and recognizing those factors, loneliness and intolerance of child distress foremost among them, may prove essential for designing the next generation of family-centered digital wellbeing interventions.