Photo: Li Hao/GT

After a long tiring day, Yang collapses onto the sofa after putting on his slippers. From the other room, his 1-year-old daughter toddles over with a comic book yelling "papa" and asking him to read to her. Putting her on the sofa and opening the book, Yang's phone suddenly chimes. Picking up the phone, Yang soon becomes absorbed in a friend's recent WeChat post.

Still sitting on the couch, his little girl looks at him expectantly for two or three minutes as she waits for him to turn the pages and tell a story. She then begins to cry after receiving no response from her dad, who is now lost in thought.

"Will you please drop your phone and play with her already? She wants you!" yells Yang's wife from the kitchen, irritated by the sound of her daughter's crying.

Rising concern

This is just another ordinary day for Yang. Working in a private company, he said he's under a lot of pressure every day and enjoys browsing the news after getting back home as a way to relax. However, this habit has come under increasing fire from his wife recently, as she comes to realize that as the baby grows older she needs more time and energy from her parents.

"My wife often gets mad about me getting absorbed with my cell phone and ignoring my daughter's demands," Yang told the Global Times. "We've argued about this a lot and she even threatened to take my phone away or smash it."

In an era of mobile Internet, more and more people are becoming fascinated by what a smartphone can provide. Addicted to it, they play with it no matter what they're doing, either dining, chatting with friends, at a meeting or even using the bathroom.

Most people don't enjoy sitting face to face with a person whose entire attention is focused on their phone. Children are no exception. The impact this behavior has on children has gradually become the center of increasing social concern.

According to a report co-published by Vinda and Children & Family in 2014, one major parenting issue encountered in Chinese families is that smartphones are distracting young parents' attention away from their children. The report shows that about 70 percent of parents enjoy thumbing through their phones while playing with children, an act which interferes with their parenting time and leaves kids in the cold.

Many education experts have pointed out that focusing on phones while playing with kids is a type of emotional absence that makes children feel neglected.

 Nancy Zhang, a mother of a 3-year-old, explained her child's reaction to her smartphone: "You can feel that he doesn't like this intruder on his time and sometimes protests its presence. Whenever my son catches me checking my phone from time to time during storytime, he says to me, 'Stop looking at it, mama. Pay attention to the story.'"

"Only children in China already feel lonely… The situation grows worse when parents are kidnapped by smartphones and decrease time spent with children," Guan Ying, a researcher at the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences wrote in her blog.

What's worse, since kids from toddlers to school-aged children are good at imitating, they easily learn to copy parents who are addicted to mobile phones and become fall slave to mobile screens as well.

A picture editor working in Beijing worried about her son's addiction to mobile phone games, Xiao Ying has begun taking action to limit her son's time with mobile devices.

"I thought it was no big deal at first, but now he's so addicted that he asks to play with my phone the minute I get home," Xiao told the Global Times.

 Xiao first started playing games on her cell phone with her now 7-year-old son back when he was 2 years old. In addition, her husband is constantly looking at his phone while eating or playing with his son. "Gradually my boy got used to this life, and so does the same thing now," Xiao said.

Finding a balance

Fortunately, more and more young parents are realizing the severity of the problem, as seen from the reactions of numerous netizens on Sina Weibo. However, while many have claimed that they would "go offline at home," probably few have the resolve to do so, as the Internet is something people just can't live without anymore.

For many people this has become a long-term tug of war. "I have to consciously control myself in this regard," Zhang said, sharing her experiences. "I try not to play games. As someone working in the media industry, checking the Internet and WeChat has become part of my job. Even though sometimes I fail, I always respond to him when he talks with me or reminds me about the phone so that I don't give him the impression that the phone is more important than him."

"We shouldn't go to extremes, instead we need to strike a balance. We shouldn't overuse cell phones for our children's sake, but at the same time, cutting them off completely from electronic devices is not the answer. They will become an important part of their lives in the future after all," Zhang said. "I'd worry that he wouldn't be able to catch up if I limited him too much."

Xiao said that the first step to controlling her son's addiction was to delete all the games but one from her phone. "I don't want to limit him too much," she said, explaining why she left him a game. In addition, she's trying to spend more time with her son now, playing games, guessing riddles, reading books and playing out of doors.

"Indulging in the virtual world to the point where I ignore my children is not very responsible. I've realized my problems now, but my husband hasn't changed and still spends little time with him," Xiao said, adding that she still argues quite a bit with her husband about the issue.

According to the 2014 report, when it comes to the parents that use their cell phones when spending time with their children men far outweigh women.

"The parent-child relationship is one of the earliest relationships children develop and is the starting point for them to develop other social relationships. A healthy parent-child relationship can enhance a child's education in the future," said Guan.

"People hate it when their significant other has another man or woman in their lives. Now cell phones are increasingly becoming the third wheel that stands between parents and children and hinders children's growth," Guan wrote in her blog post, calling for more parents to raise their heads from their phones and pay more attention to their children.