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Abstract
Smartphones are now embedded in family, educational, and occupational routines, yet their interpersonal costs are not adequately captured by screen-time measures alone. This conceptual article examines parental smartphone phubbing during school-related parent-child interactions and develops an integrated developmental explanation of how repeated attentional interruptions may become educationally meaningful. Drawing on a critical interpretive and integrative synthesis of scholarship on digital parenting, technoference, attachment, emotion regulation, academic engagement, self-determination, bioecological development, and family systems, the article positions caregiver responsiveness as the proximal mechanism connecting parental digital distraction with children's developmental experiences. The proposed framework suggests a sequence in which recurrent parental phubbing may reduce perceived caregiver responsiveness, contribute to less secure expectations of caregiver availability, constrain opportunities for interpersonal co-regulation, and, in turn, weaken behavioural, emotional, and cognitive engagement with learning. The model does not treat smartphones as inherently harmful and does not claim empirically established causality. Instead, it identifies relational interruption, developmental accumulation, and contextual moderation as the conditions under which device use may acquire psychological significance. School-related interactions are highlighted as a distinctive context because homework, examination preparation, academic problem solving, and discussions of school experiences simultaneously involve cognitive scaffolding and emotional support. The framework integrates six complementary theoretical traditions and extends prior work by linking family digital behaviour to educational engagement through a coherent developmental cascade. Implications are developed for research design, parent education, school counselling, educational psychology, and culturally responsive work in India. A staged agenda for longitudinal, dyadic, observational, and intervention research is proposed to test the model.
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