Princess Kate launches new exciting project with £100k funding | Royal | News
The Princess of Wales Early Years Center today announced an exciting new project that will involve investing £100,000 in research into how parents can deal with device-induced distractions that disrupt family life. Princess Catherine’s Royal Foundation Early Childhood Center is inviting researchers to provide suggestions on how to combat “technoference”, which can cause unwanted distraction in parents’ relationships with their children.
The center will provide £100,000 in funding to support the new study, which will work with families across the UK to understand when and why these distractions occur and test practical ways to reduce their effects. This will help shape future resources for practitioners such as health visitors and early childhood educators.
Princess Catherine’s new project aims to understand and explore ways to help families build stronger bonds in early childhood by reducing distractions from devices and helping parents find a healthy tech-life balance.
Last month, the Future Queen wrote in an article she co-wrote with Harvard Medical School Professor Robert Waldinger that excessive screen time was creating an “epidemic of disconnection” in our society that could profoundly affect family life.
“We are physically there but mentally absent, we cannot fully interact with the people in front of us,” the princess said.
Princess Catherine noted that although new technology has many benefits, it can play a “complex and often troubling role” in interpersonal relationships between parents and their children.
“While digital devices promise to keep us connected, they often do the opposite,” he said.
The princess then called on society to “invest in the relationships we have with each other”.
Christian Guy, chief executive of the Royal Foundation Early Childhood Centre, said: “There have been numerous studies into how digital devices affect relationships, but there is currently a lack of evidence on what causes people to turn to digital devices when they disrupt family life and, importantly, how people can be helped to reduce this unwanted interference.
“The Center is working to address these gaps in research so we find solutions that will make a real difference in the lives of families.”
