Checking a phone over dinner or glancing at a screen while a child is talking has become an ordinary part of family life. Earlier research has linked this habit, known as parental phubbing, to poorer conversations, less responsive parenting, and weaker social and emotional outcomes for children. A new study from Indonesia gives researchers there a tested way to measure it.
Researchers at Universitas Muhammadiyah Surakarta adapted an Indonesian version of the revised Parental Phubbing Scale and tested it with 471 parents. The findings appear in The Open Psychology Journal. Until now there has been no validated tool for Indonesian parents, and most studies elsewhere have relied on questionnaires built around Western parenting norms.
Parents aged 25–55 living in Yogyakarta, each with at least one child, completed an online survey between April and July 2025. They were recruited through a parents’ group on WhatsApp. Most were women (80%), about three quarters were in work, and 9% said they used their phone for more than eight hours a day.
Parental phubbing, a blend of phone and snubbing, describes parents giving their phone priority over their child. It is one form of technoference, the way digital devices interrupt face-to-face relationships. The scale captures it through eight everyday statements, such as using a phone at mealtimes or sneaking a glance at it during a chat.
The statements were translated into Indonesian, translated back into English to check the meaning held, and reviewed by experts in psychology and measurement. Parents rated each one on a five-point scale from never to always.
The analysis confirmed that the eight statements measure a single underlying habit, and the model fitted the data well on standard statistical tests. Seven of the eight items met the usual benchmark for strength. The weakest was keeping a phone in view while with a child, which was retained because it signals divided attention before the phone is even picked up.
Reliability was good, meaning parents answered the statements consistently. One measure of how much the items share a common core came in at 39%, below the usual 50% benchmark, though the results as a whole supported the questionnaire.
Indonesia ranks among the countries with the highest daily social media use, and family life there places heavy weight on parental attention. In that setting, a parent turning to a phone may feel like a sharper breach of what children expect than in more individualistic societies.
The study has clear limits. All answers were self-reported, which may lead parents to understate the habit in a culture that prizes attentive parenting, and every participant lived in Yogyakarta. Mothers made up most of the sample, the ages of the children were not recorded, and the study did not test whether scores relate to how children fare.
The results match versions of the scale tested in China, Turkey, and Western countries, suggesting parents in very different cultures recognise the same pattern of distraction. Future work could compare working and non-working parents, since work messages may drive phone use differently from social media.
An Indonesian parental phubbing questionnaire proved reliable among 471 parents, giving researchers a tool to study distracted parenting.
