Should mums-to-be put down their mobile phones?

Mobile phones are an intrinsic part of modern life, to the point that the fear of being out of cellular contact now even has its own name 'nomophobia'.

Most of us are in no rush to put down our smartphones for even a day, so imagine how much of a challenge a nine month detox would be? A few years back, researchers from the Yale School of Medicine linked exposure to radiation from cell phones during pregnancy with hyperactivity disorders. The bad news was that these offspring also demonstrated reduced memory capacity. The good news (for us anyway) was that this study was based on mice. But now, researcher Laura Birks and her colleagues have released a new study based on data from more than 80,000 mother-child pairs in Denmark, Spain, Norway, the Netherlands and Korea, and have found consistent evidence of of behavioural problems - particularly, hyperactivity. Uh-oh, not just the cute mice then? Apparently not. The children of mums who reported being on at least four phone calls a day, or in one cohort speaking on a mobile phone for more than an hour a day, were 28 percent more likely to be hyperactive than the offspring of mums who reported being on one or fewer calls a day, researchers found. Birks and her team accounted for variables such as maternal age, marital status and education. They found that the link also stood across five countries and time periods, with the data spanning from 1996 through 2011. Birks, who is a doctoral student in biomedicine at the Barcelona Institute for Global Health in Spain, says the results were surprising. However, Dr Robin Hansen, a paediatrician and professor at the University of California who was not involved with the study, told Reuters that mamas-to-be don't need to hang up their calls immediately:

"Is it something about the phone itself? Is it something that impacts your parenting behaviour? Those are issues that can't be answered by this study. Now we have to dig deeper and figure out why. Is it the electronic signals that go through your brain and your body, or how it changes your interactions with your child postnatally? It's not until you cry or you throw something or make a lot of noise, that your parents shift their attention from the phone to you. So children learn to make a racket in an effort to pull their parents toward them and away from their devices. It reinforces hyperactive, attention-getting behaviour."

Fair point. So, who would like to join us in a digital detox then?