Dr Lucy Tully is a Senior Lecturer and Senior Supervising Psychologist in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney. She has over 20 years of clinical and research experience, with expertise in child mental health, father engagement, and evidence-based parenting and family interventions. She also she works clinically as a psychologist delivering evidence-based intervention to families of children with emotional and behavioural problems at the Child Behaviour Research Clinic (CBRC) at the University of Sydney.

She is passionate about extending the reach and impact of evidence-based interventions to improve the mental health and well-being of all Australian children.

In today’s digital age, technology is increasingly disrupting family life. Parent use of technology (e.g., smartphones) has the potential to interfere significantly with the quality of caregiving that children receive, an effect known as “technoference”. Recent research found technoference to be significantly associated with increased child internalising and externalising problems, deficits in cognitive functioning and prosocial behaviour, and excessive use of technology for children under 5 years.

Technoference is thought to impact most adversely on child mental health in the preschool years (3-6 years), when quality of parent-child interactions is particularly important to child development and well-being. Such findings are alarming, as many parents in Australia and worldwide report experiencing technoference during interactions with their children, indicating that technoference may represent an important modifiable risk factor for child mental health in the early years. Despite this, interventions to reduce technoference have yet to be developed. The current project will produce a world-first intervention for technoference, in the form of a brief parenting intervention, ParentWorks-Unplugged.

Following a co-design phase, a pilot randomised controlled trial (RCT) will be conducted to test the feasibility and preliminary efficacy of the intervention to reduce technoference and improve child mental health. The project has the potential to produce an innovative and effective intervention for improving child mental health in Australia.

Co-Investigators: Professor Mark Dadds, Professor David Hawes, Ms Adrienne Turnell, Dr Talia Carl, Ms Alex Roach, Ms Rebecca McLean, Dr Vilas Sawrikar, Dr Jaimie Northam and Dr Georgette Fleming.