• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer, September 8, 2014

Motherhood isn’t a job; it’s an adventure. And the American mom has found her indispensable, all-purpose tool to navigate the wilderness of parenting. It is the phone. No one needs greater efficiency than the busy parent, and so it is not surprising that we find mom at the leading edge of mobile migration. She is adopting emerging platforms and use cases perhaps before many other segments.

One of the most striking things about this year’s Research Now/BabyCenter 21st Century Mom survey is how the importance of the mobile device has increased even in one year. A majority (59%) of the 1,118 women who were pregnant or with children up to 8 years old said they regarded their phones as “my backup brain” -- up 9% from last year. But there was a 26% increase (from 34% to 43%) in the number of moms who agreed that they would return home if they forgot to bring their cell phone, but they wouldn’t if they left their wallet. That shift alone suggests not only how much of a lifeline the device had become, but also how much vital data storage and utility has moved from wallet to electronic device.

One of the reasons we are seeing this accelerated change in behaviors is demographic, explains Inna Kern, VP, global sales marketing for BabyCenter. The Millennials are having kids. "Smartphones served as digital dashboards for their entire lives, well before they had children,” she tells Mobile Marketing Daily. "Previous BabyCenter studies have also shown that becoming a mom is a catalyst for increased mobile usage. Combine those two insights, and the rates of changing behaviors on smartphones isn't as surprising as some might think.”

In fact, for key digital behaviors, moms are clearly mobile-first now. For accessing social media, a whopping 68% of Facebook members use their smartphone most often to visit Facebook and 63% of Twitter users are device-first. Exactly half of BabyCenter visitors in this group are using devices more often, only 37% relying more on the desktop, and 42% are mobile-most for YouTube, compared to 37% using desktop more. Tablets are still confined to a niche of complementary use, however, cited by 11% to 13% in most instances as their most heavily used platform.

Texting remains the dominant activity, used daily by 90% of moms, followed by 78% using social media. But downtime -- gaming in particular -- is a daily habit for 42%.  

Messaging beyond SMS is emerging as an important category for moms, with 29% already using some form of IM on phones. They send on average 14 IMs via apps like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger on an average day, about half the number of texts. But they are also checking social feeds about 15 times a day. FB Messenger is the most popular messaging app, used by 35% of moms, followed by 22% on WhatsApp, 9% on Google Hangout, 5% on Kik and 4% using Yahoo. More than a quarter of moms (27%) agree that their SMS use is decreasing because of greater reliance on messaging apps.

When it comes to the job of parenting itself, the phone has become a kind of general utility tool that moms use in a range of different tasks. Most notably for 67% of moms, far and away the most common use of the device in relation to their kids is to entertain them with videos and games. This use case has more than doubled in just the last year. Also up sharply is use of the phone to get parenting information (48%) up over nine times since last year.

The migration to mobile purchasing is perhaps occurring more incrementally than other behaviors. While half of moms say they use their phones to purchase items for their kids, 65% admit that they are more comfortable researching products on devices but seeing them in-store before purchasing. That multichannel behavior is of particular importance to marketers. For this segment especially, decisions are being made about purchases across screens and incrementally.  

Streaming media and second-screening are two areas of tremendous usage for moms. Short entertainment clips are most popular with 72% of respondents, but how-to videos (62%), especially cooking tutorials and DIY instruction, are almost as popular. For branding advertisers, there is an emerging opportunity to grab moms as their streaming media consumption in these areas accelerates.

Finally, tandem screen use is pretty much a given during prime time for this as well as most segments. The study finds that among moms, 61% always or often use their smartphones while watching TV, and 47% use tablets. Perhaps a key signal of just how distracted and fragmented the media environment has become is that only 12% of moms now rarely/never use smartphones and 24% rarely/never use tablets while the TV is on.

Fueled by Millennial demographics, a pressing need for efficiency and at-your-fingertips information as well as constant mobility, the mom segment can be seen as a leading indicator of evolving media habits for all.

There is a critical distinction emerging between the mass media that took shape in the twentieth century and the multi-screen, always-there personal media of the twenty-first. In the last century, media moments were generally associated with focus and repose. Filmgoing, newspaper reading, radio listening, prime-time TV viewing, and even video game playing and desktop Internet use were characterized by modes of immersion and singular focus. Not so in the age of personal multi-screen media consumption. Distraction from competing screens is the new normal, and that fragmentation is punctuated by ever-briefer moments of fleeting focus instigated by immediate needs. 

"Mother and daughter with smartphones" photo from Shutterstock.