Digital Disconnection and Family Emotional Distance Among Vietnamese Gen Z: A Systemic Family Therapy Perspective

Smartphones and social media are now embedded in family routines, yet family therapy research has paid limited attention to how digital media organise silence, avoidance and emotional distance. Vietnamese Gen Z young adults offer an important context for examining digital disconnection as a relational pattern rather than only as an individual addiction problem. This mixed‐methods study examined associations among problematic social media use, digital disconnection, parent–young adult communication, family functioning, psychological distress and perceived family emotional distance, and explored how participants made sense of these processes in their family relationships. An explanatory sequential design was used. Survey data from 462 Vietnamese young adults aged 18–29 were analysed with reliability, exploratory factor, discriminant validity, sensitivity, regression, bootstrapped mediation and moderation checks. Thirty follow‐up interviews were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Digital disconnection was strongly associated with perceived family emotional distance and remained significant after covariate adjustment and item‐reduction sensitivity checks. Communication statistically mediated this association; cohesion/flexibility was protective but did not moderate it. Interviews described phones as shields, pauses, coping objects and markers of misunderstanding. Digital disconnection is best understood systemically as a pattern embedded in family routines, intergenerational expectations and repair difficulties. Therapists should assess what phone use does in relationships, support culturally respectful repair and avoid reducing young adults or parents to blame‐based accounts.