“Heart-wrenching!” the Shandong provincial prosecutor’s office wrote on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. “Put down your phone. Save the children!” 
 
 The death of Tutu, as the girl was identified in Chinese news reports, is just the latest example of how “distracted walking” can threaten public safety. 
 
 In August last year, a 2-year-old boy in the central province of Henan died after being struck by an S.U.V. near a shopping mall while his mother was engrossed in her phone. And in April, another 2-year-old boy with a phone-addled mother was run over and killed in the eastern province of Anhui. 
 
 Photo 
 
 Liu Qinxue, an expert on smartphone addiction at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, said the Yueyang accident could serve as a warning of the risks of overusing the devices. 
 
 “People normally do not think about the potential dangers it might bring,” Professor Liu said. “There’s not enough discussion or awareness.” 
 
 Officials in China have documented and publicized the risks of calling or texting while driving. 
 
 In 2014, for example, the Shanghai police said that calling or texting while driving had caused nearly 30 percent of 690 fatal automobile accidents between January and October of that year, according to a report in China’s state-run news media. The city’s police installed high-definition traffic cameras to identify motorists who use smartphones while driving, and offenders are fined 200 renminbi, or around $30, and penalized through a points system. 
 
 Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story Please verify you're not a robot by clicking the box. Invalid email address. Please re-enter. You must select a newsletter to subscribe to. Sign Up You agree to receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. Thank you for subscribing. An error has occurred. Please try again later. View all New York Times newsletters. 
 
 In March, a lawmaker from the central province of Hubei proposed in the national legislature that drivers who use phones while on the road be criminally charged. 
 
 But policy makers in many countries have paid far less attention to the problem of “distracted walking,” according to a 2015 study in the Journal of Traffic and Transportation Engineering. The study added that pedestrian-crash data was not yet detailed enough for researchers to determine a link between distracted walking and safety problems. 
 
 Advertisement Continue reading the main story 
 
 In Hong Kong, subway stations have signs that warn commuters not to stare at mobile phones on escalators. Officials in Seoul, the South Korean capital, announced recently that the city would install outdoor signs that warn pedestrians of the dangers of texting while walking. 
 
 But such signs are rarely, if ever, seen in mainland China. 
 
 Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies the relationship between humans and digital devices, said in an email that a declining capacity for solitude and self-reflection had given rise to a dependence on smartphones and created a need for phone-free “sacred spaces.” 
 
 “Talk to your co-workers, talk to your family,” she said. “Never bring a phone to a meal. No phones in the car. No phones at meetings or in classrooms. We can find our way back to each other.” 
 
 Many Chinese social media users have echoed that sentiment since the death of the 2-year-old in Yueyang. 
 
 “Head-down tribe, it’s time to lift your head now,” one commenter wrote on Weibo, using a popular Chinese nickname for smartphone obsessives. ||||| Screenshot of the video clip shows the girl walking alone ahead of her mother. (Web pic) 
 
 BEIJING, Oct.31 (Xinhua) -- The death of a toddler last week has triggered outrage over parents who are obsessed in smartphones and neglect their duty of parenting. 
 
 
 
 A 2-minute video clip, widely shared on the Internet, captured a horrific scene of a 2-year-old girl being hit and then crushed by a car. When the accident took place, the girl was walking alone ahead of her phone-engrossed mother. The girl didn't survive. Police investigation said that the girl walked into the driver's blind zone. 
 
 
 
 Netizens expressed their anger over the mother, saying that she should have kept an eye on her child. They said that parents should keep their responsibility and duty in mind. 
 
 "If the mobile phone was so much fun, then why had you given birth to the child?" asked web user "Xiaodingdangmaimaijimiqiu". 
 
 "It is a bloody lesson. Everyone should be alerted not to play with a smartphone while walking. God knows how regretful the mother is," a netizen in the username of "freeermiao" wrote on China's twitter-like microblog Weibo. 
 
 
 
 The accident was not a single case. In April this year, a two-year-old boy ran into the center of a road while his mother was mesmerized by her mobile phone in east China's Anhui province. The boy was hit by a car and died. In August last year, a similar tragedy happened in central China's Henan province when a boy was hit by a car in a parking zone. His mother was checking phone somewhere else when the boy was knocked down. 
 
 
 
 Parents have been urged to curb their smartphone addiction. In China, more than five in 10 adults own a smartphone. Over half of the people questioned in a poll conducted by Deloitte check mobile phone for 1 or 2 times per hour, and one fourth of the interviewees check their mobiles for over 50 times a day. 
 
 
 
 Child Accident Prevention Trust, a UK children's charity, has warned that parents obsessed in their mobile phones are putting their children in danger of serious accidents. 
 
 
 
 Almost a quarter of parents were engrossed in their devices when their children suffered an accident or had a near miss, according to a new research it released. ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
– A 2-year-old girl was killed last month in China while her mother stared at her smartphone, leading many Chinese social media users to call for a change, the New York Times reports. Surveillance video (Warning: graphic content) posted online on Oct. 20 shows the toddler walking near an SUV while her mother is on her phone a few steps behind her, reports McClatchy. The SUV starts moving, running over the little girl as she walks in front of it. The mother doesn't appear to look up from her phone until her daughter had already been hit. The girl, identified as Tutu, died before an ambulance could arrive. Police determined the driver wasn't at fault because Tutu was in his blind spot. The video spread all over the Chinese web, leading to outrage, New China reports. "If the mobile phone was so much fun, then why had you given birth to the child?" one person writes online. "Everyone should be alerted not to play with a smartphone while walking. God knows how regretful the mother is," writes another. A local prosecutor's office calls it "heart-wrenching." "Put down your phone. Save the children!" it posts online. At least two other 2-year-olds were killed by cars while their mothers were looking at their phones in the past 15 months in China. "There's not enough discussion or awareness" of "potential dangers," a smartphone addiction expert tells the Times. (Two women go blind in one eye after using their smartphones.)