Watching a nine-year-old use a smartphone more quickly than they can complete a sentence makes you feel a certain kind of uneasiness. The actions of swiping, tapping, and scrolling are smooth, practiced, and nearly instinctive. Something changes when you ask them to read a paragraph out loud. The fluency vanishes. The words are spoken slowly. That discomfort has a name thanks to a recent University of Georgia study, and it’s more difficult to ignore than most.
Children who used social media extensively on a daily basis tended to lag behind in reading and vocabulary over time, according to research from UGA. Not just slightly behind, but quantifiably so over a four-year period monitored by the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, a large-scale longitudinal project that began around age 10 and followed over 10,000 youth. That is neither a brief survey nor a small sample. That’s years of observing actual children acquire—or, in certain situations, fail to acquire—certain fundamental abilities.
The research’s principal investigator, Cory Carvalho, provided a memorable analogy. According to him, the brain is similar to a muscle in that it adjusts to its primary function. The eight hours a day that figure skaters spend on ice causes their bodies to rewire. The brain follows if a child scrolls through brief videos and comment threads for the same amount of time every day. It gets quite proficient at that and may become less proficient at the slower, more difficult task of reading. The reasoning is simple. When someone says it clearly, it sounds almost uncomfortable.
The reading challenges weren’t unique. Over the same time period, children who used social media more frequently also demonstrated poorer attentional control. It’s possible that the incessant notifications and the quick switching between bits of content are actually making it difficult to concentrate. The researchers freely admit that it’s also possible that children who already have trouble focusing are just more drawn to platforms that emphasize continuous stimulation. Sorting them out is difficult because both can be true at the same time.
It’s important to note that not all of the results pointed in the same direction. People who use social media frequently have a tendency to react more quickly and process visual information more quickly. The researchers were cautious not to exaggerate this, pointing out that these advantages primarily showed up on screen-based assessments, which are the same setting in which these children spend the majority of their time. It’s still unclear if quicker digital reflexes translate into anything practical outside of a screen.
The time cost seems more difficult to dispute. The study’s co-author, Niyantri Ravindran, put it this way: social media may be taking up time that kids could be developing more advanced cognitive abilities. It doesn’t happen automatically to read a book, follow a complicated argument, or sit through a challenging paragraph long enough to comprehend it. They need practice, and practice takes time that is increasingly being spent elsewhere.
Recently, Australia became the first nation to completely prohibit children under the age of sixteen from using social media. The governments of other countries are observing. Age verification tools are being gradually introduced by platforms, but it is still unclear how strictly they will be enforced. Instead of making broad policy recommendations, the UGA researchers made more subdued recommendations: limit screen time before bed, postpone giving kids smartphones, and think about getting a simple phone that can’t access social media at all.
Governments, parents, and researchers are all circling the same issue from various perspectives, giving the impression that society is genuinely still figuring this out. Carvalho put it simply: everyone uses social media, even children, and no one has yet to agree on what constitutes appropriate behavior. Presumably, the goal is for those standards to eventually benefit kids rather than the platforms’ engagement figures. Whether or not that occurs is a completely different story.
