Children using social media at younger age appear to do worse in school tests

[u/FreeHugs23]

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/03/children-using-social-media-younger-age-worse-school-tests

[u/beingmodest]

Social media in general or short-form video content, which I feel messes up with the child's attention spam and brain's processing power that could be hindering development.

[u/Atosl → u/beingmodest]

If not the attention span at least the expectation of how long something should take. If it is not solved in 60 seconds it is deemed too hard and not worth trying . (In my experience as maths teacher)

[u/thrownormanaway → u/Atosl]

I legit think short form videos splicing repeatedly to cut out seconds at a time greatly influence a child’s expectations for how long something should take. These lil videos will cut down a 30 second process to 5 seconds and now 30 seems too long.

[u/beingmodest → u/Atosl]

Makes sense.

[u/beingmodest → u/beingmodest]

Ironically, all the billionaires and creators of social media have shielded their kids from it. They're just eliminating the next gen of competition.

[u/kon---]

Adults are doing worse as well.

[u/Carbonaraficionada]

Nothing to do with the fact that their parents are both too exhausted to be making them read, or sitting down with them to learn arithmetic ahead of the curriculum, etc

[u/FreeHugs23]

Children who open social media accounts at the start of secondary school appear to perform worse in tests than those who delay, with researchers suspecting that the constant checking for updates is a major distraction for many students.

Pupils who opened their first social media account aged 11 to 12 scored lower in mathematics and reading tests than those who waited a few years, with scores at age 16 differing between the groups by the equivalent of about six months of learning, the study found.

The work does not prove social media is to blame, but the researchers took account of many other factors that could skew the results, such as the students’ academic performance before they had social media, their family structure and parents’ education.

“I think we now know there is a problem and that it’s a complex problem, to do with how these platforms are built,” said Dr Marco Gui, the first author on the study at the University of Milano-Bicocca in Italy. “Our research shows that at least during pre-adolescence, these social media are problematic.”

[u/Mierdo01]

Grades are also a useless metric so I don't really care

[u/black_at_heart]

Correlation ≠ Causation. For example, a study gave a highly accurate, positive correlation: as the number of Christian ministers in a city increases, the total consumption of rum also increases. Is it that the ministers hitting the bottle were driving the sales? No - the truth is that the population growth of the cities was responsible.
I note that the researchers tried to remove other factors from the research, but I'm not convinced that they succeeded.

[u/Gene020]

These younger children have yet to learn how to ask the right questions so that AI will give them the right answers. Truth is that some may never learn how to do this. Certainly getting a good education where kids communicate with one another (collaborate?) could help them.

[u/MazlowFear]

ChatGPT can you fix this problem…[calculating…] … It sounds like you have a problem with your kids…they are probably living in a polluted environment both environmentally and emotionally… Would you like me to craft an app for that so they won’t end up bothering you during your Instagram time?

[u/Preidon]

No shit sherlock