Few parenting issues spark quite as much debate these days as the question of how much screen time and social media is too much for kids. They’ve become such an ingrained part of life that many find it absurd to limit them.
But lost in these arguments is one simple fact: Most of us adults were already grown up when we got on social media. Today’s kids, on the other hand, are on social media while their brains are still developing, and a growing body of research, including a new university study, shows it is having an alarming effect.
The study was conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, and focused on 6,554 tweens and adolescents who were taking part in a much more sprawling study, the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development, or ABCD, Study at the University of California, San Diego.
The kids were analyzed over a four-year period from 2016-2020, during which their social media use was monitored. They were broken up into three groups based on whether they used social media a small amount, medium amount, or large amount, as well as how much their use increased over the study period.
The point of the study was to focus on social media use specifically, rather than just screen time in general, because studies focusing solely on screen time have yielded mixed results. In this case, however, the impacts of social media specifically were very clear-cut.
Over the course of the study, kids were also given cognitive tests, and a very clear pattern emerged — specifically, a pattern of decline in reading and memory skills that was highly cor with how much they used social media.
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During the study, kids were given an array of tests, both orally and visually, to measure their reading, vocabulary, and memory skills. Researchers found that the more social media kids used, the worse they scored.
Those who were either high social media users or had drastically increased their use over the study period scored an average of 4 to 5 points lower than their peers who didn’t use social media at all.
But even the lowest users of social media, kids who used it just a single hour a day or less, still scored lower, too, by an average of 1 to 2 points, according to one of the study’s authors, Dr. Jason Nagata, a pediatrician.
According to University of Calgary psychologist Sheri Madigan, this indicates there is a “dosage effect” to tween and teen social media use. But more importantly, it indicated that there is no “safe” dose, even just an hour a day produced marked skills decline.
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Adolescence is an all-important period of brain growth: Just like their bodies are rapidly changing, their brains are too, growing ever more complex as they near adulthood. The only period of our lives when our brains do more development is in the first year of our lives, in fact.
And our brains, quite simply, are not designed to manage the onslaught of social media. They evolved in a time when we still lived in huts and regularly got chased by tigers, after all. Researchers found that this is resulting in young people’s brains basically shifting priorities and optimizing to manage the constant activity, feedback, notifications, and likes of social media instead of necessary skills.
These skill detriments are likely to magnify over time, too. “Even a slight change in what [their brains] look like after a short period of time means that they’re kind of now pointed on a trajectory that is different from others,” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill psychologist Mitch Prinstein told NPR. “That means that two, three, five years from now, we might be talking about some very significant gaps between kids who might have been heavy users or not as heavy users.”
We already have frankly harrowing statistics about a burgeoning literacy crisis among kids and what seems to appear to be an overall cognitive decline in young people. This study pulls into focus exactly why that may be happening, and a difficult truth parents must face. There very well may be no amount of social media use that is healthy for kids.
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John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
