There may be a link between social media use during early adolescence and lower cognitive performance, a new study suggests.
The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA, on Oct. 13, found that 9- to 13-year-olds with rising levels of social media exposure performed poorer on reading, memory, and vocabulary tests compared with their peers who used little to no social media.
The findings come as hundreds of school districts have sued major social media companies claiming their products are eroding students’ mental health and ability to learn, and forcing schools to devote significant resources to managing the academic and behavioral fallout.
More schools and districts are also curtailing students’ access to cellphones during the school day. At least 31 states and the District of Columbia require school districts to ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools, according to an Education Week tally. Limiting access, educators and policymakers argue, will benefit students’ mental health and academic achievement.
Many of the existing studies on social media’s effects on kids focus on mental health outcomes, such as depression or anxiety, but much less is known about how kids’ social media use affects cognitive development, said Jason Nagata, the lead researcher of the study and a professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
“There are still many unanswered questions about how social media use affects developing brains,” said Nagata, who is also a pediatrician at Benioff Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. “Parents and educators often ask: How old should a child be before getting a social media account? What does social media use mean for learning, reading, and memory?”
Kids with rising social media use performed 4 points lower on cognitive tests
Nagata and his colleagues aimed to help fill the gap by examining whether early and increasing social media use is linked with differences in cognitive performance.
They used data from the nationwide Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, a longitudinal project following thousands of preteens to understand their brain development. As part of the ABCD Study, kids are surveyed about their social media use every year and asked to take learning and memory tests every other year.
Nagata’s team analyzed data from 6,554 children in the ABCD Study at three time periods: baseline (2016-18, ages 9-10), year one (2017-19), and year two (2018-20). They found three distinct social media patterns among the kids:
- No to very low use (58%): kids who spent virtually no time on social media;
- Low increasing use (37%): kids who spent about one additional hour per day on social media by age 13;
- High increasing use (6%): kids who spent about three additional hours per day on social media by age 13 than they did at the start of the study.
The children participating in the research took five tests to measure their cognitive abilities at the start of the study and in early adolescence. Some of the tests included an oral reading recognition test, which assesses familiarity with the written language, and a picture sequence memory test, which assesses short-term memory, Nagata said.
Adolescents with low but increasing social media use performed an average of 1-2 points lower on the reading and memory tests than the kids who spent virtually no time on social media, while those with high increasing use performed up to 4 points lower, after accounting for factors such as age, sex, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other screen time use, the researchers found. The researchers defined social media apps as those that focus mostly on social networking, such as Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok.
“These are subtle differences, and one of many influences that can affect child development, the developing brain,” said Dan Florell, a professor of psychology at Eastern Kentucky University, who was not involved with the study. The results don’t seem too concerning, given that a majority of the kids are in the no-to-very-low-use group and that the kids still scored near the average for the tests, he said.
“It’s just one more outcome of when you are watching things, reading short snippets, and screen-scrolling a lot that can impact your language development,” Florell added, “because you’re probably not using and reading the big words or the words you’re being exposed to aren’t the ones you’re probably going to need to use in a school context.”
However, Nagata emphasized that even a few points can make a difference.
“This [study] is only over a two-year period,” he said. “I think that with more time, [the differences] can also add up, and at population level, with millions of kids being affected, they can matter.”
Social media use might be displacing time for other activities
One reason that kids with low-increasing or high-increasing social media use might score lower on reading and memory tests is because their social media time “might displace time for school work or reading or even sleep or rest,” Nagata said.
It could also be that “the content and the context of use can be disruptive for more complex tasks,” he said. For instance, rapidly switching between apps, constant notifications, and short-form videos can train the brain to seek novelty, making it harder to sustain focus on longer or more complex tasks.
The constant stream of information we get from social media can also overload our working memory and leave less mental capacity for deep thinking or problem-solving, he added.
The study findings reinforce that kids under 13 should not be on social media, experts said.
The 9-13 age range is a key brain developmental period for kids, Florell said. At puberty, the brain goes through a growth spurt and looks for input to shape its new capacity so it fits the environment it’s in.
“When you flood it with a lot of social media, it starts pruning parts of your brain to make it more amenable to that usage,” Florell said. And as the study suggests, “social media usage is maybe not the best when you want to do more learning.”
Most social media apps are restricted to children under 13, but kids often bypass these controls. Some states, including California and Florida, have passed laws putting more restrictions on kids’ access to social media or certain features on the platforms. (Most of those laws are being challenged in court.)
Social media companies say they have taken meaningful measures to provide young users with safer and healthier experiences on their platforms—bolstering parental controls, removing suspected underage users, and giving minors’ accounts the highest privacy settings by default, to name a few examples.
Schools can help by teaching digital literacy skills and working with parents
Schools can play an important role in talking about social media use with students and their families, experts said.
With students, it can come in the form of digital literacy lessons, said Michael Robb, the head of research for Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that studies the effect of media and technology on children.
The study implies that “some digital literacy and self-regulation lessons in upper elementary grades might be really helpful,” Robb said. “Those are opportunities to talk about attention and multitasking and how you emotionally respond to what you see online—in tandem with or hopefully before they get their first [social media] accounts.”
It’s important to talk about usage in moderation, Florell said. Educators and school-based health professionals can ask questions, such as: How do you feel when you go on social media? Is it satisfying to you? Is it something you enjoy? What are other things you enjoy? Do you like playing outdoors? Do you like hanging out with your friends? Do you like going to the movies together?
“What you’re doing is trying to show and tell them about moderation, and then also give a pause: Just because everybody’s doing it, what if you don’t like it so much?” he said.
Schools also have a role to play in terms of collaborating with families around how and when they introduce devices and social media into their kids’ lives, Robb said. Schools can offer parents training and host information nights to make them aware of what the risks and rewards are for their families.
“This is a whole-child issue, where the joint attention of teachers and parents together can make this a healthier environment for children,” Robb said.
