Children who join social media younger fall behind faster, study says |
| An Italian study of more than 5,000 school pupils, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, has found that children who opened their first personal social media account by the age of 11 or 12 had fallen behind by the equivalent of about six months of schooling by the time they sat national tests at 15 or 16, relative to peers who opened their first account at the age of 14 or 15. Professor Marco Gui said that while "most research on social media and minors has looked at mental health as an outcome, we looked at academic performance and we found clearer signs of this negative effect." Prof. Dennis Ougrin from Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved in the research, noted that "While the findings do not prove that social media alone causes poorer academic performance, they suggest that earlier, largely unsupervised use is associated with differences in later attainment, particularly in mathematics and language. The study also points towards plausible mechanisms, such as frequent phone checking and reduced attention, rather than simply screen time itself." |
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