If your teen is not a reader and you blame social media for hijacking their brains, you’re not so far off base: A new study has found regular social media use during early adolescence is related to worse reading and vocabulary skills over time.
“The brain is like a muscle. The more you use it, the more it changes according to however you’re using it,” said Cory Carvalho, University of Georgia post-doctoral researcher and lead author, in a press release about the study, published in the Journal of Research on Adolescence. “If you think of the Olympics, the figure skaters are really good at figure skating because they spend eight hours a day doing it. Their muscles are wired to be figure skating machines.
“If kids spend over eight hours a day using social media,” he added, “that’s what their brains are going to adapt to and be wired for.”
The study found that tweens who used social media more often each day tend to struggle with recognizing and pronouncing words.
The new findings come just as social media, specifically Meta and YouTube, has been under increased fire due to two recent landmark losses in the courts. Now, say the researchers, the study raises additional concerns on the impact of social media and screen use on childhood development.
The study analyzed longitudinal data from the ongoing Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development study, which follows more than 10,000 adolescents over six years starting around age 10. And frequent social media use, researchers noticed, was linked to struggles with reading and vocabulary across four years.
“There’s a time cost to social media use. If you’re spending time doing one thing, that means you’re not spending time doing another thing,” Carvalho said. “Other studies found that the more kids are using social media, the less they’re reading, so reading development lags behind. We also found this with their vocabulary.”
Children who used social media more often also struggled with attentional control during the same period — possibly because online multitasking is a disruptor of kids’ attention, but also maybe because adolescents who already struggle with focusing are more likely to use social media, the researchers said.
One possibly positive finding of the study was that kids who were on social media frequently processed information faster and had shorter reaction times. Still, researchers cautioned, these observed benefits may be limited to screen-based assessments of processing speed, like the one used in the study.
“It’s not necessarily that social media is having only these negative effects or only these positive effects,” said Niyantri Ravindran, co-author of the study and an assistant professor in the UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences. “The negative effects on vocabulary and reading are more expected because social media is potentially depriving kids of opportunities to engage in some of those higher-level cognitive skills.”
To help combat those negative effects, the researchers — as do most online safety experts — suggest limiting screen time for adolescents, especially before bed. They also recommend waiting until kids are older to purchase a smartphone and instead suggest getting your kid a “dumb phone,” with no social media, just to keep in touch.
