Amazing, but we don't have genetically informed data to figure out whether the difference is based upon the conscientiousness of the parent. How much does delaying your kids social media overlap with polygenic risk for educational attainment.
These are yet more examples of many hundreds of dubious studies that claim social media and smartphones harm children and teenagers in various ways, from depression to sleeplessness to poor academic performance, suicide, etc., that fail to control for crucial family variables such as violence, psychological abuse, drug/alcohol abuse, mental health problems, criminal behavior, etc., by their parents and household adults. Failing to control for parental/adult abuses and troubles is like studying lung cancer causes while failing to include cigarette smoking.
The CDC's 2021 and 2023 YRB surveys are among the few that do include the key variables of parental abuses and troubles, and these surveys and studies consistently show two major results: compared to teens from healthier families, (1) teens who suffer parental/adult abuses and family troubles are far more likely to have mental health, academic, etc., problems, and (2) teens who are abused and/or have violent, addicted, mentally troubled parents and adults in their homes are much more likely to use social media.
We don't have good measures of family abuse trends, but we do know that drug/alcohol deaths and ER cases rose sharply among parent-age adults during the 2010s, when teens' mental health problems rose. The 2021 and 2023 CDC surveys show 30% of teens grow up with parents and household adults who abuse alcohol/drugs, and one-third with parents who are "severely" mentally troubled and/or violent. Girls and LGBTQ teens report more family abuses and problems, along with poorer mental health.
It is very possible that the simple, usually weak correlation between teens' social media/smartphone use and poorer mental health, suicidality, lack of sleep, cognitive issues, academics, etc., is a false correlation resulting from these problems' connection to family abuses. That issue needs rigorous examination rather than simply being ignored, especially before we rush to ban and restrict teens' social media use.
This is an important study, and I think the result is real. Earlier access to social media through a personal smartphone appears to predict poorer subsequent performance in maths and Italian. Where I remain cautious is over what we call the cause.
The paper itself cannot tell us why this happens. Its strongest potential mediator is smartphone “pervasiveness” — including use while studying and around sleep — and the authors explicitly raise time displacement and cognitive overload as possible mechanisms.
This is consistent with something I have been exploring in my own work: that sleep displacement may be an important causal pathway behind the international social-media signal. Social media is not a biological mechanism. Sleep disruption is. It affects attention, memory, learning, emotional processing and resilience.
There is also a broader problem here that increasingly concerns me about this debate: selection of evidence.
Jonathan Haidt has done an important job drawing attention to changes in childhood. But evidence consistent with the social-media-harm hypothesis tends to receive considerable attention, while findings that complicate it receive much less.
This paper itself is a good example. The negative maths and Italian results are highlighted. But English shows no negative effect at all, and the authors suggest that digital exposure may actually provide a learning benefit through incidental exposure to English. The strongest mediator is smartphone pervasiveness rather than demonstrated harmful content. And yet the introduction goes further and predicts that repeating the experiment with today's TikTok generation would produce larger effects. That may be true. But it is a hypothesis, not a finding of this study.
This matters because very few parents, teachers or policymakers will read a 16-page Nature Human Behaviour paper and interrogate its methodology. They rely upon people like Haidt — and indeed people like me — to represent the evidence fairly. That places an obligation on all of us to give equal weight to evidence that challenges our preferred hypothesis.
I have been writing on my Substack about this distinction between signal and cause. My reading of the international evidence increasingly leads me towards sleep displacement as a major candidate mechanism. This Italian study doesn't disprove that hypothesis. If anything, its mediation results are remarkably consistent with it.
Social media undoubtedly has costs. It also has benefits. The scientific task is to identify the mechanisms producing each rather than putting everything under a single label.
Before we legislate the signal, we should be much more certain that we have identified the cause.
After reading your post and the references offered including the paper 'Longitudinal effect of early social media use on standardized learning outcomes during school year', I resonate with a few of the phrases therein: "AI (has managed) to create stronger engagement for users", "social media use during preadolescence impacts academic outcomes negatively", and the "problem may lie in the continuous fragmentation of attention and the habitual shifting between digital and offline activities". It's no mystery that these "digital distractions" are creating problems for our children. Thanks for your powerful post.
Amazing, but we don't have genetically informed data to figure out whether the difference is based upon the conscientiousness of the parent. How much does delaying your kids social media overlap with polygenic risk for educational attainment.
Is this satire?
Ultimately it’s upon the family to restrict access and passwords.
These are yet more examples of many hundreds of dubious studies that claim social media and smartphones harm children and teenagers in various ways, from depression to sleeplessness to poor academic performance, suicide, etc., that fail to control for crucial family variables such as violence, psychological abuse, drug/alcohol abuse, mental health problems, criminal behavior, etc., by their parents and household adults. Failing to control for parental/adult abuses and troubles is like studying lung cancer causes while failing to include cigarette smoking.
The CDC's 2021 and 2023 YRB surveys are among the few that do include the key variables of parental abuses and troubles, and these surveys and studies consistently show two major results: compared to teens from healthier families, (1) teens who suffer parental/adult abuses and family troubles are far more likely to have mental health, academic, etc., problems, and (2) teens who are abused and/or have violent, addicted, mentally troubled parents and adults in their homes are much more likely to use social media.
We don't have good measures of family abuse trends, but we do know that drug/alcohol deaths and ER cases rose sharply among parent-age adults during the 2010s, when teens' mental health problems rose. The 2021 and 2023 CDC surveys show 30% of teens grow up with parents and household adults who abuse alcohol/drugs, and one-third with parents who are "severely" mentally troubled and/or violent. Girls and LGBTQ teens report more family abuses and problems, along with poorer mental health.
It is very possible that the simple, usually weak correlation between teens' social media/smartphone use and poorer mental health, suicidality, lack of sleep, cognitive issues, academics, etc., is a false correlation resulting from these problems' connection to family abuses. That issue needs rigorous examination rather than simply being ignored, especially before we rush to ban and restrict teens' social media use.
Nice to have data about this.
Our kids can get social media and the smartphone at eighteen
We also took away their tablets. They don't get underestricted access to the laptop either
It's in the family room and password protected
This is an important study, and I think the result is real. Earlier access to social media through a personal smartphone appears to predict poorer subsequent performance in maths and Italian. Where I remain cautious is over what we call the cause.
The paper itself cannot tell us why this happens. Its strongest potential mediator is smartphone “pervasiveness” — including use while studying and around sleep — and the authors explicitly raise time displacement and cognitive overload as possible mechanisms.
This is consistent with something I have been exploring in my own work: that sleep displacement may be an important causal pathway behind the international social-media signal. Social media is not a biological mechanism. Sleep disruption is. It affects attention, memory, learning, emotional processing and resilience.
There is also a broader problem here that increasingly concerns me about this debate: selection of evidence.
Jonathan Haidt has done an important job drawing attention to changes in childhood. But evidence consistent with the social-media-harm hypothesis tends to receive considerable attention, while findings that complicate it receive much less.
This paper itself is a good example. The negative maths and Italian results are highlighted. But English shows no negative effect at all, and the authors suggest that digital exposure may actually provide a learning benefit through incidental exposure to English. The strongest mediator is smartphone pervasiveness rather than demonstrated harmful content. And yet the introduction goes further and predicts that repeating the experiment with today's TikTok generation would produce larger effects. That may be true. But it is a hypothesis, not a finding of this study.
This matters because very few parents, teachers or policymakers will read a 16-page Nature Human Behaviour paper and interrogate its methodology. They rely upon people like Haidt — and indeed people like me — to represent the evidence fairly. That places an obligation on all of us to give equal weight to evidence that challenges our preferred hypothesis.
I have been writing on my Substack about this distinction between signal and cause. My reading of the international evidence increasingly leads me towards sleep displacement as a major candidate mechanism. This Italian study doesn't disprove that hypothesis. If anything, its mediation results are remarkably consistent with it.
Social media undoubtedly has costs. It also has benefits. The scientific task is to identify the mechanisms producing each rather than putting everything under a single label.
Before we legislate the signal, we should be much more certain that we have identified the cause.
After reading your post and the references offered including the paper 'Longitudinal effect of early social media use on standardized learning outcomes during school year', I resonate with a few of the phrases therein: "AI (has managed) to create stronger engagement for users", "social media use during preadolescence impacts academic outcomes negatively", and the "problem may lie in the continuous fragmentation of attention and the habitual shifting between digital and offline activities". It's no mystery that these "digital distractions" are creating problems for our children. Thanks for your powerful post.
I think you could reframe this whole debate as: modern education fails to catch up with Gen Z's smartphone-influenced cognitive styles.