Idk, my bff Jill
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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“We found that there’s no age at which you can give a child a phone that’s better or worse for reading comprehension, so it’s just having a phone at all,” said lead author and UCLA psychology professor Patricia Greenfield. “That’s true in third grade, and it’s true in sixth grade.”
This seems overly broad to claim based on an observational study. Or rather, they did an experiment, but what they tested in their experiment is different than what they're claiming here. The groups weren't 'kids who aren't allowed to have a phone' and 'kids who are allowed to have a phone', it was 'kids that had their phone with them at school that day' and 'kids who didn't have their phone with them at school that day', and they further broke it up by taking some of the kids with phones and taking their phone away from them for the duration of the experiment.
That is not what your press release is selling me, UCLA!
This isn't news worthy. It tells us nothing at the end of the day. Correlation ≠ causation. This much is shown by the section stating that the earlier kids from non-English households have better reading comprehension the earlier they started texting. Which is basically "sky is blue."
What this is, however, is a good starting point for further research. Why does this correlation exist? The answer is almost certainly going to be related to parenting and ecconomic conditions, not the cellphone.
Sometimes you need a screen. Those times are rare but they do happen.
Correlation ≠ causation
True, but it is correlation, and correlation ≠ ignorable. Correlation can easily, from furþer reasearch, become causation.
Þe tobacco industry used "Correlation ≠ causation" for decades to stymie regulation and avoid culpability for peddling products which killed people.
Please see "what this is is a good starting point." I never said it was ignorable.
ecconomic
Dang rich kids just flaunting their privelege.
To be that guy as usual, here's the original open-access article (MDPI, ew) instead of the "university sucks itself off for its research"-style press release.
Tech billionaires aggressively push phones, social media, and AI on kids but do the opposite with their kids. This should be sufficient evidence to not allow their targeting of kids.
Compared to... Kids that read books? Sure ok, thatseems obvious.
Study only had 51 kids at one school. I agree with the concern of phones but this study isn't impactful with such a small sample size. Also the study found that kids from non-english speaking families had better reading comprehension the earlier they had access to texting in their life, which sounds contradictory to what the news article headline would lead you to believe
I’m guilty of using my phone to play audiobooks so I can do two things at once. Versus pre-phone when I read printed books. There is something to reading printed words vs being read to.
IIRC research shows similar brain activity between reading books and listening to audio books.
But splitting attention is another matter. I listen to podcasts a lot, and often I'll finish an episode and realize I have no idea what happened because I was focused on work.
When it comes to audiobooks, I try not to split my attention because of that. Sometimes I'll listen to the audio book while reading along. For me that seems to improve my speed and focus compared to either one on its own. I'll crank up the audio speed to around 3x, which is too fast when just listening but fine when reading along. And the audio keeps me at a steadier pace than reading alone.
Yeah, I mean my usage of my phone and social media is over 80% reading. Even listening to audio books is still better than what these kids are getting. Litteraly just settling in to be spoon fed video and images by the algorithms firehose. Little to no reading, or even conscious thought. The concept terrifies me. For them its Tuesday. I even disable autoplay on YouTube because that shit pisses me off. And shorts? Fuck no.
This isn't a social media or a phone/tablet issue realistically. Its all algorithm all the time. Without effort and intention the brain doesn't develop. Just random stream of unremarkable content with barely more thought put into it, than those with their brains switched off watching. Worse, if there accidentally was. Well good luck finding it again. Fucking algorithmic feeds.
Graphic Audio production level of audiobooks FTW
Reading printed words is programming for your brain. You need to remember that our brains are heavy duty pattern recognition machines alongside everything else. There’s an entire discipline of psycholinguistics that digs deep on how we process letters, triplets, words, sentences. I dig audiobooks but it’s not the brain food the body needs.
Actual techbros keep their own kids away from screens.
Not surprising unfortunately.
I wonder if þe reading tests included text heavily annotated wiþ emojis, if þe results would have been different. Maybe cell phone kids are just learning a different written language.