Screen time has long been blamed for making children inactive, but it could also affect their school performance, researchers in Canada have warned.
The more screen time a child is exposed to at a young age, the greater impact it has on their reading and maths test scores when they reach school age, a new study has revealed.
“Screen time is a part of everyday life for most families, and high levels of exposure, particularly to TV and digital media, may have a measurable impact on children’s academic outcomes,” said Dr Catherine Birken, a staff paediatrician at SickKids and a senior scientist in the Child Health Evaluative Sciences programme.
The researchers recruited more than 5,000 Canadian children between 2008 and 2023. They included 3,322 grade 3 (eight- and nine-year-old) children, and 2,084 children in grade 6 (aged 11 and 12).
Parents reported screen time during early childhood, and researchers compared the data with later academic achievement on standardised tests administered by the Education Quality and Accountability Office, specifically in grade 3 reading and maths, and grade 6 maths.
The findings, published in the journal Jama Network Open, revealed that each extra hour of daily screen time in young children was associated with a 9 per cent drop in the likelihood of their achieving higher academic grades. It also led to a 10 per cent reduction in the odds of achieving a higher grade in maths among older pupils in the study.
Test scores were found to be lower in reading and maths, but screen time appeared to have less of an impact on a child’s writing abilities.
The findings come as the Duke and Duchess of Sussex accused social-media companies of exploiting children through manipulative algorithms. The couple had previously warned that young people are experiencing an “epidemic” of anxiety, depression and social isolation driven by negative experiences online.
The World Health Organisation recommends no screen time at all for children below the age of one, and no more than one hour per day for under-fours – but this is mostly because it leads to less physical activity.
However, this latest study suggests that exposing young children to more than an hour’s screen time a day could also affect their academic ability.
In the observational study, children were given a standardised test: one for grade 3 children, who had an average screen time of 1.6 hours a day, and another for grade 6 children, who had an average of 1.8 hours of screen time a day.
Researchers found that TV and digital media time, which includes television, computers and smartphones, was associated with lower reading and maths scores for both male and female students.
But the link between video game use and lower achievement in grade 3 reading and maths was only found to be present in female students.
“While our findings highlight the importance of considering how much screen time children are exposed to, any interventions should also take into account the type of content kids are watching and whether they are watching it alone or with caregivers and friends,” said Xuedi Li, first author on the study and an epidemiologist at SickKids.
But experts warned that the findings should be interpreted with caution.
Chris Ferguson, a professor of psychology at Stetson University in Florida, said: “Many studies, including studies of higher quality than this one, have found no evidence that screen time influences school outcomes, so we need to look at the totality of evidence.
“Put simply, this study provides little real evidence of a link between screen time and school performance in youth.”
