Why Kids’ Phones May Hurt Reading Skills

You probably already had a hunch about this one. Now there is research to back it up.

A new study looked at elementary school children and their cellphone habits. Researchers found that kids who owned their own phones consistently scored worse on reading comprehension tests than classmates who did not have one.

Here is the part that really stands out. It did not matter where the phone was during the school day. Whether it was sitting on a desk, tucked in a backpack, or left at home entirely, the gap in reading scores still showed up.

The findings suggest the problem is not children sneaking peeks at their screens during class. Simply owning a cellphone appears to be enough to affect how well kids read.

The work came out of UCLA and was published in the journal Behavioral Sciences. Researchers tested 106 third and sixth graders at public schools in the Antelope Valley and at Coptic Church schools in Los Angeles County. The children read short passages, answered questions about what they had just read, and filled out a survey about their phones. The pattern held in both grades.

Patricia Greenfield, the UCLA psychology professor who led the study, put it plainly. There is no age at which handing a child a phone turns out better or worse for reading. “It’s just having a phone at all,” she said.

Still, the finding lands at an uncomfortable moment. On the 2024 Nation’s Report Card, average reading scores for fourth and eighth graders fell again, landing five points below where they stood in 2019. Forty percent of fourth graders scored below the most basic reading level, the largest share since 2002. About a third of eighth graders did too, the highest in the history of the test.

Meanwhile, the phones keep arriving earlier. The UCLA paper notes that among eight and nine year olds in the United States, personal smartphone ownership climbed from roughly 13 percent in 2015 to about 31 percent by 2021. Common Sense Media has found that a majority of children own a smartphone by age 11.

One more thing the study raises, and it may surprise you. If ownership is what matters, then a school banning phones during the day may do little for reading scores in the elementary grades. The researchers still see a case for those bans, just for a different reason. Time without a phone means more talking, more listening, and more playing with the children sitting three feet away. They flagged that as the next thing worth studying.

For grandparents, this is worth a conversation with the family. Many of us watched our grandchildren grow up with screens in their hands almost from the start. This research gives everyone, parents and grandparents alike, a reason to think twice before handing a young child their very own phone.

That conversation goes better when it comes with an offer instead of a warning. Read aloud on your next video call, even ten minutes of it. Mail a book with a note tucked inside the cover, because a package with a grandchild’s name on it still beats anything on a screen. Ask what they are reading before you ask what they are watching. Take them to get their own library card. When they visit, let the house be a place where nobody is reaching for a phone, including you.