Owning a Phone Tracks With Weaker Reading in Young Children

Put a switched-on phone face up on the desk beside a nine-year-old, hand them a reading test, then take the phone away and hand them another. Common sense says the first score should sag. It doesn’t. In a study of 106 children across Los Angeles County, the phone sitting right there made no measurable difference at all.

Which is the first surprise in a paper that’s full of them, and not the one the researchers went looking for. They set out to catch the phone in the act of distraction, and the phone, in the moment, did nothing.

The team, led by psychologist Patricia Greenfield at the University of California, Los Angeles, wanted a clean test of an idea that has hardened into policy across the country: that a phone within reach eats the concentration a child needs to perform. So they built one. Third and sixth graders read short passages from a standard multiple-choice comprehension test, once with their own phone turned on and face up beside them, once with it handed to a researcher and out of sight. Same child, same sitting, two conditions, the order shuffled so nobody could blame the sequence.

Nine in ten questions came back correct with the phone present. Nearly the same without it. The gap was noise.

You might reasonably ask whether the phones were simply quiet that day, and they were. Each passage carried a seven-minute limit, and over that stretch most children got nothing: eight of ten third graders and twenty of twenty-seven sixth graders received zero notifications during testing. The one thing the researchers had hypothesised would break concentration barely happened. A phone that never buzzes is not much of a test of buzzing.

So the immediate-distraction story collapsed twice over, because a second comparison backed it up. The children who happened to bring a phone to school that day scored no differently from the ones who came without. As Greenfield put it, “The children who brought their phones to school had the same reading scores as children who did not have phones at school that day. So, it’s ownership of a phone, not the immediate presence of one, that correlates with poorer reading comprehension at the elementary school level.”

Ownership Was the Thing That Tracked

That is the finding underneath the null results, and it’s a stranger one. This part of the study was cross-sectional, a snapshot: alongside the tests, every child filled in a survey about what phones they owned and used. Set the in-the-moment experiment aside, look at who simply owned a phone, and a small negative association appears. Across the whole sample, with grade held constant, the children who had their own phones tended to score lower on comprehension than the children who did not. Ownership was already common: 46 per cent of the third graders had a phone, and 70 per cent of the sixth graders, rates well above the national picture from a few years earlier. The link held for kids who spoke English at home and for those who did not.

“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,” she said. “That’s true in third grade, and it’s true in sixth grade.” When the researchers checked whether the age a child first got a phone made any difference, it didn’t. Not in third grade, not in sixth.

Here’s where the honest caveats matter: This ownership finding is a correlation, drawn from about a hundred children at a single moment in time. It can’t tell you which way the arrow points. Maybe phones nudge reading down; maybe children who already struggle are likelier to be handed a phone; maybe some third thing sits behind both. The authors argue the first is more plausible than the second, partly because most of the sample owned phones and it strains belief that most were struggling readers, but they are careful to call it correlational and to ask for the long-term study that could actually settle it.

And the press release, worth noting, skips the number. Read the announcement alone and you would not learn that the whole edifice rests on roughly a hundred kids, tested once, with the language comparisons resting on as few as thirteen. The finding is real; its foundations are narrow, and narrowness is easy to lose between a paper and its summary.

There was one truly unexpected turn, and it points the other way. Among sixth graders from Arabic- or Spanish-speaking homes who owned phones, the ones who had started texting earlier read better, not worse. Greenfield’s version: “In fact, when students from Arabic- or Spanish-speaking homes began to text in second or third grade, by sixth grade they had reading comprehension scores similar to their peers who still did not have phones.” For a child learning English, in other words, a phone may be a page as much as a distraction, thumbing out messages in a second language, night after night. The same small group who gamed on their first phones also read better. Both patterns rest on a handful of children, so hold them loosely.

What a School Ban Would and Wouldn’t Buy

All of which provides mixed signals for the school phone ban movement, now spreading through districts on the promise of sharper, calmer classrooms. On the evidence here, at least through sixth grade, taking the phones away on test day buys no reading gain, because the phone on the desk was never the problem the tests could catch. The problem, if it is one, travels home with the child and does its work over years, not minutes.

Which does not make the bans pointless, only aimed at a different target. Greenfield and her colleagues suspect the real case for keeping phones out of elementary school is social, not academic: more talking to actual classmates, more of the ordinary friction that builds a young person’s people skills.

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