Is Social Media Making Your Child Less Intelligent? What the 2025–2026 Research Actually Shows

Written By Anindo Mitra

By Dr. Anindo Mitra | MBBS, MD Psychiatry (JIPMER) | Consultant Psychiatrist, Athena Behavioural Health, Gurugram

Published on dranindomitra.com | Reading time: ~10 minutes

Let me start with a scene most Indian parents will recognise.

It's 9 PM. Your Class 7 child has finished dinner. They have 30 minutes of free time before studying. You walk past the bedroom and see them on Instagram or YouTube Shorts — scrolling, tapping, swiping. Their eyes barely move. You remind them about homework. They look up slowly, as if coming out of a trance, and say, "Just five more minutes."

Most parents feel something is wrong here. But when you raise the concern — with your child, with your spouse, with a teacher — the response is often vague. All kids do it. It's just the times. Don't overreact.

So let me tell you what the science actually says. Because the research published in 2025 and early 2026 is not vague at all. And as a psychiatrist who sees the downstream effects of this every week in clinic, I think every parent in urban India deserves a clear, evidence-based picture — not panic, not dismissal.

The Flynn Effect: A Century of Rising Intelligence — Now Reversing

For most of the 20th century, something remarkable was happening: every new generation was, on average, measurably smarter than the last. IQ scores across the world rose by approximately 3 points every decade. Better nutrition, wider access to education, exposure to more complex environments — every generation outperformed the one before it.

Researchers named this the Flynn Effect, after New Zealand psychologist James Flynn, who first documented the phenomenon. It held across decades and countries. Then, something changed.

Beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, studies from Scandinavia and Western Europe began indicating that these gains had plateaued or even declined — particularly evident in tests administered to young men at military recruitment. Norwegian conscription data showed that IQ scores rose through the mid-1970s, then fell for cohorts born after about 1975.

Researchers began calling this the Reverse Flynn Effect — and it has since been confirmed across multiple high-income nations.

In January 2026, this landed in the United States Senate. Neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, in written testimony presented to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, stated: "Over the past two decades, the cognitive development of children across much of the developed world has stalled and, in many domains, reversed. Literacy, numeracy, attention, and higher-order reasoning have declined despite increased school attendance and expanded public investment."

His testimony suggested that Gen Z may be the first generation in modern history to score 2 to 4 points lower on standardised cognitive tests than their predecessors — reversing a trend that held for over a hundred years.

Worth unpacking carefully, because this claim is being both sensationalised and dismissed in ways that don't help parents trying to make real decisions.

What Is Actually Declining — And What Isn't

Adolescent performance on externally scaffolded tasks — those where structure and rules are explicitly visible on the screen — has shown moderate growth. But performance on internally scaffolded tasks — those requiring sustained memory, prior knowledge, verbal reasoning, and internal processing without visual support — shows significant declines.

In plain language: children raised in digital environments are still good at navigating interfaces, reacting to visual cues, and rapidly processing short content. What they are struggling with is the kind of deep thinking that doesn't come with a prompt — sustained reading, working memory, and constructing arguments from recalled knowledge.

Horvath's concern goes beyond averages. He questions whether the fundamental learning environment has shifted without anyone really noticing. Classrooms were once primarily human spaces. They are increasingly digital. Perhaps it is not children's abilities that have changed, but the conditions under which they develop.

This matters. The reverse Flynn effect appears to be environmentally driven, not genetic — which means it is reversible. The environment shaped it; a different environment can shift it back.

The JAMA October 2025 Study: Reading, Memory, and Vocabulary

If the Flynn Effect reversal tells us something is happening at the population level, a study published in JAMA in October 2025 points the lens directly at social media.

A JAMA study involving 6,554 adolescents aged 9–13 found that children who spent more time on social media scored lower on oral reading, memory, and vocabulary tests.

The researchers used data from the nationwide Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study — a longitudinal project that has followed thousands of preteens across 21 research sites. Children were assessed at three time points, and their social media habits were tracked alongside standardised cognitive tests.

Three patterns emerged: no to very low use (58% of children), low increasing use (37%), and high increasing use (6%). Children with low but increasing use scored 1–2 points lower on reading and memory tests compared to children with virtually no social media use. Those with high increasing use scored up to 4 points lower — even after accounting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and other screen time.

A 4-point drop on standardised cognitive tests is not trivial. Across a classroom of 30 children, it is the difference between a student who grasps complex concepts independently and one who needs repeated scaffolding to reach the same understanding.

An Important Caveat — and Why It Doesn't Change the Concern

This study is observational. It can identify correlations but not establish causation. Children who use social media more may have other characteristics — less parental supervision, more family stress, fewer books at home — that also contribute to lower cognitive scores.

That is a fair scientific point. I'm not asking you to ignore it.

But consider this: when multiple large, well-designed studies are pointing in the same direction — and when the biological mechanisms make sense — the absence of a randomised controlled trial is not a reason for complacency. We don't wait for RCT evidence before telling children to wear helmets.

The Attention–ADHD Connection: From Sweden and the US

The third piece of the puzzle is attention — and it is the one I find most relevant to what I see in my own practice.

In December 2025, researchers from Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Oregon Health & Science University in the US published findings that go a step beyond correlation.

They followed 8,324 children aged 9–10 in the USA for four years. Children who spent significant time on social media gradually developed inattention symptoms. Children who watched television or played video games did not show the same pattern.

That last part matters. This is not a story about screen time in general. Something specific to social media — its architecture of constant notifications, variable reward, and endless scroll — is doing something different to the developing attention system.

The association held regardless of socioeconomic background or genetic predisposition toward ADHD. More importantly: children who already had inattention symptoms at the start of the study did not go on to use social media more. The association ran one way — from use to symptoms, not the reverse.

One of the most common counterarguments is that inattentive children gravitate toward social media, rather than social media causing inattention. This data directly challenges that.

As of 2022, there were over 7 million children and adolescents in the US diagnosed with ADHD — up from just over 6 million in 2016. Researchers at Karolinska now suggest that greater social media consumption may explain part of that rise.

In India, formal ADHD prevalence data is harder to come by, but the clinical picture I see — and what colleagues across metros report — points in the same direction: more referrals for inattention, more parental concern about children who "can't sit with a book for 20 minutes," more adolescents who can scroll for three hours but cannot focus through a 40-minute class.

The India Picture: Why This Is Not a Western Problem

Some of you may be thinking: these are American studies. India is different — our education system is more rigorous, our children read more, our family structures provide more supervision.

That is partially true. And I genuinely do not want to import panic from another cultural context. But the data specific to India is not reassuring.

As of 2024, India had over 880 million internet users. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) 2024 found that while 82.2% of Indian children aged 14–16 can use a smartphone, only 57% use it for education, compared to 76% who use it for social media. More of our children are using smartphones for Instagram and YouTube than for learning — on the same devices.

India reports an average daily screen time of 6 hours and 36 minutes across the general population — among the highest in the world. For urban adolescents with smartphone access, it is likely higher.

Prevalence studies in Indian schools estimate that 11–37% of adolescents show signs of problematic or addictive social media use. Research in Indian adolescents shows strong associations between high social media use and depression, anxiety, stress, and low self-esteem. Cyberbullying affects anywhere from 3% to over 60% of Indian children depending on context and definition.

Older children in urban areas spend over three hours a day on online activities including gaming, watching videos, and accessing social media. This is a conservative figure from data that predates the post-COVID smartphone explosion among Indian adolescents.

The Indian government has begun to respond. New DPDP Rules introduced in January 2025 require parental consent for children under 18 to use social media. Karnataka's move to restrict social media access for children under 16 — which I will cover in a separate post — signals growing policy urgency. But policy is reactive. Parenting can be proactive.

What Is Happening in the Brain

Here is a simple but accurate picture of what social media is doing to your child's developing brain. Not to alarm you — but because the mechanism makes the concern easier to understand, and harder to dismiss.

The brain between ages 9 and 16 is undergoing rapid development, particularly in the prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for sustained attention, impulse control, decision-making, and working memory. This is also the most plastic period: the brain is actively shaped by what it repeatedly encounters.

Social media platforms are built to maximise time on platform. They do this through variable reward schedules (you never know if the next scroll will bring something exciting — the same mechanism that makes slot machines hard to walk away from), social validation loops (likes, comments, follower counts), and infinite scroll that removes natural stopping points.

Notifications and the mere anticipation of them are distracting even when the phone is not being used. That background hum of checking competes directly with the sustained focus that reading, studying, and complex thinking require.

A brain repeatedly trained in this environment learns to expect rapid stimulation, low effort, and immediate reward. Deep reading, long-form problem solving, and sustained attention — which require the opposite: delayed reward, sustained effort, tolerance for ambiguity — become increasingly aversive. Not because the child is lazy or undisciplined, but because their neural pathways have been shaped by a very different kind of demand.

At puberty, the brain goes through a growth spurt and actively looks for input to shape itself. When those hours are dominated by social media, the brain prunes itself to fit that usage — at the expense of the capacities that aren't being exercised. Pruning is normal and necessary. The question is what gets pruned.

What the Evidence Does Not Say

A few things worth being clear about, because I have seen the research distorted in both directions.

The evidence does not say:

  • All screen time is equally harmful

  • Children who use social media will definitely have lower intelligence

  • Television and video games carry the same risks as social media

  • The damage is permanent or irreversible

  • Digital literacy has no value

The evidence does say:

  • Social media specifically — more than other screen activities — is associated with measurable declines in attention, reading, and memory in children aged 9–14

  • Higher use produces larger effects

  • The critical window is preadolescence and early adolescence

  • The direction of effect runs from use to symptoms, not the reverse

  • The effect at the population level is meaningful even when the individual effect looks small

This is not a reason to take your child's phone and lock it in a drawer. It is a reason to think carefully about how much unstructured social media access your child has — particularly during the years when their brain is most actively being shaped.

What Can You Do? A Psychiatrist's Practical Guidance

Note: These are general educational recommendations, not individualised medical advice. If you have specific concerns about your child's attention or development, please consult a paediatrician or child psychiatrist.

1. Age-appropriate access, not complete restriction. The research consistently highlights 9–14 as the highest-risk window. This is not the time to introduce unmonitored social media access. Many platforms set 13 as a minimum age — but as the JAMA data shows, that threshold may be too low. If your 11-year-old insists they need Instagram because "all their friends have it," that is a social pressure argument, not a developmental one.

2. Time boundaries with clarity, not battle. The goal is not zero use — it is bounded use. An hour of social media after homework, with a clear endpoint, is very different from two hours of scroll before bed. The bedtime part matters particularly because social media before sleep suppresses melatonin and disrupts the memory consolidation that happens during sleep (more on this in a separate post).

3. Replace, don't just remove. A child who reads for 30 minutes, plays outdoors, or practises a musical instrument is building exactly the cognitive skills that social media does not build. You are not punishing them. You are giving their brain a chance to develop the capacities they will need for the rest of their lives.

4. Have the conversation — genuinely. Teenagers who understand the mechanism — that the app is engineered to capture their attention, that this is not a personal failing — respond better than teenagers who are simply told "it's bad for you." Explaining what the science says, without catastrophising, is more effective than a power struggle. I will write a separate post specifically on how to have this conversation.

5. Watch for signs, not just symptoms. You don't need a clinical diagnosis to notice that your child cannot sustain attention through dinner conversation, reads only when forced, or becomes irritable when the phone is removed. These are early signals worth taking seriously.

The Larger Picture

For most of human history, the question facing each generation of parents was: how do we give our children access to more information, more stimulation, more opportunity?

That problem is solved. Information is not scarce. Stimulation is not scarce.

The question now is the opposite: how do we protect our children's capacity for sustained attention, deep reading, and complex thought in an environment that was designed to fragment it?

The 2025–2026 research does not answer all of this. But it does establish, across multiple methodologies and independent research groups, that the concern is real, the mechanism is biologically plausible, and the years we have to act are the early ones.

Your child's brain is not broken. It is doing exactly what brains do — adapting to the environment it spends the most time in. That is the problem. It is also where the solution starts.

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Dr. Anindo Mitra is a Consultant Psychiatrist at Athena Behavioural Health, Gurugram. He completed his MD in Psychiatry from JIPMER, Puducherry. His clinical focus includes evidence-based pharmacotherapy, deprescribing, and the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders. He writes at dranindomitra.com on mental health education for the Indian public.

This post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute individualised medical advice. If you have concerns about your child's mental health or development, please consult a qualified clinician.

Anindo Mitra
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