Gen Z is shaping up to be one of the least literate generations of Americans in modern history, and Gen Alpha might be worse. Reading scores have been sliding for years, reading comprehension is plummeting, and according to a new UCLA study published in Behavioral Sciences and detailed by the university in a press release, elementary school students who own cell phones score significantly lower on reading comprehension tests than classmates who don’t own one.
But there’s an interesting twist: the researchers found that the mere ownership of a phone, and not its presence during testing, was associated with weaker reading skills.
Giving a third grader a smartphone is so detrimental to a child’s ability to read that UCLA researchers recommend parents wait until after elementary school to buy their kids their own mobile devices.
There was one fascinating exception to the recommendation: students from Arabic and Spanish-speaking households who start texting earlier actually performed better on reading tests, suggesting that phones can sometimes be a kind of informal language learning tool instead of an easy-to-access dopamine dispenser that kills your ability to read and comprehend a sentence.
Maybe Don’t Give Your 8-Year-Old a Cell Phone
By sixth grade, those kids from Arabic- and Spanish-speaking homes who received phones in the second or third grade had reading comprehension scores similar to peers who still didn’t have phones.
It’s a strange quirk in the findings, which broadly don’t definitively prove that phones cause lower reading scores, but it does correlate strongly enough for the UCLA researchers to recommend that parents wait a bit before introducing a potentially literacy-obliterating phone into their kids’ lives.
All of this seems to align with what neuroscientists have been talking about for some time now, like one neuroscientist named Jared Cooney Horvath, who, earlier this year, said that Gen Z might be “the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized academic tests than the one before it.”
It’s no wonder we are seeing a mass cultural rise in the popularity of book clubs, and high-end luxury versions of the same idea, where adults pay thousands of dollars to read books together as a very expensive way of holding themselves accountable.
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