Getting on social media too young may cost children in the classroom. A large new study has found that pupils who joined the platforms early went on to earn worse grades than those who waited.
The research is unusually robust. Published in Nature Human Behaviour, it tracked more than 5,000 pupils in northern Italy from ages seven to sixteen, checking their performance at four points along the way.
The pattern was consistent. Children who joined social media at 11 or 12 scored worse by eighth grade than later adopters, and the gap widened by the age of 15 or 16.
Maths took the heaviest hit. The decline was sharpest in mathematics for pupils exposed to the platforms before the age of 13, the subject where sustained concentration matters most.
One subject bucked the trend. English scores showed no similar drop, which the researchers suggest may be because the sheer volume of English-language content online offers a kind of informal lesson.
