According to the results announced by an Italian research team today (August 4, 2026), children who started using social media at ages 11-12 showed significantly lower academic performance compared to peers who started later, with a learning gap of up to 6 months. This is a long-term longitudinal study result that clearly demonstrates the negative impact of early social media use on children and adolescents' academics.
Professor Marco Gui's team at Milan Bicocca University in Italy published their research results tracking 5,227 students over a long period in the prestigious academic journal "Nature Human Behavior." The research team compared and analyzed academic achievement between students who started using social media in 6th grade (ages 11-12) and those who began in 9th grade (age 14 and older).
The analysis results showed that the group exposed to social media in 6th grade consistently demonstrated lower grades in Italian language and mathematics compared to the group that started after 9th grade. Notably, 10th-grade math scores were found to be 0.27 standard deviations (SD) lower, which corresponds to approximately a 6-month learning achievement gap. The research team emphasized that 0.2 standard deviations (SD) equals a 6-month learning gap. However, in the case of English grades, no significant correlation was found with the timing of social media use initiation.
Professor Gui's team identified "the habit of frequently checking smartphones" as the key cause of academic decline. This attention-scattering habit was found to explain 15-47% of the grade decline. Professor Marco Gui suggested the possibility that "policies delaying social media use could potentially be helpful from a learning perspective until children become cognitively mature enough to self-manage the attention-scattering effects of social media."