From the desk of Dr. Sam Goldstein
An intriguing study suggests cellphone ownership is associated with poorer comprehension, while unexpected findings about texting show why the evidence is more complicated than "phones are bad."
Parents wondering when to give a child their first cellphone have plenty of reasons to hesitate. Concerns include social media, inappropriate content, sleep, distraction, cyberbullying, and the possibility that hours spent staring at a screen are hours not spent playing, talking, or reading. Now, a study led by UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield adds another potentially troubling finding: elementary school children who owned their own cellphones had poorer reading comprehension scores than those who did not (https://doi.org/10.3390/bs16081263). The association appeared among both third- and sixth-graders and among children from English-speaking and non-English-speaking homes. Perhaps most surprisingly, it did not seem to matter whether children actually had their phones beside them when they were tested. "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," Greenfield told the media. "That's true in third grade, and it's true in sixth grade."
It is a striking finding, particularly as schools across the country debate or implement cellphone restrictions. But it is also exactly the kind of result that warrants careful reading. The study found an association between owning a phone and poorer reading comprehension. It did not demonstrate that giving a child a cellphone causes reading ability to decline. In fact, some of the study's other findings make the picture considerably more complicated. The immediate presence of a phone did not lower children's scores, and notifications were too infrequent to meaningfully test their distracting effects. Among children from homes where English was not the primary language, starting to text at a younger age was actually associated with better reading comprehension later. Rather than delivering a simple verdict that "cellphones make children worse readers," the research raises a more interesting question: What about phone ownership or the lives of children who own phones is associated with reading?
What the Researchers Actually Did
The study, published in Behavioral Sciences, involved 106 children: 51 third-graders and 55 sixth-graders. The sample was deliberately linguistically diverse. According to the study abstract, English was the home language for 42% of the children, Arabic for 30%, and Spanish for 28%. The children attended public schools in California's Antelope Valley and Coptic Church schools in Los Angeles County, settings where phones were normally permitted. Researchers were interested in a surprisingly understudied question. Although concerns about children, smartphones, and learning have become widespread, there has been relatively little experimental research specifically examining cellphone use and reading comprehension among elementary school children. The researchers therefore wanted to investigate both whether possessing a phone was related to comprehension and whether a phone's immediate presence could interfere with the concentration required for reading.
The children completed grade-appropriate reading-comprehension assessments from the DIBELS 8th Edition, reading short passages and answering questions designed to determine how well they understood them. Children who brought phones to school completed one reading assessment with the phone beside them and another equivalent assessment without the phone nearby or visible. Children who did not have phones with them also completed two assessments. All participants completed a survey covering cellphone ownership and use, as well as demographic information. This repeated-measures design allowed the researchers to distinguish, at least to some degree, between two ideas that are often blurred together in discussions about children and phones: the possibility that the physical presence of a phone creates an immediate distraction, and the possibility that owning and regularly using a phone is associated with longer-term differences in reading performance.
The Surprising Result
If the popular theory is that children cannot concentrate because their phones constantly pull at their attention, the experimental part of the study produced an unexpected result. Children did not comprehend passages any less well simply because a cellphone was sitting beside them. There was no significant difference in reading comprehension between the condition in which a child had a phone in sight and the condition in which it was out of sight. Nor did children who brought phones to school that day perform worse than children who did not have phones at school. The researchers also hoped to examine whether notifications interfered with reading, but the children received almost no notifications during the experiment, making it impossible to properly test that question.
The broader comparison, however, told a different story. Across the sample, children who owned a personal cellphone had significantly lower reading comprehension scores than those who did not. Greenfield emphasized this distinction: "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." The reported age at which children received their first phones was also not correlated with their reading comprehension. In other words, the study did not identify a particular age at which acquiring a phone suddenly became especially harmful. What stood out statistically was whether the child owned a phone at all.
Then Comes a Finding That Complicates the Story
If phones themselves were simply toxic to developing literacy, we might expect different kinds of phone use to point in the same negative direction. They did not. Among phone-owning children from homes in which English was not the primary language, the researchers found that reading comprehension was better the earlier children had begun texting. The published abstract also reports a positive association with earlier access to games among this group. For children from English-speaking homes who owned phones, earlier texting or access to mobile games was not similarly associated with better comprehension. Greenfield highlighted the texting result, explaining that children from Arabic- or Spanish-speaking homes who began texting in second or third grade had, by sixth grade, comprehension scores similar to peers who still did not have phones.
That result deserves attention because it undermines an overly simple interpretation of the research. Texting, after all, requires children to decode language, construct messages, interpret meaning, and communicate in writing. For children growing up in households where another language is primarily spoken, texting in English could conceivably provide additional opportunities to practice literacy outside the classroom. That is a plausible explanation rather than something this study proves, but it illustrates a broader problem with the term "cellphone use." A child reading and writing messages, a child watching hours of short-form video, a child playing a language game, and a child scrolling social media may all be classified as cellphone users, yet their cognitive and linguistic experiences are very different. The study itself notes that the small amount of previous research on elementary-aged children has produced mixed results, with one earlier study suggesting benefits of texting for grasping meaning and another finding a negative influence on more basic reading mechanics at the letter and word levels.
Correlation Does Not Tell Us What Caused What
This is where the study's most important limitation comes into focus. The researchers found that cellphone ownership and lower reading comprehension were associated. That does not establish that the first caused the second. Children were not randomly assigned to receive phones or remain phone-free for years and then compared. In ordinary life, families decide when to provide a cellphone, and those decisions are entangled with many other aspects of childhood. Children who owned phones may have differed from those without phones in ways that also affected reading comprehension. Those differences could include recreational screen time, bedtime habits, sleep quality, reading for pleasure, parental supervision, family routines, access to books, social-media use, gaming, attention, independence, travel between households, or socioeconomic circumstances.
There is also the possibility of what researchers call reverse causation. The tempting interpretation is that children acquire phones and, as a result, become poorer readers. But it is possible that some children who already read less, find reading more difficult, or prefer other activities are also more likely to spend time on phones. Or a third factor could contribute to both phone ownership and reading outcomes. Parents might give a child a phone earlier because the child travels independently, moves between caregivers, has after-school responsibilities, or needs to communicate with family members. Those circumstances could be associated with different levels of homework supervision or leisure reading. The point is not that any one of these explanations must be correct. It is that an observational relationship between ownership and comprehension cannot, by itself, distinguish among them.
The Study Doesn't Show That Buzzing Phones Ruined Concentration
Another caution is especially important because it runs counter to the intuitive story many people may attach to the findings. The research began with the question of whether phones interfere with the concentration required to perform well on academic tests. Yet the experiment did not show that children were reading, receiving notifications, becoming distracted, and consequently comprehending less. There were too few notifications to meaningfully investigate that mechanism, and simply having a phone visible did not produce poorer scores. If anything, the immediate experimental results make the mechanism behind the ownership association less obvious.
Regular phone ownership may have longer-term effects that a short reading test with a device beside a child would not capture. Perhaps phones displace time that would otherwise be spent reading books. Perhaps some forms of digital media encourage rapid shifts in attention, making sustained reading less appealing. Perhaps late-night phone use affects sleep, which in turn affects learning. Perhaps phones alter children's social routines and the amount of conversation they have with adults and peers. All of those possibilities can be investigated, but this particular finding does not establish any of them. It is equally possible that phone ownership is partly serving as a marker for other characteristics of children's lives. The study identifies a relationship that requires explanation; it should not be mistaken for having already supplied that explanation.
Does the Research Support School Cellphone Bans?
The findings are also more ambiguous for school cellphone policies than they may initially appear. If children performed similarly whether their phones were beside them or out of sight, and if those who brought phones to school did not have worse comprehension than those who left them elsewhere, then this study provides little evidence that simply removing phones from elementary classrooms will improve reading comprehension through sixth grade. The UCLA report itself notes that the results suggest no academic effect of school bans on this measure. That is an important qualification at a moment when cellphone bans are sometimes presented as a relatively straightforward solution to declining academic performance.
That does not mean schools have no reason to restrict phones. The researchers suggest that elementary-school bans could improve social skills and relationships by encouraging more face-to-face interaction among children and between students and teachers, though they explicitly note this as an area for future research. Other research on digital engagement and school smartphone policies also suggests that outcomes vary by age, patterns of use, context, and the outcomes researchers measure. A school could reasonably decide that limiting phones reduces classroom interruptions, discourages social-media conflicts during the day, or encourages children to talk and play together at recess. But those arguments are different from saying this study has demonstrated that a school phone ban will make children better readers. It has not.
What Would Stronger Evidence Look Like?
A more decisive study would follow children over time, ideally beginning before they received their first personal phone. Researchers could repeatedly measure reading comprehension, vocabulary, attention, reading for pleasure, sleep and school performance while also collecting detailed information about what children actually do on their phones. Such a design could compare changes in reading trajectories before and after phone acquisition while accounting for family income, parental education, home language, prior reading ability and other potential confounders. Researchers might also examine whether different forms of phone use produce different outcomes. Twenty minutes spent texting a friend, twenty minutes reading an online story and twenty minutes watching rapidly changing videos all count as screen time, but there is little reason to assume they have identical relationships with literacy.
The UCLA study is valuable precisely because research on cellphone ownership and elementary-school reading comprehension remains surprisingly limited. Its sample of 106 children offers an intriguing signal that warrants replication in larger, more diverse populations, not a final verdict on children's phones. The linguistically diverse sample is a strength, particularly because it revealed an unexpected relationship between earlier texting and better comprehension among children from non-English-speaking homes. At the same time, that finding reinforces the need to look beneath broad categories such as "phone owner" and ask what children are actually doing with the technology, for how long, with whom, and in what linguistic and social context.
A Warning Worth Investigating
For parents, the most defensible conclusion is both interesting and frustratingly incomplete. In this study, third- and sixth-grade children who owned cellphones had poorer reading comprehension than those who did not. The association persisted across home-language groups, and simply having a phone present during the reading test did not explain it. There was no evidence of a particular "safe" or "unsafe" age for acquiring a phone based on reading comprehension. Earlier texting among phone-owning children from non-English-speaking homes was associated with better rather than worse comprehension. Those are the findings the evidence supports.
The much stronger statement "Giving a child a cellphone makes them a worse reader" is not supported by this study. Nor does the research establish that notifications are destroying children's concentration, that removing phones from schools will improve reading scores, or that all forms of cellphone use have the same effects. What it does provide is a reason to investigate phone ownership as part of the larger ecology of children's reading lives. For parents and educators, that may ultimately prove more useful than a simple argument over whether phones are good or bad. The important questions may be what children are doing on those phones, what those activities are replacing, how much time they consume, and how they interact with sleep, conversation, schoolwork, and sustained reading. Until longitudinal and experimental research answers those questions more convincingly, the finding that young phone owners score lower in reading comprehension should be treated as a warning signal significant enough to take seriously, but not strong enough to convict the cellphone itself. ◆
