In last week’s Tuesday T&T Guardian, I wrote about the decisions by many countries to limit the time children spend on screens and smartphones both inside and outside the educational system, but that have probably come too late to save the damaged minds of children who used the devices to excess for the last ten years.
Damaged minds! That’s a strong statement. Where is the evidence for it? Where is the proof that smartphones are harmful to children?
First of all, it’s worth a review some of the clinical data suggesting harm: the average teen gets 237 smartphone notifications a day; there is a new disease called “smartphone addiction;” 33% of parents of children with smartphones have cried over their child’s phone obsession; teens who spend more than three hours a day on social media face double the risk of anxiety and depression; children at smartphone-free schools get GSCE results 1-2 grades higher; 90% of girls and 50% of boys have been sent unsolicited explicit sexual content and 80% of teenage girls have been put under pressure to provide sexual images of themselves and strikingly, 75% of 15-year-olds have seen a beheading video.
If all that does not convince you that there is something wrong with allowing an untested device to be released upon an unsuspecting public by the autistic minds that control the tech world, minds that do not understand the need for social development and see the world in terms of clicks and algorithms and bank accounts, then you must necessarily be one of those who also believe children should be allowed free access to cigarettes, alcohol and sex with adults.
There is further evidence of harm. It comes from three separate modes of inquiry: neuroscientific, global educational assessments and comprehensive international analyses.
The first concrete evidence comes from MRI scans of the brains of children who spend enormous amounts of time on smartphones. MRI scans on these children show that their brains are smaller than children who have not been as exposed to smartphones. The brains are smaller because the white matter in their brains is lacking in comparison with normal brains. White matter in brains insulates nerve fibres and speeds up the transmission of signals throughout the brain, i.e. a deficit slows down brain thinking (see YouTube February 2, 2026 Chilling Warning for Parents as MRI scans show Phones are Damaging Kids’ Brains).
Then there is the proof that the physical act of writing or flipping physical pages engages entirely different brain pathways than typing and scrolling. Writing and reading physical pages while turning them, translates into deep understanding of what is being read, strengthens memory and improves fine motor development. Skim reading on screens “weakens a student’s cognitive stamina for long-form, complex text comprehension.”
This in turn translates into the results from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which is a worldwide exam carried out on 15-year-olds every three years to evaluate their scholastic performance in reading, writing and science. Students using computers for five to seven hours a day in school scored a massive 73 points lower on average in science and reading assessments compared to students with minimal or moderate screen exposure. Between 2006 and 2025, students’ scores dropped as screen time rose.
In 2023, a UNESCO Global Education Monitoring Report concluded that there is “little to no definitive, long-term scientific evidence proving that widespread digital technology inherently improves learning outcomes or basic literacy.” The evidence is that tech heavily impairs learning when it substitutes student-teacher interaction and that the presence of smart devices in proximity to learning environments directly compromises cognitive control and emotional stability.
All this helps to explain why several countries, led by Australia, Sweden, Singapore, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Spain, Finland, France, Italy and Denmark, are scaling back digital-first education, reducing computers, tablets and phones in classrooms and returning to a focus on books and handwriting.
Unfortunately, we seem to be happily going in the wrong direction. We have not participated in the PISA examination since 2015, when we did not do too badly, coming third in the nine-country Latin American/Caribbean Region behind Chile and Uruguay but well below all the European and North American countries not to mention the most successful, China, Japan, Finland, Hong Kong etc.
It would be interesting to know where we are after ten years of screen and smartphone overuse.
