Education and psychology experts warn that too much smartphone screen time is delaying kids’ language. The kicker? It’s not necessarily the children’s screen time that’s the problem.
Something to Talk About
If you want to get your kids off to a good start in life, put your phone away and talk to them. Researchers from the University of Oslo, Norway’s Department of Special Needs Education, say that kids whose parents spend more time on their smartphones have smaller vocabularies than their classmates. In a research article published August 17th 2026 in JAMA Pediatrics, the team report a negative correlation between parental smartphone use and their children’s language development.
The academics followed 747 kids from 5 years old until they were seven to see how screen time affected their language development. Kids whose primary parent passed more time looking at their phones had smaller vocabularies than their peers and kids who had their own phone had difficulties with vocabulary and grammar.
Let the Children Speak
Why is it a problem if your child isn’t a yapper and prefers YouTube to family time?
Kids need to practise talking and chatting with their caregivers to learn how to express themselves. The first five years of kids’ lives have a profound impact on their speech and language development; it’s the period when their brains are most neuroplastic. As we get older, the parts of our brain that handle speech and language get less adaptable and it gets more difficult to master new words and new grammatical patterns. This means that kids who take longer to develop fluent speech often face challenges as they grow up.
A child’s ability to communicate has a profound effect on their life. Researchers as far back as 2002 tracked kids with language delay to see how they did through school. They followed children who showed delayed language at 5 years old until they were 19, examining their educational records. Even after controlling for intelligence and other learning disabilities, the children with language impairments did worse at school than their classmates.
Moral panics about screen time and child brain development have been raging since TVs became a part of life. We’ve all heard the sound bites about kids spending too much time on the computer or tablet and how the next generation are doomed.
The difference here is that speech and language delays spiked during the pandemic because kids weren’t socializing. Those kids are now hitting elementary school. With some reports putting the average adult’s daily smartphone screen time at as much as 3.6 hours a day in 2026, it’s worth looking into whether screen time is contributing to the problem, or if we are barking up the wrong tree.
A Little Less Conversation, A Bit More Action
The special needs education researchers weren’t convinced by existing studies that have investigated the links between time kids spend looking at screens and language development.
While some researchers are adamant that digital media exposure has long-term effects on children’s language development, in reality it’s not clear cut at all. Most of the studies that survey for links between language delay and screen time focus on kids who grew up before smartphones were a thing. Many of the reports didn’t address parental screen time. What’s more, quite a few only looked at kids at a single moment in time. Once preexisting language delays were accounted for, the influence of screen time seemed far smaller.
The scientists, led by Junyi Yang, PhD., realized that if they wanted to understand what was going on with language delays and smartphone screen time, they were going to have to track kids over time. This would help them follow whether parental screen time and children’s own smartphone use improved or delayed children’s language development.
The team designed an experiment that would compare the vocabulary and grammar of kids at age 5 and then again at age 7, to assess what had changed. Then they would look to see how screen time affected those differences. Would parental screen time correlate to children’s language delays? How would a child’s screen time affect their scores?
Talkin’ ‘Bout Screen Time and Language Delay
Yang recruited participants through the SpedAims Kohort in 2023. This is a Norwegian population based cohort study that aims to follow children’s development from 4 to 5 years on.
SpedAims researchers asked parents to complete a screen time questionnaire that covered their childs screen time and their own. The special thing about this survey was that the researchers asked parents to differentiate between different types of screen and between weekdays and weekends. They specifically asked parents about their own social media use and the exact time a primary parent spent using their smartphone. Luckily, most phones these days have a screen-time tracker so it’s easy for people to check.
Trained research assistants conducted language tests on the kids every spring in the last two years of early childhood education and going into primary school. That’s three sets of tests in total. They measured vocabulary using the British Picture Vocabulary Scale (BPVS) and grammar using the Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG).
The team invited 1500 families to take part, 747 enrolled and they were able to follow 729 to the end.
Look Who’s Talking
The children were roughly 50:50 boys and girls, 39% were first born, 41% second born, 18% third born and the last 3% fourth born or later. The majority of parents attended at least one year of university or college and more nearly 80% of households had an annual income in excess of 900,000 Kr (US $92,920).
In Norway, researchers don’t typically record ethnicity and race data for these kinds of studies.
The researchers used household income, parental education, birth order, etc. to help them make very close comparisons, when it came to looking for relationships between smartphone screen time and language development. Many factors influence how a child develops. When researchers investigate whether something new has an effect, they have to consider it as part of a bigger picture. In this study, birth order, parental education and household income will affect the language outcomes far more than screen time.
First they looked at how much time participants were spending on screens. Twenty-six percent of children spent an hour or more a day during the week, with 22% spending more than two hours a day during weekends. Nearly half of kids (45.5%) had their own device. Mothers were slightly more likely to be big social media users, with 26% of mums and 24% of dads spending more than two hours a day scrolling during weekends. Primary parents spent an average of 3.2 hours a day on their phones each day, with some reporting more than four hours.
Moving to language outcomes, the researchers saw that overall, the average child increased their vocabulary scores by around 23 points over the two years, from 51.2 to 74.8. Similarly, grammar scores increased from an average of 38.2 to 59.6.
How did screen time affect vocabulary and grammar?
The team didn’t simply look for a correlation between screen time and language, and call it a day, because those other influencing factors will be so big they’ll cover it up. Instead, they looked to see how language scores increased at each time point, then they stripped away the contribution of each of the other factors until they were just left with screen time.
They calculated whether the influence of each factor was big and consistent enough to not be down to chance. Only factors with a statistical probability score that indicated they weren’t random were flagged.
So what associations fell out? First of all, parental income was more important than parental educational level in kids’ language scores. The higher a household income was, the better kids performed in language tests. When it came to screen time, parents heavily influenced their children in terms of setting an example. Parents who spent more time on their phones had kids who racked up more screen time.
Kids who had their own device scored worse than their classmates in both vocabulary and grammar tests at all three time points. Overall, screen time didn’t show much influence on language development but there was one correlation that stood out.
The time primary parents spent on their smart phones had a measurable effect on kids’ vocabulary. For every additional hour a parent spent on their phone, kids showed a 0.42 lower increase in vocabulary scores than their peers. The researchers estimated that parental screen time contributed to a statistically significant 4.5% of the variance in scores between children.
Kids who owned a device scored an average of 5.1 points lower on vocabulary and 4.6 points lower on grammar tests than their peers who had no devices.
Happy Talk
So what does all this mean? Big picture, screen time doesn’t seem to have a huge impact on Norwegian kids’ language development. We can put down our parenting pitch forks for now.
On the other hand, children who have their own devices score lower on both vocabulary and grammar language assessments. This tells us that the issue here is probably about how they use their devices rather than how much time they spend on them. The researchers couldn’t reasonably survey how every kid used their phone. Were they playing silent games, watching videos or doing educational activities? How much speech was involved? Is there enough Norwegian language content available online that kids can find themselves? We don’t know.
They couldn’t measure how much of the screen time was shared activities between parents and kids. Perhaps the kids who had to go through mum and dad to get their screen time were more likely to be discussing what they were watching or playing or doing.
Similarly, the more time a parent expends looking at their phone, the slower a child’s language development is. Is it because that parent is spending less time interacting with their child?
The researchers couldn’t draw firm conclusions about why a primary parent passing more time on their phone correlated to slower language acquisition but I think we can afford to read between the lines. Talk to your kids.
Sources
Goodwin Cartwright BM, Smits PD, Stewart S, et al. Time-Series Analysis of First-Time Pediatric Speech Delays From 2018 to 2022. JAMA Pediatr. 2024;178(2):193-195. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.5226
Quick Statistics About Voice, Speech, Language | NIDCD. July 8, 2025. Accessed August 18, 2026. https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics-voice-speech-language
Rashid M, Jalil J, Abbas Mehdi SA, Mahboob F. Effect of reducing screen time in children with speech delay: A pilot study. J Pak Med Assoc. 2025;75(5):717-720. doi:10.47391/JPMA.11437
Yang J, Furnes B, Morken F, et al. Screen Use and Children’s Language Development From Ages 5 to 7 Years. JAMA Pediatr. Published online August 17, 2026. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2026.3490
Young AR, Beitchman JH, Johnson C, et al. Young adult academic outcomes in a longitudinal sample of early identified language impaired and control children. J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2002;43(5):635-645. doi:10.1111/1469-7610.00052
Zhu L, Ding Y, Tan J, et al. Language outcomes and influencing factors in children with language delay: a retrospective cohort analysis. Sci Rep. 2025;15(1):42876. doi:10.1038/s41598-025-27057-y
