Later is better: mobile phone ownership and child academic development, evidence from a longitudinal study

ABSTRACT

Digital technologies have become an increasingly prominent feature of children’s lives both within and outside educational environments (McCoy, Quail, and Smyth 2012. Influences on 9-Year-Olds’ Learning: Home, School and Community. Dublin: Department of Children and Youth Affairs). Despite considerable media debate, we have little robust evidence on the impact of technology use on children’s development, both academically and socially. Much of the literature in this area relies on small-scale cross-sectional studies. Using longitudinal data on 8500 9-year-old children in Ireland, we examine the influence of early mobile phone ownership on children’s performance in reading and maths between 9 and 13 years of age. Across both reading and maths domains, children who already report owning a phone by the age of nine fare less well in terms of their academic development as they move into adolescence. The measured effects are sizeable, implying about 4 percentile lower ranking on standardised tests for an average student. Our results are consistent with the idea that there may be significant educational costs arising from early mobile phone use by children. Parents and policymakers should consider whether the benefits of phone availability for children are sufficiently large to justify such costs. We suggest a range of direct and indirect cognitive effects that could help explain these results.

KEYWORDS:

• Mobile phone ownership
• child development
• academic outcomes
• early owners
• longitudinal data

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for comments on earlier drafts. We are grateful for funding from the ESRI Programme of Research in Communications, which is in turn is funded by contributions from Ireland’s Department of Communications, Energy and Natural Resources and the Commission on Communications Regulation (ComReg). The usual disclaimer applies. Growing Up in Ireland has been funded by the Government of Ireland through the Department of Children and Youth Affairs (DCYA) in association with the Central Statistics Office (CSO) and the Department of Social Protection (DSP). These data have been collected in accordance with the Statistics Act, 1993. The DCYA, CSO and DSP take no responsibility for the views expressed in the research. The project has been designed and implemented by the joint ESRI-TCD Growing Up in Ireland Study Team.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Seán Lyons http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3526-6947

Selina McCoy http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8774-4018

Notes

1 Waldron, Wood, and Kemp (2017) describe textese as ‘an abbreviated vocabulary that includes initialisms (e.g. lol for laughing out loud), letter/number homophones (e.g. gr8 for great), contractions or shortenings (e.g. cuz for because), emoticons (symbols representing emotions (e.g.: (for sad), and the deletion of unnecessary words, vowels, punctuation, and capitalisation’ (Thurlow and Brown 2003; Carrington 2004; Varnhagen, Sumida-MacDonald, and Kwong 2010).

2 https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx

3 The primary caregiver, in the vast majority of cases the mother, was asked ‘Do you think the Study Child has a Specific Learning Difficulty, Communication or Co-ordination Disorder?’.

4 School engagement has proved a significant predictor of children’s academic development, and this measure tapping into academic engagement has provided valuable insight into children’s attachment to school (see (McCoy and Banks 2012).

5 The Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Irish Schools (DEIS) scheme is designed to target additional funding towards schools serving more disadvantaged populations. At primary school level three categories exist: DEIS Urban Band 1 (the most disadvantaged), DEIS Urban Band 2 and Rural DEIS, whereas at secondary school level no further categorisation amongst the DEIS-assigned schools is made (McCoy, Quail, and Smyth 2014). School social mix has proved an important factor shaping student development and post-school outcomes (McCoy, Quail, and Smyth 2014; McCoy, Smyth, et al. 2014).

6 This is a derived GUI variable (GUI 2010) in which income is categorised into quintiles of equivalised household annual income. This variable was missing for 626 observations, and as such, we created an additional ‘missing’ income category.

7 The GUI Child Cohort records 98.8% of mothers as being the primary caregiver in Wave 1.

8 Derived GUI variable (GUI 2010) in which mother’s parenting style is classified as being authoritative, authoritarian, permissive or neglectful.

9 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/france-mobile-phone-ban-school-french-government-students-a8521961.html