What the evidence is telling us about children, screens and the arts
Something has changed in the last two years. The debate about children and smartphones (and other screens) – for a long time a battleground between concerned parents and sceptical researchers – has begun to settle. Not completely, and not without dissent. But the weight of evidence is now pointing in a consistent direction, and it has direct implications for why arts education matters more than ever.
This is our attempt to summarise what the research actually shows, honestly and without overstatement.
What the evidence now says
For most of the last decade, the strongest criticism of the “smartphones are harming children” argument was that the data was correlational. Yes, heavy users of social media tended to report worse mental health. But did social media cause that — or were children who were already struggling simply more likely to turn to their phones? The question of causation remained unresolved, and some researchers — notably Professor Andrew Przybylski at the Oxford Internet Institute — argued that the effect sizes were too small to justify strong policy conclusions.
That debate has not ended. But it has shifted significantly this year.
Last January (2026), a UK government-commissioned report from a consortium of 14 leading scholars — led by the University of Cambridge, with researchers from Bristol, Oxford, Manchester, the LSE and others — published its findings for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. It confirmed a “small but consistent” correlation between social media use and poorer adolescent mental health across cross-sectional research, and found longitudinal evidence that increased social media use tends to precede declines in mental health — a directional finding that matters. The report was careful about causation, and honest about the gaps in existing research. But it did not dismiss the concern. On the contrary, it described individual-level harms — sexual exploitation, bullying-related distress, premature death — as requiring “urgent attention.”
Meanwhile, Jonathan Haidt and Zach Rausch’s chapter for the World Happiness Report 2026 — a peer-reviewed, UN-backed annual publication — presented seven converging lines of evidence that social media is causing harm to young people at scale. Among the most compelling: a 2025 meta-analysis by Burnell and colleagues of 32 separate experiments found that reducing social media use caused measurable declines in depression and anxiety, even when the reduction lasted only a week or two. This is experimental evidence of causation — not correlation. Meta’s own internal research, made public through litigation, reached the same conclusion: their randomised trial found that users who stopped using Facebook and Instagram for one week reported lower depression, anxiety, loneliness and social comparison. The company knew. They did not publish it.
In March 2026, two US juries — in Los Angeles and New Mexico — found Meta liable for knowingly designing products that harmed children, with findings of malice and fraud. The legal door, long closed, is now open. That is good news for campaigners but for those of us concerned about the future and what our government could do now for our children, these revelations ought to be driving political change – what do we hear the politicians saying?.
What Ofcom found in Britain
Ofcom’s Online Nation Report, published in December 2025, gives us the UK picture in granular detail — and it is striking.
Children aged 8 to 14 spend an average of three hours a day online on smartphones, tablets and computers. By age 13 to 14, this rises to four hours. Among 15 to 17 year olds, it reaches six hours and twenty minutes. These figures almost certainly undercount boys, because they exclude gaming consoles — and 71% of boys aged 3 to 17 game online, compared to 58% of girls.
Seven in ten children aged 11 to 17 had encountered content harmful to children in the four weeks before the survey. More than half had seen bullying content. Nearly a quarter had encountered eating disorder content. One in eight had seen content related to suicide or self-harm.
Perhaps the most arresting finding is not statistical. It is qualitative. Ofcom’s researchers asked children themselves about their experience, and what came back was the language of neurological damage. Children — some as young as eleven — described something they called “brain rot”: the feeling of disorientation and overstimulation after extended screen sessions, the inability to concentrate on a film, the compulsive return to the feed even when they knew it was making them feel worse. A thirteen-year-old girl described it with painful clarity:
“I can watch TikTok for hours and hours and hours and not get bored. But as soon as I put on a movie, I get bored, and then just go back on my phone.”
She was not describing preference. She was describing an attention system being reshaped in real time.
Sixty-four percent of children aged 8 to 14 used their devices between 11pm and 5am at least once in the four-week measurement period. The sleep disruption this implies compounds everything else.
What children actually want
One of the most important findings — buried in several of these reports but consistently present — is that children are not choosing screens over people. They are choosing screens because people are not available – and because the programmes on the screens have been designed to be addictive..
A Harris Poll survey of over 500 American children aged 8 to 12, conducted in 2025, found that when asked their preferred way to spend time with friends, an overwhelming majority chose unstructured in-person play. Nearly three-quarters agreed with the statement: “I would spend less time online if there were more friends in my neighbourhood to play with in person.”
Children are not addicted to their phones because they love their phones. They are on their phones because the real-world social infrastructure that once gave childhood its texture — the after-school clubs, the unsupervised play, the neighbourhood groups, the mixed-age friendships — has eroded. The phone fills the void.
Jean Twenge’s 2025 analysis of PISA data from 36 countries found that in countries where children used devices for leisure during the school day, standardised test scores fell sharply after 2012, and feelings of loneliness at school rose steeply. The device was not just displacing learning. It was displacing the social interaction that makes childhood bearable.
Why this matters for CATS
Cotswolds Arts Through Schools works in rural primary schools across Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire — communities where arts provision has almost entirely collapsed, where the arts budget in many schools is £1 per pupil per year, and where the real-world alternatives to a screen are thin on the ground.
When a CATS artist works with a class of children — leading an ensemble, directing a drama, guiding a piece of visual art — something specific happens that no algorithm can replicate. Children are in the same physical space, attending to the same thing, responding to each other in real time. They are seen and heard by other human beings. They experience the particular satisfaction of making something together that could not exist without all of them.
This is not a peripheral benefit of arts education. According to the research, it is close to the core of what children are being denied — and what they are telling us they want back.
The evidence is not yet complete. The Cambridge consortium is right that more rigorous experimental research is needed, and we should be honest about what remains uncertain. But the picture that is emerging is consistent enough to act on. Children are spending more time online than is good for them. They know it. The platforms know it. And what they are missing, more than anything, is the experience of being together in the real world, doing something that matters.
That is what CATS provides. Not as a luxury, and not as enrichment. As something closer to a necessity.
Cotswolds Arts Through Schools delivers professional arts education to over 13,000 children across 65+ primary schools in rural Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. If you would like to know more about our work, or to discuss how your organisation might support it, please get in touch: info@cotswoldsartsthroughschools.com
