East Lansing, June 2025. In a new, peer reviewed publication, Quello Center researchers Gabriel Hales and Keith Hampton argue that it’s time to rethink the conventional moral panic surrounding screen time and academic achievement. The prevailing focus on displacement effects tells only half the story. The authors demonstrate how adolescents’ casual engagement with social media, video games, and other digital leisure activities cultivates broader digital skills. These skills are positively associated with substantially higher standardized test scores on the SAT in reading and writing, and a smaller, yet significant, boost in math. However, gender-based media preferences—with boys favoring video games and girls tending towards social media—lead to unequal benefits from these digital engagements. While digital skills developed through these activities can narrow the reading and writing achievement gap between boys and girls on the SAT, girls experience fewer benefits in closing the math achievement gap. There is a real danger that trends prioritizing structured, adult-supervised, overtly educational activities at the expense of unstructured leisure time both on and offline are doing more harm than good. We must shift research, policy, and parenting practices to recognize the profound benefits of casual leisure (both online and offline) for adolescent well-being and development.
The paper can be downloaded or read here: https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2025.2516542