The brains of neurotypical children under the age of five years old experience a turbo-charged growth spurt that takes them from drooling infants to potty-trained kids ready to learn their ABCs in school.
That’s why it’s so worrisome that we’re inadvertently subjecting a large group of these children to an epic amount of internet brain rot that’s disrupting that crucial period, according to an analytical report from researchers at the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), a British policy group focused on people in poverty — a state of affairs that’s likely resulting in sprawling deleterious outcomes.
“I’ve got two children [in my class] who physically cannot sit on the carpet,” said one teacher quoted in the report. “They don’t have core strength. And when I went to visit one of the girls in July, she’d never been to a nursery, she’d been sat in a corner sofa on an iPad so she hasn’t developed her core strength and it’s really affecting her whole development.”
The impact from this massive uncontrolled experiment is already being felt, according to the CSJ researchers, with children suffering “anxiety and sleep disturbances” due to the onslaught of low-quality videos and other content on social media. Research elsewhere has found that kids who use social media test lower on memory and reading tests, and that increased screen time induces depression and addictive behavior for all age groups.
“This research is deeply alarming,” said Lord Nash, British House of Lords member and former Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Schools, as quoted by CSJ in their report. “With hundreds of thousands of under-fives now on these platforms, children who haven’t yet learned to read, being fed content and algorithms designed to hook adults, should concern us all.”
CSJ based their work on a May 2025 report from the UK’s Office of Communications (Ofcom), which surveyed British parents on their children’s attitude towards and use of media. The research from Ofcom found that about one in five children ages three to five have independently used social media; also alarmingly, it found that a quarter of eight to nine-year-old kids who game online have engaged with strangers in these interactive environments, making them a popular place for child predators.
The same Ofcom report found that 37 percent of parents surveyed admitted that their three-to-five-year-old kids have access to social media, a startling increase from the already-high figure of 29 percent about three years ago; CSJ took this figure, performed population data calculations on it, and estimated that it encompasses 814,000 British children who are now frying their brains with the dumbest memes and video clips imaginable.
“We are concerned about rising anxiety and identity-based distress linked to persistent stimulation from screens, with schools reporting declining attention and behavior linked to online norms,” the researchers wrote.
To get kids back to a healthy state, CSJ has recommended that any age restrictions on social media should be raised to 16 years old, that schools should ban smartphones from classes, and that there ought to be a national campaign to raise awareness on the public health hazards of social media and internet use.
More on children’s mental health: Something Grim Is Happening to Kids Who Got Cell Phones Early
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