Does screen time make kids smarter? Reading the Finnish study

Does screen time make kids smarter? Probably not in the way the headlines suggest. A Finnish study that followed 260 children for eight years found that those who reported more screen time scored better on thinking tests as teenagers, according to The Star. That is a link between two things in a fairly small group, and it does not show that screens caused the higher scores.

A month later, a pooled analysis in JAMA Pediatrics pointed the other way, linking screen use to poorer school, emotional and behavioural outcomes. Both findings can sit side by side. The reason is the most useful part for parents: what children do on screens, and what screens push out of the day, seems to matter more than the total minutes.

One honest caveat before going further. I'm working from news coverage and a research roundup, not the full papers, so treat the specific details below as reported, not confirmed.

What the Finnish study measured in 260 children

The study is part of the PANIC project run by the Universities of Jyväskylä and Eastern Finland, and it was published in the peer-reviewed journal Pediatric Exercise Science. The children were 6 to 9 years old when it started, and the researchers tracked how they changed over eight years.

• Movement: a sensor that combined heart rate and motion.
• Exercise and screen time: questionnaires the children filled in themselves, covering guided exercise, unsupervised exercise and screen time.
• Thinking skills: the Cogstate Brief Battery, a computer test of learning, attention and working memory.
• Analysis: results were split by sex and by how intense the activity was.

The headline result was that more total screen time from childhood into adolescence went with better test scores in adolescence. Lead author Petri Jalanko of the University of Jyväskylä said this was what surprised the team most. The activity findings were split by sex: for girls, more light physical activity went with better working memory, and for boys, more guided physical activity went with similar benefits.

Why a link to better scores isn't proof that screens make kids smarter

This is a reasonable study, and the result is interesting. It still carries several limits that make it a weak basis for changing what happens at home.

• It's small. 260 children, all from one country.
• Screen time was self-reported. Children estimating their own screen hours is a rough measure at best.
• It shows a link, not a cause. Kids who were already sharper might have gravitated to more screen activities, or something else (family, school, interests) could drive both.
• Lots of split analyses. Slicing results by sex and activity type raises the odds that some findings turn up by chance.
• Nobody says what the screens were used for. The coverage doesn't describe whether this was games, homework, videos or chat.

There's also a second odd result that's worth keeping in mind. Less self-reported unsupervised exercise went with better scores too. Nobody would read that as advice to stop kids playing outside, and the screen finding deserves the same caution.

The other headline: pooled research linked screens to worse outcomes

In September 2026, JAMA Pediatrics published a meta-analysis titled "Screen Use and Child and Adolescent Development and Mental Health Outcomes." According to a roundup on the DeepDyve blog, it linked screen use to poorer outcomes across several academic, emotional and behavioural areas, with differences depending on the type of screen use and the child's age.

The same roundup notes that the analysis doesn't establish one single causal effect of "screen time." The summary I've seen doesn't give the number of studies or the size of the effects, so I can't tell you how large the differences were. If you want the broader picture by area, I covered it in how screen time affects child development.

Why both can be true: active vs passive screen time

"Screen time" lumps together a child building a level in a game, looking up how volcanoes work with a parent, and watching an autoplay feed for an hour. Averaging all of that into one number will hide a lot. A study that finds a small benefit and a review that finds harm may simply be picking up different mixes of those activities.

Jalanko's own advice points the same way. He suggested parents and teachers encourage screen use that promotes "active thinking, problem-solving, creativity and learning," alongside exercise, a healthy diet and enough sleep, as reported by The Star.

A 2025 review of 32 studies, summarised in the DeepDyve roundup, also moved attention from minutes online to what young people actually see, pointing to image-related content, cyberbullying and long stretches of use. It was about teenagers and doesn't show causation, so take it as background. I went through a similar set of findings in is all screen time bad for kids.

Sleep showed a clearer link than screen time did

An August 2026 study in the Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics looked at sleep, screen time and physical activity in children aged 6 to 10. After accounting for other factors, sleep problems were still linked to difficulty managing emotions. Screen time was correlated with those difficulties but wasn't independently linked once sleep and the rest were in the picture.

This one is very small, and 43 of the 74 children were inpatients with ADHD, so it may not describe a typical classroom. Still, it fits a pattern that keeps coming up: the damage from screens often travels through lost sleep. That's one reason the phone next to the bed question matters for kids too.

What to do this week if your child spends a lot of time on screens

1. 01
   Ask what before how long

   building, coding, making videos, puzzle games and looking things up together are closer to the "active thinking" the Finnish author described than endless feeds are.

2. 02
   Protect sleep first

   keep screens out of the bedtime routine and, where you can, out of the bedroom.

3. 03
   Keep movement in the day

   light play for girls and organised activity for boys both went with better working memory, so make sure screens sit next to sport, play and walks instead of replacing them.

4. 04
   Trim the feeds

   if something has to go, the autoplay and short-video feeds are the most passive part of most kids' screen time.

If there's a younger sibling, the World Health Organization guidance from 2019 still stands, as restated by The Star: no sedentary screen time under age 2, and no more than one hour a day for ages 2 to 4.