Gen Z has managed something no modern generation pulled off before. After more than a century of steady academic gains, test scores finally went the other direction. For the first time ever, a new generation is officially dumber than the previous one.
The data comes from neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, who has spent years reviewing standardized testing results across age groups. “They’re the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized academic tests than the one before it,” Horvath told the New York Post. The declines cut across attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive function, and general IQ. That’s not just one weak spot. That’s the whole darn dashboard blinking at once.
Horvath took the same message to Capitol Hill during a 2026 Senate hearing on screen time and children. His framing skipped the generational dunking and focused on exposure. “More than half of the time a teenager is awake, half of it is spent staring at a screen,” he told lawmakers. Human learning, he argued, depends on sustained attention and interaction with other people. Endless feeds and condensed content don’t offer either.
Bans and laws like that might have good intentions, but realistically enforcement is either impossible, or the perfect tracking tool on a country or world wide scale…
Like discord requiring government IDs and face scans; Do you really trust companies & governments to do the right thing, or should we just learn to maybe socialize with our children more?
I understand your complaints entirely; something really should be done. I just hate that it takes government interference with crappy bans, instead of empowering parents with resources (not working 50+ hours a week to survive) and knowledge (hey maybe 14 hours of screentime isn’t very pro-social).
Sidenote: that part about speed over staying power, I felt that myself. At least within the US, everything is always GOGOGO and cramming over real learning. Probably something with the time is money thing, but school and a lot of college felt like memorization over problem solving or skill building.
It doesn’t have to be perfectly enforced to have a significant positive impact though. Just the signal-effect to parents is enormous. If social media is banned for kinds under 15 (or 16, or whatever), it becomes orders of magnitude easier for parents with 10-year olds to not get the their own smartphone, tablet, etc. It becomes a lot easier to not cave to pressure of disabling parental controls on the same units.
Basically, the only way a 7-12 year old is getting addicted to a smartphone is if their parents supply one and don’t lock it down. When they do that, it’s likely due to external pressure of the type “all the other kids have it”, and they don’t want their kid to be the socially awkward one that’s left out. These kind of laws make it easier for parents to collectively agree to hold off on smartphones and social media.
My 7 year old great niece has already learned how to disable the parental controls on her tablet.
I’m in agreement that the privacy grab-bag of age verification services is a big concern, but in my mind the remedy to that is strong privacy laws and protections like GDPR - with harsh punitive penalties for any companies that break them.
Companies already process and control huge amounts of private data so the best approach to increased potential for them gaining more access is strong privacy protections.
I’ll add that the laws that have been implemented in various US states to mandate porn sites validate ID are the ones that have generated this new industry of digital checks and privacy concerns, not the under-16 laws. There are 25 states with these laws now, going back to 2022.