In May, the U.S. surgeon general’s office issued its first-ever advisory on the harms of excessive screen use among children and adolescents. The warning was perhaps the most prominent addition yet to a national reckoning over kids and screens, with nearly 40 states having restricted phone use in schools.
Nearly all of this effort, however, is focused on the school day. Last month, my two kids walked out of school and into summer vacation. And the structure that has shaped their days for 10 months fell away.
During that long, sun-soaked stretch of no school, students lose academic ground, especially in reading and math. Organizations like the National Summer Learning Association have tracked those losses for decades. Researchers have been studying the “summer slide” for more than a century.
But the risk today is more than students forgetting academic content over the summer. For many kids, those unstructured hours are increasingly filled with weeks of heavy screen use, which can erode the underlying skills on which learning depends.
An AI-based summer slide
It used to be easier to picture summer as a kind of pause. Less structure (and perhaps no academic reinforcement), but also more free time for rest and resetting.
Today, most kids are not stepping away from stimulation. They’re stepping into a different kind of it.
According to Gallup, teens spend nearly two hours a day on YouTube, an hour and a half on TikTok, and close to three hours on video games. And that’s when they’re in school.
Usage only climbs once school lets out, with one recent analysis finding that teens averaged 22.7 hours a week on their devices over the summer, up from 19.8 during the school year.
These experiences might be engaging, but they don’t always align with how people develop focus or depth of thought.
The rise of AI only adds another layer of complexity. On one hand, AI can be a useful learning tool. A student can ask questions, get explanations, and even walk through problems step by step. But it can also enable cognitive offloading.
The kinds of questions that might have required reading a few different sources online before now have an AI answer as the top search result. Chatbots offer false certainty in answering questions rather than allowing users to see multiple perspectives or grapple with coming to their own conclusion.
Over the course of a summer, that pattern can compound gradually, making the well-documented summer slide much, much steeper. An AI-based summer means kids move quickly between short interactions that do not resemble the way learning—or human interaction, for that matter—works in real life.
After a summer of activities that require so little sustained attention or independent thinking, returning to the demands of a classroom can be immensely difficult. Learning suffers as a result.
This new summer slide may mean not only forgetting what they’ve learned in terms of content, but also how to learn.
Distance is widening
But summer can look different. A better break doesn’t require packed schedules or formal programs, but small tweaks that add up over time.
Placing limits on screen time (particularly on use of AI without supervision) or building an expectation to read every evening or make something each week can completely change the rhythm of a kid’s day.
Of course, that kind of approach is easier to build in some homes than others. Summer learning loss has always been uneven.
In 1978, Barbara Heyns studied the impact of summer break on students in Atlanta and found that children from lower-income families lose more ground over the summer than their wealthier peers, largely because they have less access to the books and programs that help keep learning going when school is out. That pattern holds today.
Having a parent working throughout the summer, not having access to a local library, or living in a neighborhood without a safe park can shape a kid’s day more than any single rule a family sets.
When the RAND Corporation ran the largest randomized study of district-led summer programs for low-income students, it found that kids who attended consistently came back to school stronger in reading and math, and the programs that helped most often reached the children with the fewest other options once school let out.
The distance between those two summers is widening, and families, schools, and states should all work to close it.
A teenager left entirely to default settings will likely spend their time in environments designed to keep them there. A teenager with some intentional structure, even if it’s light, has a different kind of experience—one that includes more variation, more effort, and usually more independence.
The challenge for parents, schools, and summer programs alike is that the shift isn’t always obvious. It doesn’t look like disengagement because it looks like a buzz of constant activity.
So the question isn’t just whether kids are busy over the summer, but what kind of thinking their time is actually encouraging. That’s a harder question to answer, but it’s also the question that matters more.
