Adults are often thought to be less creative than children, as we swap painting for presentations and sandpits for spreadsheets. But in a new study, children actually performed worse on creativity tests than adults – yet made up for it in confidence.

“We found that adults are actually more creative thinkers,” says at the University of Graz in Austria. “But children enjoy creativity more and are much less worried about what others think about their ideas.”

There is a popular belief that children are more creative than adults, he says, which may come from children having more time and opportunities to engage in creative activities. Yet prior research suggests that .

These studies were often based on a single task, like imagining alternative uses for everyday objects, says Benedek. Taking a broader approach, he and his colleagues recruited 92 children (aged between 4 and 7) and 70 adults (aged 25, on average) to carry out three creative tasks.

First, they had to come up with as many alternative uses for a tin can as possible within 3 minutes. Then, they drew freely for 8 minutes, and in the final task, they had 8 minutes to draw an animal that doesn’t exist.

Five people who weren’t involved in the research were then trained to objectively judge creativity based on originality and whether the final result fulfilled the brief of the task.

In the first task, the adults scored 3.9 points, on average, out of 5, while the children scored 2.9 points. One of the adults imagined a tin can could be used as a “Halloween candy box when on (a) diet”, whereas some children imagined it as a rattle.

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In the second and third tasks, the adults scored 0.6 and 1.9 points higher, respectively, than the children.

The findings underscore how creativity draws on combining ideas from prior experience, says at King’s College London. For instance, adults are probably aware of more animals than children, so have a greater variety of creatures to draw from when producing a fantasy animal.

After completing the tasks, the participants were asked questions like “How well do you think you performed the task?”, “How much were you worried/anxious to not perform well on the task?” and “How much fun was the task?”.

The researchers found that the children were substantially more confident in what they produced, scoring their performances 4.8 and 4.6 points for the free drawing and animal tasks, respectively, compared with the adults’ 2.8 and 3.3 scoring.

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The children also reported lower anxiety compared with the adults. “If the purpose of creativity is to have enjoyment in it, to play and to be unfettered humans, then children are doing better at that,” says Ross.

But the two groups got a similar level of pleasure from the animal-drawing task. Adults may have liked that task’s specific instruction, which may have meant they worried less about being judged for their idea, says Benedek.

Regardless of the quality of the end result, people should try to be more creative for their wellbeing, says Ross. Engaging with the arts has been linked to reduced mental health problems and greater social skills. “Creativity, especially when done with other people, is really beneficial to your mental wellbeing – and you don’t have to score 5 out of 5 on a ranking scale,” she says.

The UK will ban children under 16 from social media by early next year, replicating a policy that came into effect in Australia in 2025. The move is intended to put children’s well-being ahead of technology companies’ profits. But how will scientists study the effects of the measure and determine whether it is actually having a positive impact?

“We have no evidence either way,” says at Bath Spa University in the UK, who is working with the Australian government to analyse the effects of its own ban and is also advising the UK government. “It’s such new territory.”

Leading the way on research in the UK is the Wellcome Trust, which is already deep into the IRL Trial in Bradford. This has recruited about 4000 kids from 10 schools, aged 12 to 15, who installed an app on their phones to track their social media use. For half of those children, the app also limits access to social apps. The researchers expect to publish their first results in the middle of next year, after the newly announced ban has taken effect. However, at the Wellcome Trust says the findings should still help inform policy.

They will also improve upon existing research that tends to rely on self-reported measures, like asking children or their parents how much time they spend on social media, rather than using more objective metrics. What’s more, the few interventional studies that do exist . “If you’re talking about big changes here around mental health and those sorts of things, you’re not going to see changes in two weeks,” says Etchells.

Australia’s ban came into place in December, which is too recent to gauge its long-term effects. But once national bans like these are in place, it is impossible to do controlled studies, in which two groups of similar people are allocated access or not. What’s more, the results from larger studies on the wider population before and after the ban will be impossible to unpick from other social impacts.

For now, Sebastian is gearing up to run additional studies that hopefully generate at least some results soon after the ban. The UK government expects to bring legislation to Parliament before Christmas, with the policy coming into force in early 2027.

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The Wellcome Trust has invited 14 research teams to submit plans, some or all of which will be funded, into the effects of social media on young people’s well-being. These will take varying approaches to capture as much data as possible, with the goal of eventually synthesising the data into a conclusive result.

Some of these studies will follow existing cohorts and regularly interview them about their mental health and well-being over time, before and after the ban. Sebastian says these approaches can be insightful, but rigid. Other studies are proposing momentary assessments, where participants are sent text messages asking them to complete short surveys on the spur of the moment, capturing a different kind of data. Others may look to analyse data that is already being captured for some insight, such as the rate of hospital admissions or school absences.

With time against them, Sebastian hopes that some results could emerge relatively soon after the ban, but they are likely to be nuanced. For instance, a social media ban could have some positive impacts, but also disruptive ones in the short term, as online supportive networks are lost.

The effects of such bans are also likely to change over the years or decades, as today’s children and younger teenagers approach adulthood having never had access to social media. “It’s not that this is a done deal,” says Sebastian. “Policies could be continuing to change over the longer term, and it’s possible that the findings from our study and others will help to shape those policies iteratively.”

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For now, some are wary that the UK government is taking a reactive stance in the complex problem of poor youth mental health, without the appropriate data. at the University of Oxford told the Science Media Centre that a blanket age ban is a “blunt tool” and a stronger step than current evidence can support, but adds that the Wellcome research is an opportunity to learn whether these measures will “help, harm or neither”.

One thing that could hinder research – and undermine government policy – is the ability of users to skirt the bans. Early reports suggest that facial-recognition technology designed to verify ages online can be , and VPNs make it trivial to appear to websites as a user from another country where age checks aren’t mandated.

Surveys in Australia by the Molly Rose Foundation, a suicide-prevention charity, found that 61 per cent of 12-to-15-year-olds who had accounts on restricted platforms before the ban came into force . The organisation said that given the findings, it would be a “high-stakes gamble” for the UK to follow suit at this stage.

Need a listening ear? UK Samaritans: 116123 (samaritans.org); US Suicide & Crisis Lifeline: 988 (988lifeline.org). Visit bit.ly/SuicideHelplines for services in other countries.

In the fight against common childhood illnesses, scientists have turned to an unusual source: the blood of paediatricians. It turns out this is a treasure trove of powerful antibodies that could be used as preventative treatments. These have even outperformed approved antibody therapies against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and a common cold virus.

Paediatricians are almost constantly exposed to respiratory viruses, making them a potentially underexplored resource in the hunt for highly potent antibodies against such pathogens. Although antibody therapies are available for preventing infections like RSV – which infects almost every child by the age of 2 and can trigger severe breathing difficulties – they only neutralise some strains. But a broader-acting treatment could now be on the cards.

A team including Hui Zhai at the Children’s Hospital of Chongqing Medical University screened the blood of 10 paediatricians who had been working at the hospital for over a decade. From this, the researchers discovered 56 potent antibodies against RSV from the paediatricians’ immune cells.

The researchers then generated artificial versions of these antibodies and tested them in the lab, finding that three were particularly active against a diverse range of RSV strains. One of the three also neutralised human metapneumovirus, which belongs to the same virus family as RSV and is a common cause of colds, but can also lead to severe illness in some children.

Subsequent tests in mice and rats showed that injections of these three paediatrician-derived antibodies, either on their own or in combination, stopped the animals from developing symptoms when they were infected with RSV or human metapneumovirus. In fact, the paediatrician antibodies were up to 25 times better at blocking RSV than existing antibodies called nirsevimab and clesrovimab, and they neutralised a wider range of strains.

This makes sense because it is common lore among paediatricians that they become increasingly resilient to respiratory viruses over the course of their careers, says at Port Macquarie Base Hospital in Australia. “I’ve been working with paediatric patients for 10 years now and in my first few years, I would probably get two to three notable respiratory illnesses per year, and now I can go a year without getting any.”

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Calcutt believes the paediatrician-derived antibodies appear promising enough to warrant further testing in human clinical trials. “There are certainly stranger interventions out there, so I think this one is worth considering,” he says.

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Currently, there are two ways to protect infants from RSV. One is to administer a vaccine during pregnancy, which protects babies once they are born. The other is to give them an injection of nirsevimab or clesrovimab, which neutralise the virus if a child catches it, thereby helping to prevent severe symptoms. But these only work against some RSV strains.

Nirsevimab and clesrovimab were similarly developed by screening the blood of adults who had previously been infected with RSV, but who didn’t work in healthcare. This identified antibodies that the individuals’ immune systems had naturally produced against the virus. There is no approved vaccine or antibody therapy for human metapneumovirus.