Despite the time spent with smartphones and social media, young people today are just as socially skilled as those from the previous generation, a new study suggests.

Researchers compared teacher and parent evaluations of children who started kindergarten in 1998 — six years before Facebook launched — with those who began school in 2010, when the first iPad debuted.

Results showed both groups of kids were rated similarly on interpersonal skills such as the ability to form and maintain friendships and get along with people who are different. They were also rated similarly on self-control, such as the ability to regulate their temper.

Douglas Downey, lead author of the study, said, “In virtually every comparison we made, either social skills stayed the same or actually went up modestly for the children born later.”

The idea for the study came several years ago when Downey had an argument at a pizza restaurant with his son, Nick, about whether social skills had declined among the new generation of youth.

“I started explaining to him how terrible his generation was in terms of their social skills, probably because of how much time they spent looking at screens,” Downey said.

“Nick asked me how I knew that. And when I checked there really wasn’t any solid evidence.”

So Downey, with his colleague, decided to investigate. For their study, they used data from The Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, which involved about 33,000 students.

Results showed that from the teachers’ perspective, children’s social skills did not decline between the 1998 and 2010 groups. And similar patterns persisted as the children progressed to fifth grade.

In fact, teachers’ evaluations of children’s interpersonal skills and self-control tended to be slightly higher for those in the 2010 cohort than those in the 1998 group, Downey said.

“Overall, we found very little evidence that the time spent on screens was hurting social skills for most children.”

If anything, new generations are learning that having good social relationships means being able to communicate successfully both face-to-face and online, Downey said.

“You have to know how to communicate by email, on Facebook and Twitter, as well as face-to-face. We just looked at face-to-face social skills in this study, but future studies should look at digital social skills as well.”