ADHD Tied to Social Media That’s Eroding Children’s Ability to Focus, Says Study

A major four-year study tracking more than 8,000 children has found that heavy use of social media, not TV, not video games, is linked to a gradual erosion of kids’ ability to focus, coinciding with a sharp rise in ADHD diagnoses.

This was according to a comprehensive study from Karolinska Institutet, published in Pediatrics Open Science, where researchers followed more than 8,000 children from around age 10 through age 14.

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Oregon Health & Science University in the USA investigated a possible link between screen habits and ADHD-related symptoms.

The study followed 8,324 children aged 9–10 in the USA for four years, with the children reporting how much time they spent on social media, watching TV/videos and playing video games, and their parents assessing their levels of attention and hyperactivity/impulsiveness.

The average time spent on social media rose from approximately 30 minutes a day for 9-year-olds to 2.5 hours for 13-year-olds, despite the fact that many platforms set their minimum age requirement at 13.

It said that children who spent a significant amount of time on social media platforms, such as Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter or Messenger, gradually developed “inattention symptoms.”

Interestingly there was no such association, however, for watching television or playing video games.

“Our study suggests that it is specifically social media that affects children’s ability to concentrate,” says Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet.

“Social media entails constant distractions in the form of messages and notifications, and the mere thought of whether a message has arrived can act as a mental distraction. This affects the ability to stay focused and could explain the association.”

“Greater consumption of social media might explain part of the increase we’re seeing in ADHD diagnoses, even if ADHD is also associated with hyperactivity, which didn’t increase in our study,” added Professor Klingberg.

So the endless zinging of apps designed to hijack attention are one-shotting kids brains, never?