Social Media Use Damages Children’s Ability to Focus, Linked to ADHD

Over the past 15 years, children’s lives have become ever-more saturated with screen time – from smartphones and social media to video streaming. This surge in digital consumption has unfolded alongside a rise in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses in many countries. Could the growing use of digital devices be playing a role?

According to a major new study, children with access to social media see a significant erosion in their ability to concentrate, and that this may be contributing to an increase in cases of ADHD.

Researchers from Sweden and the United States followed 8,324 children’s habits over a 4-year period as they became teenagers, starting from the age of 9 or 10, up until they were 14. They analysed whether the children’s social media usage was associated with long-term change in the two core symptoms of ADHD: inattentiveness and hyperactivity.

The study found 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. 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, Sweden.

“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.”

The digital revolution has become a vast, unplanned experiment – and children are its most exposed participants.

20 years ago, social media barely existed. Now, teenagers are online for about 5 hours per day, mostly with social media. The percentage of teenagers who claim to be “constantly online” has increased from 24% in 2015 to 46% 2023.

Given that social media use has risen from essentially zero to around 5 hours per day, it may explain a substantial part of the increase in ADHD diagnoses during the past 15 years, researchers say.

Though the decline in attention was small at the individual level, when multiplied across thousands (or millions) of children, the effects are likely meaningful on a societal scale. Theoretically, an increase of 1 hour of social media use in the entire population would increase the diagnoses by about 30%, the study points out.

The researchers stress that the results do not imply that all children who use social media develop concentration difficulties, but there is reason to discuss age limits and platform design.

In the study, 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.

“We hope that our findings will help parents and policymakers make well-informed decisions on healthy digital consumption that support children’s cognitive development,” says the study’s first author Samson Nivins.

The research is published in the journal Pediatrics Open Science.

Read what the study authors say about their findings, here:
https://theconversation.com/social-media-not-gaming-tied…