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Children with access to social media A major new study has revealed that their ability to concentrate is showing a significant decline.
Researchers in Sweden and the United States followed the habits of 8,324 children over a four-year period, from age nine or 10 until age 14, when they became teenagers.
Over the past 15 years, children’s lives have become even more saturated with screen time. From smartphones and social media to video streaming. This surge in digital consumption has come along with the growth adhd The diagnosis in Sweden and various other countries prompted researchers to ask whether the two trends were linked.
A team from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet and Oregon Health & Science University in the US tracked children’s daily screen habits – from scrolling social feeds to gaming sessions – while parents reported on their children’s attention levels and impulsive behaviour.
Children who spent a “significant” amount of time using social media – on platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter or Messenger – reported a gradual decline in attention levels and an increase in “symptoms of inattention”.
Surprisingly, the same pattern did not emerge for those whose screen time consisted primarily of watching television or playing video games.
“Our study shows that it is specifically social media that affects children’s ability to concentrate,” said Professor Torkel Klingberg from the Department of Neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet.
He added: “Social media provides constant distractions in the form of messages and notifications, and the mere thought of whether a message has arrived or not can act as a mental distraction. This impacts the ability to remain focused and may explain engagement.”
The team said their findings were not influenced by socioeconomic background or genetic predisposition toward ADHD.
Furthermore, they noted that children who already had symptoms of inattention did not begin to use social media more, suggesting that this relationship is driven by use leading to symptoms, not the other way around.
The team said that social media did not increase children’s hyperactive/impulsive behavior. The impact on concentration at the individual level was minimal. However, at the population level, it “could have significant impacts”, the authors warned.
“Higher consumption of social media may explain part of the increase we are seeing in ADHD diagnoses, even if ADHD is also associated with hyperactivity, which did not increase in our study,” Professor Klingberg said.
The team said the study results do not mean that all children who use social media develop concentration difficulties, but the pattern they found was a reason to discuss age limits and platform design.
Over the course of the study, the average amount of time children used social media increased from about 30 minutes per 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 policy makers make well-informed decisions on healthy digital consumption that support children’s cognitive development,” said study first author Samson Nivins, a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health at Karolinska Institutet.
The researchers said they now plan to follow the children beyond the age of 14 to see if this relationship holds.
This research has been published in the journal Pediatrics Free Science,