Children with access to social media see a significant erosion in their ability to concentrate, a major new study has found.
Researchers from Sweden and the United States followed 8,324 children’s habits over a four year period as they became teenagers, starting from the age of nine or 10, up until they were 14.
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 ADHD diagnoses in Sweden and various other countries prompting researchers to ask whether the two trends are connected.
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 offspring’s attention levels and impulsive behaviour.
Children who spent a “significant” amount of time using social media, on platforms including Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter or Messenger – recorded a gradual decline in attention levels and an increase in “inattention symptoms”.
Strikingly, the same pattern did not emerge for those whose screen time was primarily made up of watching television or playing video games.
“Our study suggests that it is specifically social media that affects children’s ability to concentrate,” said Professor Torkel Klingberg, of the Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Neuroscience.
He added: “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 team said their findings were not influenced by socioeconomic background or a genetic predisposition towards ADHD.
Furthermore, they noted that children who already had symptoms of inattentiveness did not start to use social media more, which suggests that the association leads from use to symptoms and not the other way round.
Social media did not heighten children’s hyperactive/impulsive behaviour, the team said. The effect on concentration was small at the individual level. At a population level, however, it “could have a significant impact”, the authors warned.
“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,” Professor Klingberg said.
The team said that the results of the study do not imply 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.
During the study, the children who used social media’s average time engaging with social networks 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,” said the study’s first author Samson Nivins, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health at the Karolinska Institutet.
The researchers said they are now planning to follow the children after the age of 14 to see if this association holds.
The research is published in the journal Pediatrics Open Science.
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