New research out of the University of California, San Francisco found that teenage boys who describe their social media use as “addictive” are more likely to develop worsening ADHD symptoms a year later.
“It’s not a randomized controlled trial, so we can’t definitively prove causality,” said Dr. Jason Nagata, an associate professor of pediatrics at UC San Francisco and the study’s lead author, “but we can show that the association tends to go in that direction.”
Nagata and his team tracked more than 11,000 American adolescents over five years, following kids from about age 12 through age 16. Published Friday in JAMA Network Open, the study drew on the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, the largest ongoing look at brain development and child health in the country.
Researchers asked kids about behaviors tied to problematic use, like constantly thinking about social media, using it to escape problems and trying and failing to cut back. Roughly 23% of 12-year-olds said they spent a lot of time thinking about or planning their next scroll, 18% said they used apps to forget their troubles and 15% admitted they’d tried to use less and simply couldn’t.
Parents were then surveyed separately about their kids’ attention, hyperactivity and impulsivity. When a boy’s addictive social media use climbed one year, his ADHD symptoms tended to climb the next, especially around ages 14 and 15. The reverse pattern rarely held true, and girls didn’t show the same association at all.
“Some studies do suggest that teenage boys in particular may be more sensitive to immediate reward and sensation-seeking in adolescence,” Nagata said.
Related: Is Social Media Really Causing the Youth Mental Health Crisis?
Social media platforms, he explained, are built to exploit exactly that tendency. Constant task-switching and a steady stream of novelty and instant gratification can override the working memory and self-control teens need for schoolwork and daily life.
Judy Chu, a developmental psychologist affiliated with Stanford University and co-author of When Boys Become Boys, told the Post that still-developing brains are especially susceptible to this kind of pull. Even her college students, she said, describe having to fight hard not to get sucked in — proof that resisting compulsive scrolling doesn’t get easier with age.
The CDC estimates roughly 7 million American kids ages 3 to 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD, with boys diagnosed at nearly twice the rate of girls. The new findings build on Nagata’s earlier research linking heavier social media use among tweens and teens to depression symptoms and lower cognitive performance down the road.
Nagata’s advice to parents isn’t to obsess over the clock.
“Most parents focus a lot on total screen time, but this is more about specific red flags” and patterns of problematic use, Nagata said. He suggests parents ask whether a teen can stop scrolling when they want to, whether it’s interfering with school or friendships, and whether they show withdrawal-like symptoms when the phone disappears.
Screen-free bedrooms and phone-free family meals have proven effective, he added, and so has a parent’s own example.
“One of our previous findings was that parents’ screen use is a strong predictor of children’s screen use,” Nagata said. “So I think it’s really important — not just to set rules, but to follow them and be a good role model.”
Movieguide® has followed this territory closely in recent weeks, from a report on how screen habits may shape still-developing brains to a piece on psychologists warning that nonstop scrolling can mimic ADHD-like attention struggles. None of this research condemns technology outright.
It does, however, hand parents something better than guesswork. A little discernment now, this latest study suggests, beats waiting around for a perfect, guilt-free answer later.
Read Next: Is Your Child Suffering from ‘Popcorn Brain’? Here’s What You Need to Know.
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