A new comprehensive study conducted by the Karolinska Institutet found that children who spend large amounts of time on social media have shorter attention spans.
Published in Pediatrics Open Science, the study “included 8324 children (53% boys; mean age: 9.9 years). On average, children spent 2.3 hours/day watching television/videos, 1.4 hours/day on social media, and 1.5 hours/day playing video games. Average social media use was associated with increased inattention symptoms over time.”
“Our study suggests that it is specifically social media that affects children’s ability to concentrate,” Torkel Klingberg, professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Department of Neuroscience, Karolinska Institutet, shared per Medical Express. “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.”
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Klingberg also suggests that due to increased time on social media there has been an increase in ADHD diagnoses.
“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,” Klingberg revealed.
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt would agree with the Karolinska Institutet findings. Haidt is adamant about not allowing children to have social media until they are at least sixteen.
“Social media is an inherently adult activity. Don’t allow kids under 16 on it — and I direct this plea to parents as much as to policymakers. We need systemic change, the kind #Australia is implementing on Dec 1 by requiring social media companies to only allow teens over 16 to open social media accounts. This is a brilliant policy that I hope we’ll see implemented in the US, EU and around the world,” Haidt shared on social media.
Haidt wrote the book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Episodemic of Mental Illness,” which “lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the ‘play-based childhood’ began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the ‘phone-based childhood’ in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies,” a synopsis of the book reads.
As more research is conducted, doctors are finding that increased social media use leads to decreased attention spans, and an increase in mental health issues.
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