For many young people with the condition, screen interactions are especially hard to resist — and intensify the mental-health challenges they face.
Adolescents with ADHD are particularly prone to using social media long into the night.Credit: golubovy/Getty
For many parents, prying a teenager’s eyes from TikTok or Instagram is a nightly battle. For those whose children have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), it can feel like a never-ending war.
Adolescents with ADHD are particularly prone to long hours of compulsive scrolling, the result of differences in how their brains regulate attention and reward. They are also disproportionately likely to use social media in dangerous ways — sharing personal information, engaging in risky interactions and staying online deep into the night — to the detriment of schoolwork, sleep, friendships and general well-being.
Nature Outlook: ADHD
It is now well established that a strong link exists between ADHD and social-media use. What remains uncertain is the direction of the relationship: does extensive screen time worsen ADHD symptoms, or do the traits of ADHD make teenagers more prone to unhealthy patterns of time spent online?
The answer, clinicians say, is probably a bit of both, with a feedback loop driven by a mix of neurobiological vulnerabilities, reward-seeking behaviours and the ever-present lure of digital platforms engineered to keep users hooked. “It’s very hairy,” says Meredith Gansner, a child psychiatrist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. “I do caution parents of children with ADHD to be extra mindful about their kids’ use of social media.”
So the question becomes: what can they do about it? Cutting off access to social media can backfire, straining family ties and leaving teenagers feeling isolated from their peers. Yet ignoring the problem risks deepening the very struggles that define ADHD — impulsivity, distractibility and difficulties maintaining healthy relationships offline.
Because researchers still can’t say definitively whether social media fuels ADHD or simply feeds on it, or which brain circuits intersect with digital stimulation to mould the developing mind, families are stuck navigating the grey area of what to do next.
Screening for ADHD
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