OSLO, Dec 9 — Children who spend significant time on social media are more likely to experience a gradual decline in their ability to concentrate, a major new four-year study has found.
Researchers who followed over 8,000 children found that this effect was specific to platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook, and was not seen with watching TV or playing video games.
The comprehensive study, published in Pediatrics Open Science, adds significant new evidence to the growing concern over the impact of screen time on young, developing minds.
Social media’s unique effect
Researchers from Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet and Oregon Health & Science University in the US tracked 8,324 children from age 10 to 14.
The children reported their daily time spent on social media, TV/videos, and video games, while their parents assessed their levels of inattentiveness.
The results showed a clear link between heavy social media use and a gradual increase in concentration problems.
The study’s lead author suggests that the very nature of social media is to blame.
“Our study suggests that it is specifically social media that affects children’s ability to concentrate,” said Torkel Klingberg, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Karolinska Institutet.
“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.”
Importantly, the study found that the link was not the other way around; children who already had attention problems did not start using more social media.
Population-level impact
While the effect on an individual child’s concentration was small, the researchers warned that on a population level, the impact could be significant.
“Greater consumption of social media might explain part of the increase we’re seeing in ADHD diagnoses,” Klingberg said, though he noted that the study did not find an increase in hyperactivity.
The researchers stressed that their findings do not mean every child on social media will develop attention problems, but they hope the study will prompt a serious discussion about age limits and platform design.
Despite many platforms having a minimum age of 13, the study found that the average time spent on social media rose from 30 minutes a day for 9-year-olds to 2.5 hours for 13-year-olds.
“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.
