Hard-to-control social media use linked to later ADHD symptoms in teens

Researchers used data from the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, a population-based U.S. project that enrolled children ages 9 and 10 at 21 sites. For this analysis, they included 11,286 young people who had information on ADHD symptoms or problematic social media use during at least one of five yearly assessments.

The assessments ran from study year 2, spanning 2017 to 2019, through year 6, spanning 2021 to 2023. Participants were 12.1 years old on average at the second-year assessment. About 52% were male.

The study did not simply ask how many hours teens spent on social media. Young people completed the Social Media Addiction Questionnaire, which measures problematic social media use. That means use that feels difficult to control, such as struggling to cut back. Parents reported ADHD symptoms using the ADHD Problems section of the Child Behavior Checklist. ADHD symptoms can include problems with attention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity.

The researchers used a statistical approach designed to look at changes within the same person over time. In other words, they asked whether a teen reporting more problematic use than was typical for them in a given year was followed by a change in parent-reported ADHD symptoms the next year.

They found this pattern in two later intervals of the study. Higher-than-usual problematic social media use from year 4 to year 5 was followed by higher ADHD symptom scores from year 5 to year 6, with a standardized estimate of 0.08. A similar estimate, also 0.08, was seen from year 5 to year 6 predicting symptoms at the next assessment. These are small associations, as the authors noted.

The reverse pattern was less consistent. Higher ADHD symptoms were linked with later problematic social media use from year 4 to year 5, but the estimate was smaller, at 0.04. The authors described links in this direction as small and sporadic.

The association from problematic social media use to later ADHD symptoms was larger for males than females. The abstract does not provide separate effect estimates for each sex, so it cannot show how large the difference was in everyday terms.

This was a prospective cohort study, meaning it followed young people over time. That is useful because it can establish that one measured change came before another. But it remains observational research. It cannot prove that problematic social media use caused ADHD symptoms. Other factors not fully captured in the analysis could help explain the pattern. The study also measured symptoms reported by parents, not clinical ADHD diagnoses.

The findings point to a possible area for further research and discussion: whether teens who feel unable to control their social media use may also need attention paid to changes in focus or impulsivity. Future studies would need to test whether reducing problematic use changes ADHD symptoms, and whether any effects differ by sex or by specific social media experiences.