What ADHD kids can teach us about screen addiction
Attention deficit children are the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to device addiction — they’re the most vulnerable
The World Health Organization recently classified gaming addiction as a legitimate medical disorder. This might surprise some, but many parents of kids with ADHD (boys in particular) won’t bat an eyelash: they know just how powerfully screens can pull at even the youngest children.
Maybe it started at age three or four, and you found that he liked to sneak over to the TV and turn it on when you were preoccupied in some other part of the house. So you hid the remotes. When he got too good at finding the remotes, you started removing the batteries and hiding them. When he could not only find the batteries, but reinstall them correctly, you started locking the TV cabinet and hiding the key for that. But he kept finding it, and then it got lost in one of the progressively more difficult hiding places. A combination lock worked for a while, until he figured out he could use a screwdriver to get the hinges off the cabinet doors.
After a few years, you stopped instituting consequences for all of this, because they never even slowed him down, let alone stopped him. You got him diagnosed, and learned that ADHD can mean not only a lack of impulse control, but a complete indifference to consequences. Go figure.
As he got older, you started to wake up in the middle of the night to find him watching YouTube videos of other people playing video games. At parties he’d slip away to play on his host’s game system.
At various points, you tried to establish some kind of system: he could have half an hour of screen time after his homework and chores. But he was so driven to get online that he rushed things and messed them up — he literally couldn’t concentrate, he was so worked up about getting in front of a screen. And after his screen time, he was always agitated and sour, because the time he got was never enough. And if a sibling got screen time, it was
just as bad: he paced behind, endlessly suggesting where to click next, often grabbing at the mouse, getting more and more frustrated. Someone always ended up having a meltdown.
Yet another variation of the locking theme: you wired a master switch in the kitchen for the TV outlets; it has a plastic lockbox over it. It only took a couple of weeks for the kid to figure out that if he stuck a dinner knife in the side of the box and jimmied it a bit, he could flip the switch on.
Today, after almost a decade of this, the game continues: the pin codes on the iPad and computer only last so long. He spies you typing them in an unguarded moment, or he spies on you from a hallway. One day you notice your camera sitting on the printer, pointed at the keypad; it’s recording you inputting the computer’s pin code.
You take power cords to bed with you.
Our devices and apps are designed to be addictive primarily because they promise an endless stream of varying rewards. For kids with ADHD, however, there’s more going on: they have as little as half the dopamine of “normal” kids; dopamine is a conduit for pleasure, so with so much less of it, ADHD kids need greater stimulation in order to experience an emotional reward. They’re tormented by agitated, restless boredom, which comes often and can bring them to tears, it feels so awful.
The screen is the ultimate solution:
first, it provides a constant flow of stimulation — a combination of lights, sounds and movement that staves off boredom. Second: unless it’s truly, completely captivated by something, the ADHD brain is a whirlwind of thoughts, and it struggles mightily to concentrate on one idea, one task. What a profound relief it must be to finally have a break from this frenetic thinking — to let the screen dictate a singular focus.
ADHD kids are the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to this kind of thing — they’re the most vulnerable to screen addiction because of the brains they were born with, and they show us just how powerfully screens can draw us in. And yet we continue to give screens increasing importance in our lives, brain-training a generation of children to rely on screens, to be more and more vulnerable to screen addiction, rather than to develop as they were meant to — with face-to-face social interaction, with outdoor activity, and with play developed by them, not an adult game designer.
The 2024 Paris Olympics are in talks to make video gaming a demonstration sport. I won’t be watching.
Latham Hunter is a writer and professor of cultural studies and communications; her work has been published in journals, anthologies, magazines and print news for 25 years. She blogs at The Kids’ Book Curator.