The best Christmas gift for children is a social media ban - and science proves it

The ban applies to young people under the age of 16. Speaking alongside its rollout, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he hopes it will lead young people to spend more time on creative pursuits or outdoor hobbies. To borrow the parlance of the internet, he wants kids to ‘touch grass’.

Before advocating for similar bans to be rolled out in other countries, we have to see what effect the one in Australia has. But in the meantime, it should serve as a reminder to parents in the UK this Christmas of the harmful effects social media can have on their children.

My own research supports Australia’s focus on social media over screentime. At the Karolinska Institute, we studied 8,300 US children between the ages of 10 and 14 and found that the use of social media gradually impaired children’s concentration levels and could be contributing to a rise in ADHD cases.

What’s important to take away from this research is that not all screentime is equally harmful. Watching TV or YouTube, or playing video games, was not found to be harmful to concentration.

In fact, screentime can, in specific cases, be helpful and enriching, which is why my research underpins the work of attention and memory training app Nuroe.

With social media, the message, notifications and constantly refreshing feeds are intricately designed to draw your attention and distract you. Just the idea of a message potentially coming through serves to draw you away from something else you’re focusing on.

Think about it: How often in the day do you check your phone just in case a notification or message will be there?

For children, this pressure is especially acute at a time when they are working out how to socialise with peers as adults and forming all sorts of new relationships. The stakes of social media feel especially high.

Take all this and tie it to the fact that social media use increases during the holiday period. The result can be kids going back to school after Christmas with increased inattention symptoms, or even symptoms related to ADHD.

The prevalence of ADHD among children has risen sharply over the past two decades. The research shows that social media could be a contributor to this increase.

Over the Christmas period, children and teenagers will be without structure and away from their friends, making them more likely to spend long stretches of time on social media.

Obviously, this should not all be put on parents. Most already know that social media is bad for their children, but it can be extremely difficult to keep them off it. As well as governments and parents working on this issue, tech companies need to take far more responsibility for responding to the growing body of scientific research that proves the harmful and addictive qualities of their products.

Although it’s too early to say if a full social media blackout is the way to go, to me, the evidence is clear. Structure and limitations around their use of social media could not only save their attention but also unlock something more profound.

Social media is destroying our children’s attention and inhibiting their potential. Trapping them in a state of distraction and shallowness, rather than one of focus and deeper thinking. If we can help our children overcome the seductive power of social media, who knows what creativity, ideas and ambition we can help them unlock.

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Torkel Klingberg is a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute whose research underpins the attention & memory training app Nuroe.

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