Excessive screen time linked to rising rates of anxiety, depression and ADHD in children

Published Jun 18, 2025, 3:43 AM

It's been revealed that more young Australians are starting school with poor emotional regulation and social skills than ever before. Screen time has played a massive part in that. 

Author David Gillespie told Sofie Formica on 4BC Afternoons, "We've seen massive increases in rates of anxiety, depression and ADHD, all of the things associated with increasing the use of addictive things." 

On Monday, I shared with you a recent Australian Early Development census. It revealed that more children are starting school with poor emotional regulation and social.

Skills than ever before.

It's all since two thousand and nine that we've been using this censor, and it measures a child's development across five key domains. Their physical health, their social components, emotional maturity, language and cognitive skills, and emotional skills, their general knowledge. Sadly, in Queensland it looks like over twenty five percent of our kids are showing significant challenges in one or more of these areas, and the Education Minister Jason Clair attributed it to the trend that we've seen post the pandemic and the impact it had on young kids. But you can't also look beyond those socioeconomic factors we know exist the access to quality early childhood care, and our attention also has to turn to excessive screen time and what the impact it is having on language development and overall learning. Testing by the Queensland government we just spoke about is working to identify kids so they don't fall through the cracks. But when it comes to the things we can control, what should parents and cares be aware of, especially when it comes to devices. David Gillespie has authored eight books, including two about the brain. In Teen Brain, David offered some effective strategies for parents to help manage their kids' screen time and why and how the developing brain is impacted by it. And he's joining us once again on afternoons. Always lovely to see you, David.

Good a Sophie.

You know, I can't help it sort of think about teen Brain and brain reset and the way you were kind of helping us understand the impact that screen time, devices, dopamine has on a brain by the time it's getting to that teen development area, or if we reverse time a little bit, we now know and we see Toddler's you know, very adept or very quickly before they can even really articulate what they're doing on screens. There must be impact that's happening to that side of things for that little tiny brain.

Ah. Yeah, of course. So when teen Brain was written, which I think came out in twenty seventeen, we really were concerned mostly with teenagers who were the ones first encountering the sorts of devices where they'd find addictive apps, and now that's spread very significantly. So since then we've had COVID, which sort of accelerated a lot of things, including access to devices for lots of legitimate reasons. But also since then we've seen massive increases in rates of anxiety depression ADHD, all of the things associated with and which were predicted in the Tin Brain Book associated with increasing the use of addictive things. Now people often say to me, it's a bit extreme calling these devices addictive, but the biochemistry is pretty clear and pretty unequivocal that the mechanisms being used to keep kids glued to these screens are addictive mechanisms. They have to be. They're giving away billions of dollars worth of software for free. That just doesn't make sense unless you can guarantee that the punter in this case, the child, or the product which is the child, is going to stay glued to the thing. So it's become a very big problem very quickly.

And then you wonder how excessive use of it.

And we can talk about what excessive means, but even if it is constant use, daily use, even that if that daily use might be controlled to be what might be perceived as a reasonable period of time, how can that potentially be impacting these different measures we talk about when it comes to developmental delays across these domains that we've just outlined.

Yeah, look, so the problem is there's multiple aspects to it. The first is that the device, in using the mechanism it does to addict the child. So, and I should be clear about this, it's not the device. It's not the piece of plastic or probably ninety percent of the things that are on the piece of plastic. It's a few very specific apps that are very carefully engineered to create an addictive state in the human brain. And it works, It really does work. The problem with that is not just that the child spends all of their time looking at a screen, which would be bad enough, you know, just from a wholesomeness perspective. You know, kids should be playing, they should be doing other things. They shouldn't be running simulations, which is essentially what these things are doing. But even apart from that, if that were the only problem that might be addressable. But once you addict a brain, a human brain, you change a lot of things about it because of the biochemistry involved. So you make it much more susceptible to anxiety, much more susceptible to depression and much more susceptible to ADHD. And so by doing those changes so early in a young child's life. Now, when I wrote teen Brain, there was no research about young kids doing this. It just didn't exist. Now it's coming out, and it's coming out in force. That says all the problems we saw in teenagers, you know when Brain came out, are now appearing in kids much younger, much younger, and because kids are getting access much younger.

So in Brain Reset, just to go back to those issues that you talked about, the specific of the reward system.

Of the app.

You know, you talked a lot in that book about dopamine in particular the reward system.

I'd love you to just go into that a little bit more and elaborate.

For the listeners on how these modern digital platforms, these apps that you're talking about that have the infinite scroll notifications, rewards that pop up, you know, even if it's a unicorn or a rainbow or a star, you know, those things are all about exploiting that development of that brain dopamine pathway and a child.

Yeah, so we have a reward pathway that is designed to make us do stuff from an evolutionary perspective. The stuff it's designed to make us do is eat things, have sex, run away from danger, and socialize with others. But that pathway can really be exploited with simulations. So pornography, for example, exploits the simulations for sex. What the app companies have done is work on that one of those ones that I mentioned about seeking the approval of others. We are highly rewarded by the approval of others. It's what makes us work together with strangers. And those apps exploit that by using the like mechanism, so that if you post something on an app and you get a like, get a little shot of dopamine. It's not massive, it's just a little shot, but every like gives you a little shot. And it also uses the bottomless scroll to use another principle called the uncertainty principle, which is we get twice the shot of dopamine when we find something rewarding if we are if it's interspersed with things which are not rewarding. So if it's just a random thing, if they always showed us what we wanted to see, we wouldn't be interested. But they show us a bunch of things that we're not that interested in, and then every now and then there's something good.

And the algorithm, right, that's the magic of the algorithm.

Magic of the algorithm. It's not by chance. It's designed to operate that way, and it makes the app addictive. It's why we pick it up. And now we might say to ourselves, we're just picking this up because we're bored, or we've got five minutes or whatever it is, but that's not what's really going on. And the test for that is could you stop tomorrow? Now, most people say yes, of course I could, Like most smokers say yes, of course, I can stop anytime I want to. But the real test is if I say to them, okay, then delete your account, and nobody's prepared to do that. They are prepared to delete the app because they know they could quit any time, but they also, in the back of their mind think, you know, I could put that back on if I really needed to delete your account. That's the test, and if that's a hard thing to do, you're addicted.

And so therefore we take this back to the developing brain, the very young brain, the immature brain, even to the point of immaturity, of not fully understanding what it is that they're doing, but knowing that they are getting that reward, and you can see that the addiction that you begin when you have a toddler who is playing an innocuous game that you think is quite yeah, you know, quite.

Well, there's a test for that too.

So you try and take it away and you see what happened, and.

Take the thing away from the kid and see what happens, and if they freak out, you've got it's an addict. You're dealing with an addict. It's like taking anything away from an addict.

And beyond the addiction, though you've obviously started to look and examine the neuroscientific research now that we have more information to tell us about the impact of early and excessive screen use.

Yeah, so the addiction mechanism, the bit we see where they're addicted at the surface, on its own, isn't that bad. Okay, it's irritating, you get a misbehaving child, you get a child that's hard to deal with. It's a little bit irritating. But if that's all it was, then I guess it wouldn't be so bad. It's the things that flow from that, particularly the ADHD. So as the mechanism changes in the brain to cause the addiction. It raises a tolerance level in the brain that coincidentally also controls impulse control and also controls focus. So what happens in that child's brain is they become less and less able to focus. And today that's diagnosed as ADHD, which is essentially unable to keep a single train of thought for more than a few seconds. And that's the big problem that kids of that age are starting to bring into the classrooms and the schools are having to deal with in very large quantities.

Author David Gillespie is with me this afternoon. We're talking about the impact of devices on a young and developing brain. And David, before the break, we talked about integrating devices into education. I've heard parents say that they felt that they were almost pressured into iPad use because the nap plan was going to be on the iPad and the child hadn't really had exposure, and they felt that they would be disadvantaged by not having the device. And therefore, you know, iPad use began in that house, and you know, the snowball of what that looks like. What does the current scientific understanding of brain development suggest about the potentials risks and benefits of this early and widespread use of devices inside an educational setting.

It's really bizarre to me that we have gotten to the point now where we are forcing parents to buy an entertainment device. And an iPad is an entertainment device. It is. They've never ever suggested it was anything but an entertainment device. You don't need it to do computer work. You can do Excel spreadsheets on a computer lab in a school and that works just fine, and people learn to use a computer. But this is an entertainment device, and we're forcing every child in our education system to have this thing on their person at all times. And that's extraordinarily destructive, not because it's got exiled on it, but because of the other stuff that can sit on that same device. So Facebook, Instagram, you know, anything in YouTube, All of those things are on the device. All of those things are engineered for addiction. And worse that addiction, that addictive state in the human brain causes them to be more prone to ADHD, anxiety and depression. So what we've done is take something that's sold as an educational device but is in effect distributed addiction and put it in the pocket of every single school student in our system. We've never done anything like that before. We've never distributed cigarettes to every primary schooler before, we've never distributed alcohol shots to every high schooler before. We've never distributed addiction at this kind of scale. And we're about to find out why that's a very bad idea.

Is it an all or nothing situation? Is there absolutely no room for it in your opinion?

In my opinion, none whatsoever. There is no reason that every child should have access to a device carrying addictive apps. And people might say, well, well, how are they going to learn to use a computer. They're going to learn to use a computer the way they learn to use any other tool, which is the school provides a facility, so a classroom full of computers. You go in there, you learn to use it, and then you get on with your day. It doesn't need to be on your person all the time. And most teachers that I've spoken to agree with me. These things are tools of mass distraction and they hate having them in their classrooms.

What about the device at home?

The iPad in the backseat of the car to keep the kids happy and occupied while you're on a long drive in lieu of a DVD or you know, we've all seen it and I've spoken about it so many times. Everyone has either been a part of or has observed the family at the dinner table at the restaurant where the kids are on an iPad or some sort of a device to keep them quiet while the adults are having a conversation.

Well, it's setting your kids to stun, isn't it. That's what it is. It's administering a stun. And while that's really convenient, it's not good for them, and it's not good for you either, because you're probably doing it too. So it's a bad idea. And it's encouraged by the fact that the schools require these kids to have the device. So most of them, or a fair number of them, wouldn't even have the device if it wasn't required for school. And once it's there, they've always got the convenient excuse, Oh, I need it to do my homework, or I need it for school or whatever or whatever. On the other side of the coin, as you say, if you just want to have a conversation and you want the kids quiet. Now, hey, we used to I admit fess up here. You know I used to use Bluey for the same thing on television back in the day. Couldn't wait till six o'clock in the morning when it was actually on on a Saturday morning, because that would set the kids to stune. The problem is that rather than it being a television where you're just watching a piece of empty time which isn't engineered for addiction and has no effect on the human brain, you are giving them something that is actively interacting with them.

And that it's interesting that you just put that clarity in there, the difference between what we were exposed to as kids in front of a television as opposed to this the apps that you've referred to a few times. You've mentioned now a couple of times, Adhd, and I want to get back to that, but just on the subject of you know this, I think quandary that particularly young parents now are dealing with. I mentioned that Pixar is getting ready to release Toy Story five next year and they've unveiled a preview clip of who.

The villain is in the movie.

There's always a villain in a Pixar movie, and in this case it's lily Pad, and lily Pad is a device colorful like the ones that we see in the hands of small kids, and lily Pad is given to the main human character, Bonnie, and it threatens to divert her attention away from her beloved toys.

In the Toy Story, the ones that we know like.

Jesse the Cowgirl, and there are little details about, but what I was able to really infer quite easily is that the tablet is distracting Bonnie from playing with her analog toys. So it's a case of imitating life. The scenario has drawn mixed reactions. Some are applauding Pixar for addressing these legitimate concerns that parents have today. Others are criticizing it for adding more stress to parents who may or may not be giving their kids devices and the guilt that they feel for maybe doing that, And some are saying it's simply really sad that it's an issue that needs to be addressed at all, But it needs to be addressed.

It definitely needs to be addressed. Think about what's happening when a child is given an interactive entertainment device that's full of addictive apps instead of their toys. Those toys don't do anything on their own, except in Toy Story, movies. They sit there and do nothing. The only way they become a game is if the child uses their imagination to make them a game. When you give them a device, you're saying, turn off your imagination and let these companies play with your biochemistry. And now, if it was positioned that way, I don't think they'd sell a single one. But that's exactly what's going on, and we've got to be awake to this. We've got to be aware of it. And this is not about making people feel guilty for anything. They're the victims just as much as anybody else is of a significant and intense marketing campaign that has been running for the better part of a decade to make them use a device that gives these companies direct access into their lives.

So let's go back then and finish on ADHD. You've mentioned it a few times and the potential impact that device use may have on the developing brain that may lead down that path. I'm assuming not for all children, but for some. And I have shared with the listeners the latest statistics when it comes to NDEs in the amount of kids, particularly young boys, who find themselves now on the ndies and it's always surrounded some sort of spectrum disorder or ADHD.

Can you tell us about this book that you're.

Yeah, So, I'm working on a book with a sort of I guess sketch title of hyper Focus, and it's looking at the ADHD epidemic, but in the context of the things I've written about before, which the things we've been talking about today, which is how are these things engineered to change a person's brain and what can you do to change it back? And so, because the brain is plastic, it is and it's easily changed back. Give it three months without constant dopamine stimulation and it's back to the way it was, which is the great news in all of this. It's fixable, but it's not easily fixable because the nature of addiction is that you can't stop doing it. And unfortunately, the first step is you have to stop doing it. But what I do is go through strategies for doing that for not only for you, but for your kids, and working through how do we get them unhooked from these devices, how do we get them back into real life without the potential damage. And the link to ADHD is that one of the consequences of the changes to the human brain is that we lose our ability to focus. So once we are hooked on these devices or anything else addictive, we can no longer focus, and that turns into we can no longer sleep, and then that turns into anxiety and then depression and the.

Issues that are identified inside the classroom. Absolutely, David, always fascinating.

Thank you very much for your time.

This afternoon, when hyper Focus working title finds itself ready for publication, I would love to have you back on to tell us a little more absolute pleasure