School Principal warns of potential links between screen time for kids and ADHD

By Robert Firth, Local Democracy Reporter

A headteacher has blamed parents who ‘shove’ screens in front of their toddlers for surging levels of ADHD among schoolchildren.

Mike Baxter, principal of the City of London Academy in Lynton Road, Bermondsey, told a Southwark council education meeting that young kids had been ‘hardwired’ by their parents to get a screen when they cried.

Speaking on Monday evening Mr Baxter, who leads the borough’s second largest secondary school, said: “There is evidence around the link between this and increased prevalence of ADHD. I do think screen time for toddlers is a massive problem. We have young people who are not able to sit still and engage with toys.

“They’ve been programmed, hardwired by their parents, that when they cry they get a screen shoved in their face. Now the rewiring of the brain from zero to two is profound and if you’re doing that staring at a screen, we are starting to see the impact of that and there is relation to this effect.”

Mr Baxter went on to refer to a study he had recently read which he said showed ‘a direct correlation’ between the likelihood of developing ADHD and the amount of screen time kids had between the ages of zero and two.

Mr Baxter’s source material is a piece of research published in peer-reviewed journal Reviews on Environmental Health in 2023 which found a positive correlation between screen time and the risk of ADHD.

The study from China, entitled ‘Screen time and childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder: a meta-analysis’, used statistical techniques to compare the results of nine studies containing 81,234 children.

Mr Baxter acknowledged that his remarks were ‘controversial’ at the meeting on Monday evening. But he insisted they were informed by research that he had looked at and cared deeply about.

He added: “We have to be honest about what is triggering some of the issues we are seeing. I don’t think people are bold enough to talk about what we actually need to do to decrease SEN longer term which is some pretty challenging conversations to start with.”

Researchers from UCL published a study in 2023 that found ADHD diagnoses increased in both males and females between 2000 and 2018.

The number of males under 18 being diagnosed with ADHD doubled during the period, while the number of females under 18 being diagnosed quadrupled, according to the study published in BJPsych Open.

The same study, which analysed the data of millions of individuals aged three to 99 from a UK primary care database, found a 20-fold increase in ADHD diagnoses among men over 18 years old and a 15-fold increase in women over 18.

Pictured: The City of London Academy, which is overseen by Mr Baxter (Picture: Google Street View)