[greesil]

"People who are diagnosed with ADHD at a younger age likely have parents who just don't want / know how to deal with issues."

Once you have a child with ADHD, or if you are someone with ADHD, you will understand just how wrong you are. Until then, enjoy your bliss.

[citilife]

I formed this opinion from knowing many and seeing the way they are being / were raised. There's quite a bit of evidence to support this btw (outside of my observations).

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/1471-2431-12-50

> Approximately 10% of the sample was classified as having ADHD. We found depression, anxiety, healthcare coverage, and male sex of child to have increased odds of being diagnosed with ADHD. One of the salient features of this study was observing a significant association between ADHD and variables such as TV usage, participation in sports, two-parent family structure, and family members’ smoking status. Obesity was not found to be significantly associated with ADHD, contrary to some previous studies.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221133551...

> Youth with ADD/ADHD engaged in screen time with an average of 149.1 min/weekday and 59% had a TV in their bedroom. Adjusting for child and family characteristics, having a TV in the bedroom was associated with 25 minute higher daily screen time (95% CI: 12.8–37.4 min/day). A bedroom TV was associated with 32% higher odds of engaging in screen time for over 2 h/day (OR = 1.3; 95% CI: 1.0–1.7).

https://journals.lww.com/jrnldbp/Abstract/2018/04000/Sleepin...

> A shorter sleep duration and less time spent in cognitively stimulating activities were associated with an increased risk of developing ADHD symptoms and behavior problems.

There's plenty more, but the gist is pretty clear. Get your kids outside, give them a supportive and safe environment, teach them how to behave like adults, give them plenty of sleep, and provide them plenty of opportunities to learn. All those reduce risk of depression and ADHD (hence the correlation above).

[dwallin]

The links you provided don't support your argument in the way you think it does, but does reveal a gap in your understanding of ADHD.

ADHD has strong correlations with motor control and sleep issues, and is notoriously under-diagnosed amongst girls as they tend to present and be perceived differently.

ADHD is also understood to be hereditary and therefore given that the divorce rate for adults with ADHD is much higher than normal you should expect a higher incidence of children with ADHD growing up in a single family household. - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4071160/

Your second source is ridiculous, if you actually read the study they looked only at kids diagnosed with ADHD and then found that kids with tvs in their rooms watched more tv. It should seem obvious that this would be the case and im fairly certain you would get the same results if you looked at non-diagnosed kids (which again, they didn't)

[Djvacto]

> Youth with ADD/ADHD engaged in screen time with an average of 149.1 min/weekday and 59% had a TV in their bedroom. Adjusting for child and family characteristics, having a TV in the bedroom was associated with 25 minute higher daily screen time (95% CI: 12.8–37.4 min/day). A bedroom TV was associated with 32% higher odds of engaging in screen time for over 2 h/day (OR = 1.3; 95% CI: 1.0–1.7).

This does not imply causation. Someone with ADHD is more likely to give in to distraction and dopamine. This study was done with a sample of people who already have ADHD. Nothing in it indicates that television time is going to cause ADHD.

Someone who has a better relationship with exercise, screens, or whatever, doesn't mean they don't have ADHD anymore. Medicated or not. They just have better support and lifestyle habits that minimize how much it might impact them.

[lettergram]

> Medicated or not. They just have better support and lifestyle habits that minimize how much it might impact them.

If a disease can be resolved through changes in lifestyle is it a disease needing medication?

I think that is kind of the point, is it not? We can give the kids anti-depressants for being depressed or we can help them change their lifestyles. We can give the kids ADHD drugs or we can change their lifestyles. We can let the kids get diabetes, put them on drugs, or help them lose weight.

This is a ridiculous discussion. Yes, drugs can help and we may need to use them in extreme cases to aid in lifestyle changes, but shouldn’t the goal be improved life style

[Djvacto]

They're not mutually exclusive, and ideally you mix and match. Being on medication is a bit too polarizing, as there are people who vilify it, or otherwise shame people who need to be on life-long or long-term medication, but there is also a problem with over- or mis-prescribing.

I don't really have much to do with the prescribing part of it (besides my personal medication decisions, and doing my part to not ignore the problem), so I'll leave that to my friends in the medical industry. Though especially having held some uninformed opinions on people who need medication earlier in life, I think it's important to not make people question whether they should take life-changing medication because of stigma or social pressure.

I will say my personal experiences have exposed me to people who need medication but have trouble accepting it a lot more than the latter, so I don't want to pretend my experience is universal.

[Taywee]

None of those studies establish a causal relationship. Correlation is not causation. Even the first study says "Longer time spent in cognitively stimulating activities (>1 hours per day) was associated with lower scores of both ADHD symptoms (0.96, 0.94–0.98) and behavior problems (0.89, 0.83–0.97). Time spent watching TV and engaging in physical activity were not associated with either outcomes."

I have a child with ADHD (age 9) and a child without (age 6). They are both highly intelligent, but compared to each other:

* My ADHD child is significantly more attracted to screens, video games, and quick stimulation in general. If he doesn't have a screen, he's much more likely to engage in simple, lower-focus activities like simply spinning and running in circles or just hitting things against each other. When given the choice, he will always choose screen stimulation.

* My non-ADHD child is more likely to play with clay and building materials, read, write, and draw. He likes TV and video games, but will very often decide to do other, lower-stimulation activities without being prompted. When outside, he explores and examines things, and will play more structured, imaginative games with rules.

* My ADHD child sleeps much less than the non-ADHD child. He has trouble falling asleep, and wakes up very early every morning on his own. It is impossible to "give them plenty of sleep" when they literally can not sleep.

* My ADHD child exercises much more than the non-ADHD child. He is more interested in going outside in general.

* My ADHD child does not like studying and can not focus on learning things. He learns less, he learns slower, he is disruptive in class. He acts more immaturely even when we take much time teaching him to behave like an adult. He is often depressed because he feels like there's something wrong with him because he has a significantly harder time just having fun doing things that other kids his age do. He feels depressed because he wants to learn things that he simply can not make himself sit long enough to focus on. He feels depressed because he knows he is being immature and disruptive and feels like he literally can not control it.

Given the same opportunities and treatment, my ADHD child has more screen time, more time exercising, less time sleeping, learns less, is less mature, and is more depressed. He is on medication now, but I felt the way you do for years, and it set him back severely in school and life, including his friendships and relationships with family. On medication, he is doing much better in every single respect, but he still struggles, and the medications become less effective over time (we're still trying to find something that works better long-term).

I'm going to be frank here. You are taking studies that show correlation, ignorantly assuming causation, and making judgements and giving advice about an area that you clearly do not have any personal connection to. ADHD may be overdiagnosed, it may have been underdiagnosed in the past (note that ADHD is strongly correlated with self-medication and addiction, which has always existed), but it's not something that you can really easily cause or prevent, and dealing with ADHD in a child is stressful and challenging for both the parent and the child. Assuming neglect among parents of children with ADHD is absolutely uncalled for, and contrary to my experience, where parents of children with ADHD are absolutely run ragged from years of trying to fight to keep their kids healthy, sane, and educated.

[citilife]

> Assuming neglect among parents of children with ADHD is absolutely uncalled for, and contrary to my experience, where parents of children with ADHD are absolutely run ragged from years of trying to fight to keep their kids healthy, sane, and educated.

I never once suggested the parents were being neglectful in the sense they weren't giving it their all or trying their hardest. To your point, they're ragged, the ADHD children clearly need more work, etc. Further, I'm sure the "mental health professionals" recommended it to them.

I'm not going to share my personal experiences, but I truly do understand all of this and the struggle. I agree we have no proof about what causes ADHD, and those were all correlations. That said, I can say that in the past 100+ years our entire environment as a species has changed. We have some pretty unreasonable expectations on children and not all of them will want to build, some will want / need to lasso cattle, ride horses, hunt, etc (as we did for tens of thousands of years). They may not learn the way we structure our society, they may not respond well to the chemicals, the change in diet, what have you. It could simply be genetics.

The point I was trying to make was it's clear why depression is often correlated (there was no causation in this paper btw) with ADHD and ADHD drugs. Societal and family support is weaker than it was 80 years ago, there's lack of community, less dual-parent households, constantly being told "the world will end", etc That's kind of my point.

ADHD and depression are a disease, meaning they are a variety of symptoms that when presented together are diagnosed as impeding normal function. Those symptoms can have various causes and unless careful observation is made, it's possible to conflate or miss the cause, there may also be a multitude of causes. Treating the cause will "cure" the disease, much like you can cure (or at least dramatically reduce the risk of) type 2 diabetes with diet and exercise (the issue being your bodies ability to process glucose -- often due weight); but not Type 1 diabetes.

What I want to clarify is that I think this is a societal issue, but expressed it through personal observations. Having one parent clearly has an impact (less energy and capability to give to an ADHD child), having structured education, having screens, etc.

Give the example you stated around screen time; would your son be better off trying to learn to focus or playing outside? I honestly don't know for sure, but what is clear is that you care. I'm 100% sure you're doing your best to make that judgement call. My point, was that many times the parents don't care, they just want their kids out of their hair.

My general point was never to assign blame, it was to point out that diseases such as ADHD, Autism, depression, anxiety, etc to be diagnosed together. Further, that those diseases often correlate with some of the issues I highlighted. That doesn't mean it's all cases, but to ignore reality isn't going to help either. If we don't examine the causes and we just medicate -- it wont work well for the children. Medicate as needed, but if we can, we should try to cure the disease.

[jamal-kumar]

I can see very clearly from the facility of your statements that you don't have children of your own.