It makes sense both logically and intuitively, and there's research to back up his claim. The question is what conclusion to draw from it. It's pretty easy to dismiss children who's parents didn't give a shit about enforcing proper screen times at that then subsequently developed an attention deficit by rigorous conditioning as lazy. And it's a convenient avenue for gatekeeping in education.

It just makes sense: if you condition a developing brain to never expect anything other than instant gratification, you obviously have no neural pathways that can deal with a regular workload. There's a reason the chinese government is so harsh in terms of policing kids screentime nationally. Kids show similar symptoms to ADHD after consuming TikTok for a while.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for any archaic educational policies, like not giving your kids a smartphone until they get bullied by their peers for not having one. I'm just pissed that boomers completely missed teaching this generation some media literacy (because they don't know it either) and now act suprised when their kids grow up with this kind of deficit.

Children in front of a screen are essentially alone. It doesn't have to be a surplus in instant gratification but could as well be a deficit in human interaction.

> and there's research to back up his claim

That's a good chance to link it.

> you obviously have no neural pathways that can deal with a regular workload

And that's a really bad description for ADHD where, no, you absolutely do. And it's not about "regular workload".

Correlation is not causation. It's also likely that there was more awareness in urban areas, access to mental healthcare, schools that could look for ADHD synonyms.

Moreover, ADHD was also a thing 30 years ago when there weren't any screens; it just wasn't diagnosed.

There are many people who got diagnosed in adulthood. One of the key diagnostic criteria for adults is: the symptoms should have been present since childhood. Let me tell you this, many adults who got diagnosed late, absolutely had these symptoms as kids and have a lot of secondary psychological conditions due to undiagnosed ADHD.