Most Replayed Moment: Is Modern Parenting Causing ADHD? Your Decisions Shape Your Child’s Mind!

Steven Bartlett (0:04)

ADHD.

Erica Komisar (0:05)

Yep, okay.

Steven Bartlett (0:07)

I don't feel like I don't even have to ask a question here, but just to set the stage, the reason why I'm so compelled by this is just this, I have to say it, the shocking rise in diagnosis and prescriptions over the last 10 years. Between 2000 and 2018, ADHD diagnosis in the UK rose approximately 20-fold.

Erica Komisar (0:29)

Yes.

Steven Bartlett (0:30)

Among boys aged 10 to 16, diagnosis increased from 1% roughly to about 3.5% in 2018 And in men aged 18 to 29, there was a nearly 50-fold increase in ADHD prescriptions during the same period. And the same applies to the United States, where an estimated 15.5 million adults in the US have been diagnosed with ADHD. Approximately 1 in 9 US children have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point, with 10.5% having a current diagnosis.

I don't know where ADHD was, but the conversation around it, the prescriptions, the diagnosis, seemed to have really surged into culture in a really, really big way. What's going on?

Erica Komisar (1:10)

So ADHD was one of the factors that drove me to right being there, because I was seeing this huge uptick in ADHD diagnosis and children being medicated so, so early. Do you know what the fight or flight reaction is?

Steven Bartlett (1:24)

That's when the sympathetic nervous system starts to kick into action and...

Erica Komisar (1:31)

Yes. So well, it's basically our evolutionary response to a predatorial threat. So if a saber-toothed tiger was chasing you, you either stood and fought, fight, or you ran for your life, flight. So when our children are under stress, they go into fight or flight. So one of the first signs that a child is under stress that they cannot manage, is when they become aggressive in school, they hit, they bite, they throw chairs, they have trouble socially in daycare or preschool or even in school. Or they become distracted, which is the flight part of fight or flight. So what's happening is their nervous systems, the stress regulating part of their brain is getting turned on. So we say that the stress regulating part of their brain has to do with a little almond shaped part of the brain called the amygdala. It's a very primitive part of the brain, very old part of the brain. And it regulates stress throughout our lives. It helps us to manage it. What we know is that part of the brain is supposed to remain offline for the first year to three years, which is why mothers wear babies on their bodies. It's why babies stay close to their mothers in the first three years.

To keep the amygdala quiet and only incrementally, incrementally expose children to stress and frustration that they can manage. So imagine taking small bites of it so you can digest it, right? And your mother's there to help you digest the stress. What we're doing now by separating mothers and babies, by putting babies into daycare with strangers, is by sleep training babies, all these weird things that we're doing to babies, is we're turning the amygdala on. We're making it active precociously too early. What happens when the amygdala is activated too early, is it becomes very active and very large very quickly. The problem is then it shrivels up and burns out also, because it cannot manage that kind of stress so early. When it ceases to be functional, it ceases to be functional for a lifetime. And so it's very important to protect, you know, what's the expression, the family jewels. These are the family jewels in the brain of a baby. This is the jewel, the amygdala. You want to keep the stress to an absolute minimum in the first year, which is why sleep training is dangerous. It's why letting babies cry it out. It's why putting babies into daycare. It's why leaving babies for hours on end when they're so, so very fragile is so bad for their brains, because it gets the cortisol flowing, which is the stress hormone, but it makes this part of the brain very active. So it grows, grows, grows, and then pfff, and ceases to be functional in the future, like a PTSD response. So what we know is that these children are in hypervigilant states of stress.

Steven Bartlett (4:55)

ADHD.

Erica Komisar (4:55)

ADHD children. Hypervigilant states of stress. If you stay in a hypervigilant state of stress long enough, you go into a hypovigilant state of stress, which then causes depression.

So what we have now are not disorders. So there was a whole movement to take the D off of ADHD, because it's not a disorder. It is a stress response. And instead of asking the right questions, which are, okay, what's causing the stress? How do we make sure that our children are not exposed to this kind of stress because they're going into fight or flight? So the nervous system, as you said, the brain has an on switch and an off switch. The on switch to stress is the amygdala. The hippocampus is the off switch. And you'd say the stress response is in a negative feedback loop. It's actually important. In other words, if a sable tooth tiger is chasing you, very important that you can activate, run or fight. So the stress response is supposed to be short term. It's supposed to be acute rather than chronic. So we can kind of manifest it, we can activate it. But then it's supposed to be turned off by the turn off switch, the hippocampus. What we're seeing in children's brains is that the amygdala is growing very precociously large and the hippocampus, which is the off switch, is very small. So we have this problem, as we say, Houston, we have a problem. We have an on switch going full speed, gas, no breaks and no off switch. And that's causing ADHD, behavioral problems that are hugely rising in children, in school, a lot of aggression and violence. And so that's what's happening. This is a stress response. And again, instead of asking the right questions, like where is this coming from? What's causing the stress? Instead, we silence the children's pain. We tell parents, we'll medicate it and we'll just relieve the symptoms. For me, that's malpractice. The way we treat ADHD is malpractice. A child develops, goes into fight or flight when they are under stress. It could be psychosocial stressors at home, in the family. It could be at school. It could be with their friends. It could be a learning disability. There are so many things that can cause kids stress. So instead of medicating them, why don't we figure out what's happening to that child deeply that's causing them to go into fight or flight?