‘KIDS THESE DAYS!’ A META-ANALYSIS OF CHANGES OF ATTENTION PROBLEMS IN REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLES OF CHILDREN

Abstract

"It is a common belief that the attention of new generations of children is in decline (Protzko & Schooler, 2019). However, such devastating claims about new generations are challenged when inspecting the evidence (Protzko, 2020). The current meta-analysis aimed to explore comprehensively whether attention problems have increased, decreased, or remained unchanged among children over the past decades. Findings allow us to determine whether there has been any problematic development of attention among children. Studies that used the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL) with representative samples of 1.5-14 year-old children were systematically searched in multiple databases (i.e., Web of Science, Scopus, Google Scholar, PubMed). Informants varied between studies (i.e., teachers, self, parents), but parent-reported data was dominant. Preliminary results from the meta-regression analysis of raw scores from 22 studies showed no change in reported attention problems over the past decades (byear = -0.009, p = .72; 95%CI = -0.06 to 0.04. However, when mean age of children was analyzed in interaction with the year of data collection, we found that attention problems have increased with age over the past decades (byear× age = 0.007, p = .01; 95%CI = 0.002 to 0.011). When analyzing the percentage of maximum possible scores from the same 22 studies, there was an increase in reported attention problems over the past decades for all children (byear = 0.4493, p = .03; 95%CI = 0.03 to 0.87,), regardless of age (byear× age = -0.0022, p = .35; 95%CI = -0.07 to 0.02). These findings show that attention problems among children are increasing, and school-aged children might be especially at risk. A possible explanation of these results might be that children usually spend more time on screen from year to year (e.g., surfing on the internet, playing online games, using social media, media multitasking) which might have had a negative effect on their attention regulation skills in the last decades (Moisala et al., 2016; Rideout et al., 2010)."