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

The host opens with a list of figures rather than a question, explaining that what drew them to the topic was "the shocking rise in diagnosis and prescriptions over the last 10 years." For the UK, the host says ADHD diagnoses rose "approximately 20 fold" over a period the transcript gives as "between 2020 and 2018," which is internally inconsistent as transcribed. Among boys aged 10 to 16, the host says diagnoses went from roughly 1% to about 3.5% in 2018. Among men aged 18 to 29, they cite "a nearly 50 fold increase in ADHD prescriptions during the same period."

The host then cites US figures: an estimated 15.5 million US adults diagnosed with ADHD, about one in nine US children diagnosed at some point, and 10.5% with a current diagnosis. No sources for these numbers are named in this excerpt. The host's framing is that the conversation, prescriptions and diagnoses "seemed to have really surged into culture in a really, really big way."

The guest replies that ADHD was one of the things that motivated their work: "I was seeing this huge uptick in ADHD diagnosis and children being medicated so, so early."

The guest builds the argument on the fight-or-flight reaction, which they describe as the sympathetic nervous system kicking in, an evolutionary response to a predator. Their example is a sabre-toothed tiger (transcribed as "stable tooth tiger"): you either stand and fight or you run. They map both halves onto children's behaviour. Aggression in school or daycare (hitting, biting, throwing chairs, trouble socially) stands in for "fight," and distraction is "the flight part of fight or flight."

From there the guest concludes that ADHD symptoms are signs of stress a child cannot manage, not a disorder in themselves. They mention, without saying who was involved, that "there was a whole movement to take the D off of ADHD because it's not a disorder."

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.

The guest's account of the mechanism centres on the amygdala, which they call "a little almond shaped part of the brain" and "a very primitive part of the brain" that regulates stress throughout life. They say this part of the brain "is supposed to remain offline for the first year to three years." They give that as the reason mothers carry babies on their bodies and babies stay close to their mothers in the first three years. In this account, children should be exposed to stress and frustration only incrementally, in amounts they can manage. The guest's image is taking "small bites" of stress with the mother there to help "digest" it.

The guest then names specific modern practices they believe switch the amygdala on too early: separating mothers and babies, putting babies into daycare "with strangers," and sleep training. They group these as "all these weird things that we're doing to babies." Later they add letting babies "cry it out" and "leaving babies for hours on end when they're so, so very fragile."