The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: Is Modern Parenting Causing ADHD? Your Decisions Shape Your Child’s Mind!
27 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
ADHD.
Yeah. Okay.
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, the shocking rise in diagnosis and prescriptions over the last... Ten years? Between 2000 and 2018, ADHD diagnoses in the UK rose approximately 20-fold.
Yes.
Among boys aged 10 to 16, diagnosis increased from 1% roughly to about 3.5% in 2018.
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Chapter 2: What shocking trends in ADHD diagnoses are highlighted?
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 one in nine US children have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point, with 10.5% having a current diagnosis. It...
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?
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?
That's when the sympathetic nervous system starts to kick into action.
Yes. So, well, it's basically our evolutionary response to a predatorial threat. So if a sable-toothed tiger was chasing you, you either stood and fought, fight, or you ran for your life, flight. Right. 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, you know, 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.
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Chapter 3: How does stress impact children's behavior and development?
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 brakes, 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's 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?
Isn't that point of view, I've got two questions here. The first is, how do you know that it's stress? And the second is, if it is stress, then the problem, or at least the inconvenient truth that that then creates is that the parent is responsible.
Yes, there's the inconvenient truth.
For that child's ADHD.
Yes. Yes. That's the inconvenient truth. It's not so simple. Sometimes it's the family. Usually it's the family, particularly with small children. But when children get to school, it could be social. As I said, you know, you can't control whether your children are exposed to social issues or bullying or there's many things that can cause stress in children. But when they're very little...
You are their environment. So the inconvenient truth is that when your child gets an ADHD diagnosis, the first thing you should do is go to a therapist who will do parent guidance with you. Don't rush that child to a psychiatrist to medicate them. You go with your partner or spouse and talk to a parent guidance expert about what could be causing this child to feel such stress.
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Chapter 4: What role does the amygdala play in childhood stress responses?
What it showed in this study is that the children who were born with this genetic precursor, this sensitivity to stress, if they had sensitive empathic nurturing in present parents in the first year, it neutralized the expression of that gene so those children could be as healthy as children born without that gene.
If, however, children born with that sensitivity gene were neglected, you know, abandoned, not provided with sensitive empathic present nurturing... it exacerbated that gene. So we know that that sensitivity gene is tied and correlated to mental illness later on unless the sensitive empathic nurturing mitigates that gene.
And what do you say to people that point to MRI scans?
And yeah, there's all kinds of neurological tests now where we can see the brain in action. So it's not a static thing. We can actually see the blood flow to the brain. We can see the electrical activity in the brain. It's amazing, actually.
Some people say that this proves that it's the way your brain is. And lots of my friends that have ADHD, when they talk about their ADHD or the way that they are, they say, my brain works like this.
No, it's not correct. Their brain is sensitive to stress. Someone with ADHD is more sensitive to stress. So you could ask them questions like this. You could say, are you a more sensitive person? Are you more sensitive to noise? to smells, to touch when you were a child? Did you not like itchy things? Did you cry more? Were you more sensitive when your parents would go out for the night?
Were you more sensitive when your mom would go to work? Or were you more sensitive when you were left at nursery school? And they're probably going to say yes.
But if they say no and they still have an ADHD diagnosis...
I would guarantee, almost guarantee they wouldn't say no because people with ADHD are people who are sensitive. Sensitivity is an amazing strength if it's met with sensitivity. If you have a sensitive child – so what does a sensitive child look like?
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Chapter 5: How can modern parenting practices contribute to ADHD?
It could be arguing parents. It could be a neighbor or whatever, some environmental factor that caused that stress. You were sensitive. You developed ADHD. You become an adult. You get diagnosed at 30 years old as having ADHD. You're offered medication. You take the medication. The medication makes you much more functional in your career, in your relationships, in your life.
It's a stimulant. And so what stimulants do is they can cause great anxiety. They can cause panic attacks. In adolescents, they can cause growth issues. So I have patients who come to me, young men who didn't grow. Because they were put on stimulants when they were young.
So in terms of the consequences of using stimulants, the jury is still out, but we know that they cause growth issues, they cause panic attacks, they cause anxiety disorders, they cause depression.
They're quite life-saving.
They're quite life-saving for some people in terms of having a... Because there's so much stress in modern life and there's such a need for people to perform and be successful in their careers and in school and get good grades. There's so much pressure on kids. So, you know, I'm 60 and we didn't have this kind of pressure before. growing up.
And so the generations that follow have so much pressure. That pressure makes children literally go off the rails. We could talk about the academic pressure, the competitiveness, the perfectionism. So ADHD is a bucket. It's a bucket which you throw people in who have anxiety that has never been treated. And there's different ways of thinking about treatment, too.
So we are a society that likes superficial quick fixes. We like drugs. We like CBT therapy. The truth is that this is not a quick fix. Figuring out relationally, dynamically, what happened to you as a child, what your losses were, what your traumas were, what caused you to feel so anxious, what's caused you to go into fight or flight is hard work. It requires frustration. It requires commitment.
It requires going to someone who can think very deeply with you. You know, I want to define... what anxiety is because I think it's really important because we rarely define depression and anxiety. Depression is preoccupation with past losses. Anxiety is preoccupation with future losses that may never occur. What do they have in common?
It's all about losses.
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