Fidget Spinners: Toy Or Treatment?

American children seem to have a problem staying focused.

As of 2011, as many as 6.4 million children between the ages of four and 17 had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That number is a 43 percent increase from 2003, according to a 2015 study by the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health.

Part of the increase may be due to a rise in reporting of symptoms as negative social stigma decreases, but another reason may be that technology is changing how we relate to each other and our environment, according to clinical psychologist Gregg Henriques, director of James Madison University's Combined-Integrated Doctoral Program.

"There are good reasons to believe the age of technology is transforming how we fundamentally relate and how we learn, and there are lots of good reasons to believe those kinds of transformations will have a profound impact on our attention and how we're able or not able to attend to society," Henriques said. "[Children's] developmental trajectory is altered because you're two and looking at a screen and getting used to instantaneous gratification and not as many face-to-face reactions."

Similar to other issues plaguing society - be it obesity, cancer, hair loss or acne - it doesn't take long for a quick fix to come along claiming to help.

The latest trend aimed at helping with distraction is fidget spinners, which are held pinched between two fingers and weighted to spin when given a flick.

The three-pronged, gyroscopic toys are sold with the claim of helping children with ADHD, autism or anxiety focus.

"Official" spinners can go for as much as $30 on Amazon, while simpler, plastic versions can be found at the corner convenience store for less than $10.

But psychologists are wary of giving into the hype.

There is no scientific evidence that the spinners work across the board, said clinical psychologist and Duke University professor Scott Kollins in a May NPR article.

Henriques concurs, adding that he doesn't know of any clinicians who use or have recommended the spinners.

In fact, parents looking for a solution to their child's distraction are made vulnerable to the potentially false marketing ploys.

Henriques compares the scientific fad to the rise of phrenology - the idea that one's skull shape could predict personality - in the 19th century, where people paid large sums of money to have their skulls "read."

"It's a sort of social contagion effect when other people are doing things, and there are some herding inclinations where they want to be part of a new and exciting thing," he said. "There are a lot of examples of things that catch fire that have no utility, just like we look at phrenology now as having no validity at the level it claimed."

While the spinners have cropped up in the Rockingham County Public Schools, they're not seen as much of a problem, according to David Burchfield, director of federal programs.

"It's really not much of an issue in the elementary schools," Burchfield said. "In the few cases it has been brought up, we dealt with them individually with the spinners. The teacher or principal has just asked [the student] to put them away."

To actually work toward helping someone with ADHD or anxiety, a psychologist would tailor treatment to the individual.

"A psychologist will work with an individual with concerns, and from my vantage point, tailor treatment on the basis to foster attention," he said. "You have to be careful. What is fun and entertaining may not foster the kind of attention you want to foster. People can like things that may not help them in the long run."

That doesn't mean that clinicians don't use potential distractors during treatment.

Some people are recommended to doodle, use noise machines or play background music because it can be used as a way to reduce someone's sensitivity to unfamiliar stimuli.

But just as people vary greatly, what works for each person can vary, too.

"Those things are often explored as environments that help people actually focus, but it depends a lot," Henriques said. "There is a lot of individual variation on what is the right kind of environment for focusing."

The spinners may not work as marketed to help with attention deficit problems, and shouldn't be trusted until studied in a controlled way to determine if they do make a difference.

Until then, Henriques recommends looking into things that may actually help children focus.

"The idea that [spinners] would be a transformative intervention that a lot of people would use seems to me unlikely, and once the novelty wears off, people will get bored quickly," he said. "In my estimation, what we need is more foundational overhauling of what we think of education and ? the context we need to build to manage our lives in the new information age. A little gadget like this is not where my focus is."