Screen time, by age, without the panic

• No solo screen time. Background TV counts.
• Video calls with family are the carve-out: short, with you, narrating what is happening.
• Children this age learn from your face and voice, not a screen. Anything else is replacing the thing they need most.

What the research says: RCPCH 2019 and WHO 2019 both advise that children under 2 should have no sedentary screen time. AAP allows brief video chats with familiar adults, with a parent present.

• Around 1 hour a day, ideally split into shorter sittings.
• Co-view when you can. Talk about what they are watching afterwards.
• Avoid fast-cut, ad-heavy or autoplay content. Slower-paced shows are easier on developing attention.
• No screens in the hour before bed. Screens delay melatonin in this age group particularly.

What the research says: WHO 2019 and AAP both recommend no more than 1 hour of high-quality, co-viewed screen time per day for children aged 2 to 5. Quality and context matter more than minutes.

• There is no single recommended limit at this age. The right amount is whatever does not displace sleep, movement, in-person play and family time.
• Audit weekly, not daily. Look at the week as a whole.
• If reading, sport, sleep and friendships are intact, the screen time is probably fine. If any of those are slipping, that is the signal, not the screen-time number.
• Devices charge in a shared room overnight from the moment they are introduced.

What the research says: RCPCH 2019 deliberately did not set a numeric limit beyond age 5 because the evidence is too weak to justify one. The evidence does support displacement effects: sleep, exercise, social interaction.

• Continue auditing weekly using the displacement test (sleep, movement, friendships, family, schoolwork).
• Start moving the conversation from how long to what and with whom. A child watching a long-form documentary, talking to a friend on a video call, and scrolling reels for the same total time are doing three different things.
• Phones (if any) charge overnight outside the bedroom. This is the single most evidence-supported screen rule for adolescents.
• No device in the hour before bed. Blue light is part of it; the bigger driver is the social and emotional activation of being online right before sleep.

What the research says: Multiple longitudinal studies (most notably Twenge & Campbell, Orben & Przybylski) show that the strongest negative associations between screens and adolescent wellbeing track to disrupted sleep and high social-media use, not total screen minutes per se.

• Most teenagers have already worked out how to get around any cap you set. The lever now is conversation, not control.
• Sit down once a term and look at the week together. What is working. What feels too much. What they would change. They will surprise you.
• Keep the overnight rule (devices out of the bedroom) for as long as you reasonably can. The wellbeing evidence here is the strongest.
• Talk about what they are seeing, not how long they spend. The content they are absorbing daily is shaping their identity in ways minute-counts will not capture.

What the research says: Adolescent wellbeing research consistently points to sleep, social comparison and content type as the active ingredients. Total time spent is a poor proxy for harm in this age group.