How much screen time for kids, by age (what the guidelines actually say)

If you are trying to work out how much screen time for kids is sensible by age, the honest answer is that the official guidance is more specific than parents expect for the youngest children, and deliberately less specific as children get older. Understanding why is more useful than any single number, so this piece gives you both: the actual figures from the major health bodies, and the principle underneath them.

A note first: this is a plain summary of published guidance, not medical advice. Children differ, families differ, and your GP or health visitor knows your situation. Treat the numbers as a starting frame, not a rule.

Under 2: avoid screens apart from video calls

Both the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics draw the firmest line here. The WHO’s 2019 guidance for under-fives states that for children under 1, screen time is not recommended at all, and for 1 year olds, sedentary screen time is also not recommended.^[1] The AAP similarly advises avoiding digital media for children younger than about 18 to 24 months, with one explicit exception: video-chatting with family, which is interactive and social rather than passive.^[2]

The reasoning is developmental. In the first two years, children learn overwhelmingly through real interaction, handling objects, and responding to faces. Screens, however well made, do not deliver that in the same way for this age group.

Ages 2 to 5: up to about an hour, ideally together

For this band the two bodies broadly agree. The WHO advises no more than one hour of sedentary screen time per day for ages 2 to 4, and adds that less is better.^[1] The AAP suggests that from age 2 parents may introduce up to around one hour a day of high-quality programming, and stresses watching it with your child so you can help them make sense of what they are seeing.^[2]

Two words do a lot of work in both: quality and together. An hour of a slow, well-made programme watched alongside a parent who talks about it is a different thing from an hour of fast, solitary, autoplaying clips.

School age: the guidance changes shape

Here the single number disappears, and this is the important part. The AAP stopped recommending a fixed hourly cap for older children and instead points families towards consistent, individual limits and a family media plan: making sure media does not displace adequate sleep, physical activity, and other healthy behaviours.^[2]

The UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health went further. After reviewing the evidence in 2019, it concluded there was not enough strong evidence to set a specific safe threshold of screen hours.^[3] Rather than a number, it offered questions for families to ask: Is screen time controlled? Does it interfere with sleep and physical activity? Does it interfere with family life and face-to-face time? Is the child able to stop? Is screen use accompanied by snacking?

The principle worth keeping

Across all three bodies, the consistent message is that what screens displace matters more than the count of minutes. Sleep, unstructured play, movement, and conversation are the things a childhood needs, and the risk of screens is mostly that they quietly crowd those out. A useful test is not “how many hours” but “what did this hour replace.”

That is also why having good non-screen defaults ready makes the limits easier to hold. When boredom strikes and there is nothing else obvious to do, the screen wins by default. Stocking a few simple, open-ended things to reach for instead is half the battle, which is the thinking behind the Children’s Collection.