New Guidance on Screens for Under-5s: Welcome but not sufficient

You don't need to talk to many parents or early years providers to know that children's first, most formative, experiences of technology often aren't good ones. Hours of endless, mindless kiddy crack. (Yes, Cocomelon, I'm looking at you.) Parents know this too. We've even coined a word for it: "brainrot." And when is brainrot most harmful? During the early years, when our children's brains are developing faster than they ever will again. 

So yes, it's about time we gave parents better advice. This new guidance is something I can absolutely get behind. You can read the full guidance here. 

A summary of the new guidance: 

1. Under 2s: Avoid screen time, with the important exception of things that encourage conversation, interaction, and relationships. i.e. FaceTime with (grand)parents is fine. Watching or playing something together as a family – especially if it gets you talking, playing, or moving – is also all good. Looking through your memory videos and photos together doesn't need to add to parental guilt. 

2. 2–5 year olds: Try to keep it to no more than one hour a day and again  remember that not all screen time is created equally. Quality is at least as important as quantity. 

3. Parents: Look at your own screen use too. 

(And children with SEND may need more nuanced guidance; one size doesn't fit everyone.) 

Problem solved?  

Sensible experts. A refreshingly rapid, transparent process that drew on broad consultation. Sensible guidance for parents. Job done? I fear not. 

My tribe – public health – are quite good at telling people what to do. Eat five vegetables a day. Do 150 minutes of exercise a week. Breastfeed exclusively for six months. We can now add this guidance to that list, hoping that the messages on quality not just quantity survive first contact with the media. 

But will these guidelines fundamentally change the reality of so many young children being glued to fast-paced, endless, high-intensity content on YouTube for hours a day? I think that's wishful thinking. 

The breastfeeding example is illustrative. UK guidelines recommend six months of exclusive breastfeeding, yet the UK has some of the lowest rates in the world: only around 1% of babies meet that recommendation. Guidelines alone don't change behaviour. 

Choices are shaped by much more than advice

The bottom line –  which good public health action always recognises –  is that our choices are shaped by much more than advice. Our environments, our peers, and wider societal forces determine what we actually do. In many situations, people have far less choice than we might hope when issuing recommendations. Telling a single parent working two jobs to exclusively breastfeed, in the absence of infant feeding support, adequate parental leave, or workplace policies to support her, is an exercise in guilt amplification, not public health. 

I want to be clear: none of this is a criticism of the new guidance. I think it's (with one caveat*) excellent advice, generated by brilliant academics informed by proper consultation, with the backing of a diligent and thoughtful secretariat. It was developed remarkably quickly, so kudos to all involved – including the politicians who commissioned it.  

So this is a "yes, and" — not a criticism. The "and" is that we, as a society, need to avoid the temptation of stopping here. We need to build on this guidance if we're really serious about reimagining the digital lives of young children. As Prof Pasco Fearon of Cambridge and UCL wrote last week: "Guidance is just the start." 

My Wish List 

Here is my wish list for how we build on this new guidance: 

1. A serious media campaign to communicate the guidance well. 

The biggest risk is that the nuance gets lost. If the headlines become "one hour a day" and nothing else, we'll have missed the point. As one of the experts who helped write the guidance, Prof Cat Davies, said last week: "If you take one thing from today's coverage, make it this: put down the timer and think about what you and your child are watching, and how." We need a resourced, thoughtful campaign to make sure that message lands, especially the quality vs. quantity distinction. The neuroscience is increasingly clear that passive solo consumption of high-intensity content really isn’t doing the same thing to a young, malleable, a shared moment on a video call, or playing/reading together (in Tandem). We need to make sure parents understand this too.  

2. Better regulation of early years content. 

Defining the boundaries will be hard, but I think we can develop workable definitions of the kind of content that hooks toddlers into hours of passive consumption. For example, I don't think we should have autoplay on YouTube Kids. I think we need better regulations on advertising too, to help move us away from children's platforms that monetise by maximising time spent by little people "consuming" content for hours on end.

3. Real investment in early years tech alternatives. 

Shaping the market also needs more than regulation; we need to use the full market-shaping toolbox, including investment. The BBC should be expanding its early years content, not cutting it. And – I'm biased here – but I believe that if we really want to move the needle on tech for toddlers, we need a whole new wave of creative, ethical, tech-for-good startups providing parents with real alternatives to YouTube and TikTok. At Tandem, that's exactly what we're building: technology designed to bring parents and children together, not keep them apart. Kudos to the investors already backing in this space, including our investors BGV and ElevateGreat — but early years tech innovation should be a much more crowded field, and we should be asking why it isn't. 

4. Tackling the deeper drivers. 

Finally, let's not pretend that any guidance can address the real reasons many parents rely on screens. If you have no time, no help, no books, no toys, no nearby playground, live on a street polluted by air pollution in an unsafe neighbourhood, and if you lack access to alternatives, the allure of the robo-babysitter is going to continue to be compelling. The breadth and depth of child poverty in the UK and beyond is a shame on all of us. As we talked about in the Play Commission last year, without action on these fundamentals, guidelines, and the above suggestions, will only ever go so far. 

So let's Not Stop Here 

So you can add my name to the long list of people welcoming this guidance. But let's not stop there. Only time will tell whether these guidelines move the needle, but to give them the best chance we need to build on them. I'm sure I've missed things in the list above. I'd love to hear your thoughts and ideas. Please do get in touch.  

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* My one caveat is on AI. I think the guidelines and the evidence review get it a bit muddled. I think I'm probably one of the most risk-aware people out there on the complex challenges that some AI technologies pose for child development. Questions about unhealthy attachment to AI personas, and the social-emotional impacts of the AI toys being rushed to market, genuinely keep me awake at night – and I've been involved in some of the research the review cites. But conflating those risks with using AI carefully to build better tech for kids, as we're trying to do at Tandem, risks repeating the very mistake this guidance warns against: treating all screen time as equal. Pressing a stop button that may not exist is less useful than getting stuck into the details and trying to guide the juggernaut that is AI as it reshapes the early years, along with everything else. I’ll write a longer blog to expand on this point soon, as it’s an important one!