Guideline-led
Whatever the paediatric guidance says for their age.
You take the question as settled by people who have looked at it properly, and follow the age-banded guidance: none under eighteen months, an hour or so for the under-fives, consistent limits after that. The appeal is that it removes the argument from the household and puts it somewhere external, which is a real benefit and not a lazy one.
Not what it promises
Every approach here works for the families it suits; the useful question is what it costs to run.
- Keeping up, since the guidance has moved a lot and will move again
- Tolerating that the most-quoted numbers are the least evidence-based part of it
- Enforcing a limit you did not personally set, which is easier in some households and harder in others
How it gets misread
Taken to be the evidence-based option by default. The AAP softened its numeric limits in 2016 and the RCPCH declined to set any, having read the same studies.
Where it stands
Every position with the source it was read from, and the pale band is how much internal variation the approach genuinely tolerates. A wide band is not vagueness — it means the texts in this family really do disagree with each other about that axis.
Source: Guidelines on Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour and Sleep for Children Under 5
Source: The Health Impacts of Screen Time: A Guide for Clinicians and Parents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
Source: Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
What to read
Media and Young Minds — American Academy of Pediatrics
The actual policy statement, which is more cautious than its news coverage.
The Health Impacts of Screen Time — Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health
The same evidence, read by a different college, reaching no threshold at all. Worth reading precisely for the contrast.
Compared with
Sources for this row
Guidelines on Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour and Sleep for Children Under 5
World Health Organization, 2019. Cited for the under-fives positions. Note that the guideline development group rated the certainty of the screen-time evidence as very low.
The Health Impacts of Screen Time: A Guide for Clinicians and Parents
Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, 2019. Reviewed the same literature as the AAP and declined to set a threshold, on the grounds that the evidence does not support one. The clearest institutional statement that this is contested.
Media and Young Minds / Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents
American Academy of Pediatrics policy statements, Pediatrics 138(5), 2016. The source of the age-based limits the guideline-led row follows — and, since the 2016 revision, notably less numeric than the version most parents remember.