How Much Screen Time Should My Child Have, By Age?

Parents ask 'how much screen time' hoping for one tidy figure, understandably: a number is easy to remember and easy to feel guilty about breaking. The honest answer is that no such number exists for most ages, and that's not officialdom dodging the question. It's that the evidence doesn't really support one. Older advice used to hand parents a flat figure (two hours a day was the one that stuck around longest, borrowed from decades-old guidance), but the organisations that used to say it have since moved away from it. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health actually withdrew its own 2019 screen time guide, saying plainly that a single cut-off oversold a 'toxic' effect the evidence didn't back up, and that families are better served by weighing up an individual child's use rather than following a blanket rule.

There's one genuine exception, and it's recent. In March 2026 the UK government published its first official screen time guidance for parents of under-5s, developed with the Children's Commissioner and a leading paediatrician. For the under-fives, there's now something close to a real figure (more on that below). For every age beyond that, there still isn't one, and probably won't be for a while yet. That's genuinely fine. It means the useful job is learning what actually matters, rather than hunting for a rule that was never going to arrive.

Treat everything below as context, not commandments. No child has ever been harmed by a parent rounding up on a rainy Tuesday.

• Under 2s. Guidance leans towards little to no solo screen time. Video calls with grandparents or family don't count against this, they're the shared kind. The goal isn't zero, it's making sure a screen isn't standing in for a face.
• 2 to 5-year-olds. Around an hour a day is the figure now used in official UK guidance, with mealtimes and the hour before bed flagged as best kept screen-free. That's a guide for a typical day, not a ceiling that slams shut the second the clock ticks over (a longer stretch on a poorly day or a long car journey is not a parenting failure).
• Primary school age, 5 to 11. There's no official UK figure here at all. In practice, families commonly land somewhere around one to two hours on a school day and more at weekends and holidays, but that's an observed pattern, not a rule from anyone official.
• Secondary age and teens. A fixed daily number more or less stops being a useful tool. What matters shifts almost entirely to content, sleep protection, and whether screens are crowding out everything else.

Notice what happens as children get older: the official guidance doesn't get stricter, it gets quieter. That's not neglect. It's an honest acknowledgement that a single number matters less the older a child gets, and what they're watching, and why, matters more.

The reasoning behind the new under-5s guidance is worth borrowing for every age, because it's a genuinely useful lens. The concern was never really that screens exist, it's what a long stretch of solo screen use quietly crowds out. The guidance is explicit that long periods of time spent on screens alone can get in the way of activities critical for development, like sleep, physical activity, creative play and interaction with parents. That's a test you can run at any age, not just the very young: is a screen taking the place of sleep, movement, play or a conversation, or is it just filling a gap that would otherwise be, well, a gap?

Sleep is the one displacement effect with the clearest evidence behind it, at any age. The NHS's own guidance on sleep and young children is blunt about it: screens in the 30 to 60 minutes before bed can genuinely interfere with a child settling, partly through the light itself and partly through what's actually on. That single window, the last hour before bed, is worth protecting far more carefully than the total for the whole day.

Ask most families which was worse for their child: twenty minutes of a fast-cut, shouty channel five minutes before the school run, or an hour of a slow, familiar favourite like Bluey's 'Rain' on a wet Sunday afternoon, and they'll tell you the twenty minutes, every time. Minutes alone don't predict much. What's actually playing, and what else is happening around it, predicts a lot more. We go through exactly which properties of a video tend to wind a child up rather than settle them in does screen time really cause dysregulation?, including the four culprits worth watching for: fast cuts, shouty presenting, constant reward pings, and cliffhanger endings straight into autoplay.

Even the new official guidance leans this way rather than towards a stopwatch. It nudges families towards slower-paced, age-appropriate content and away from fast-paced, social-media-style videos, and it flags watching together as better than watching alone wherever that's realistic. None of that fits neatly into a number of minutes. It fits into two questions worth actually asking: what is this doing to my child right now, and would I rather they were doing something else with this half hour?

If you want a single practical swap for clock-watching, try this: instead of counting minutes, watch the transition. How your child comes off a screen tells you far more about whether that stretch worked for them than how long the clock says it ran. A child who clicks off a slow, familiar episode and wanders away to find their Lego has had a perfectly good stretch of screen time, whatever the total said. A child who comes off wired, or dissolves the second it's switched off, is telling you something worth listening to, regardless of whether they were only on for fifteen minutes. We go through exactly why that switch-off moment goes wrong so often in why does my child melt down after screen time?

It also helps to notice, honestly and without judgement, which slots screen time is actually filling in your day. A lot of real screen time isn't a considered decision at all, it's dinner needing to happen while a small person needs containing. That's a completely legitimate reason to press play (we built our twenty minutes to cook dinner collection around exactly that window), and it's a different job for a screen to do than filling every spare gap in a day that has no other shape to it. Same minutes, different job.

There is no number waiting to be discovered that will tell you you've got this right. Official guidance has moved, deliberately, away from handing parents one, because the evidence never really supported it in the first place. What's left is more useful anyway: rough ranges for the very young, sleep protected at the edges of the day, and after that, a habit of noticing what a screen is actually doing for your particular child, on this particular day.

None of this is about becoming stricter. Self-regulation, including around screens, is a skill children grow into gradually rather than a switch that flips at a set age, something we cover properly in our guide to self-regulation in children. Some days the honest answer to 'was that too much screen time' is: it doesn't matter, everyone's fed, nobody's melting down, and bedtime went fine. That's a better measure than any number a website can hand you, including this one.