Screen time for preschoolers: what do expert bodies recommend?

“How much screen time is normal?” Almost every parent of a young child asks it. The good news: the main recommendations are fairly close to each other. The less simple news: none of them is just a number. What they really care about is what screens take away from a child’s day.

The recommendations in brief

This summary is based on guidance from three bodies. For the full wording, see the sources at the end.

• Under 1 year: the World Health Organization (WHO) does not recommend screen time at this age. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) also advises avoiding screens other than video chatting before 18 months.
• 1–2 years: WHO does not recommend sedentary screen time at 1 year; at 2 years it says no more than 1 hour, adding that less is better. For 18–24 months, the AAP suggests that families who want to introduce media choose high-quality content and watch it together with the child.
• 3–5 years: WHO and the AAP agree on roughly 1 hour a day at most of quality content. The Canadian Paediatric Society also recommends less than 1 hour a day for ages 2–5.

The idea behind the number

These recommendations do not mean that harm starts at minute 61. What young children need most is sleep, movement, play, conversation with adults and shared reading. Problems grow when screens replace those. That is why the WHO guideline treats screen time together with activity and sleep, not on its own.

The AAP’s second point is watching together. Young children find it hard to carry what they see on a screen into real life. When an adult says “Look, the bear is going to bed, and soon you will too”, the content starts to mean something.

Making it work at home

A few practical ideas:

1. Choose the content first, then the time. Short, calm, age-appropriate videos are far easier to manage than an endless feed.
2. Set screen-free times and places. The AAP suggests keeping mealtimes, bedrooms and the hour before bed free of screens.
3. Don’t make screens the only way to calm down. Reaching for a video every time a child is upset can make it harder for them to learn to settle themselves.
4. Look at your own use too. Children learn from how their parents use their phones, which is why the Canadian Paediatric Society encourages parents to review their own habits.
5. Be flexible. Sick days, long journeys and hard weeks happen. The guidance is a target; the balance over a week is more realistic than any single day.

Older children

For ages 6 and up, guidance moves away from strict hour limits towards consistent family rules: are sleep, school, movement and family time protected? At this age, inviting children into the conversation about rules makes them easier to accept.

Where Owlo Kids fits in

Owlo Kids has no default time limit; a limit exists only if you set one, because families know their own needs best. If you do, your child sees the time left as a bar that empties like a picture (a tap shows the minutes), and when time is up the video stops with a gentle closing screen. Because you choose the content as well, you stay in charge of what that hour is filled with.