Screen Time Limits by Age: A Realistic Framework

By Laura Lurns · Reviewed by Philip Weaver · Last reviewed 2026-09-29

How much screen time is right at each age?

Two groups are cited most often. One is the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The other is the World Health Organization (WHO). For young children, they broadly agree.

What the AAP advises:

• Under 18 months. Avoid screens, except live video calls, such as with family.
• 18 to 24 months. If you start, pick high-quality programs. Watch them with your child. Do not leave your child to use a screen alone.
• Two to five years. About an hour a day or less of high-quality programs. Watch together where you can.
• Six and older. No fixed number of hours. There is more on this below.

The AAP gives a reason for children under two. They do not learn from a screen the way they learn from a person.

What the WHO advises, in its 2019 guideline for children under five:

• Under one year. No screen time spent sitting still.
• One year. Screen time spent sitting still is not recommended.
• Two years. No more than an hour of screen time spent sitting still. Less is better.
• Three and four years. No more than an hour of screen time spent sitting still. Less is better.

The WHO looks at the whole day. Its goal is to swap sitting at a screen for active play. It also aims to protect sleep. It is not counting minutes for their own sake. The WHO encourages reading and telling stories together while sitting.

Watching together is part of the AAP's advice for the youngest children. Talk about what is on the screen. In our view, that turns watching into a conversation.

Why does the AAP give no number for older children?

For children six and older, the AAP chose not to set one fixed limit in hours. It asks each family to set consistent limits of its own. Those limits should protect sleep, physical activity, school, meals and time with people.

The AAP suggests a Family Media Plan for this. It is a plan each family makes for itself.

So the AAP gives no number of hours for a ten-year-old. Its answer is a plan, not a number.

In our view, how long is only one question. The others are what is on the screen, when your child uses it, and who is with them.

A realistic plan for school-age children

Here is how we would build the plan. Pick one step. Run it until it goes without reminders. Then add the next.

1. Protect sleep first. Turn screens off a half hour to an hour before bed. Charge devices outside the bedroom overnight. Figueiro and Overington (2016) studied twenty adolescents using screens in the evening. In their study, the screen light suppressed the body's signal that sleep is due. The studies we hold on evening light were mostly in adolescents. None of them measured school results.

2. Focused work before the screen. Homework comes before the screen, not after. No games, phones or treats in the half hour before homework. Save the stimulating thing for later in the evening. Keep it out of the time before bed.

3. Replace, don't just remove. Our position: pair every limit with something real to do instead. That can be moving around, play, or a job you share. It can be a task with a result your child can see. In our view, a limit with nothing in its place leaves a gap to fill.

4. Screen-free times and places. Write them into the family plan. Meals, bedrooms and the time before bed are good places to start. In our view, a fixed rule is easier to keep than a new argument each night. In our view, a plan your child helped set is easier to keep too.

5. Turn off autoplay and alerts you do not need. This takes away the hooks without making the device the enemy. For an older child, talk about how an app keeps them on it.

6. Screens off for the adults too. In our experience, children follow what the house does more than what it says. Your own phone at dinner and at bedtime sets the real rule.

Why the order of the evening matters

After a fast, high-stimulation activity, an ordinary task straight afterward can feel flat and harder to start. That is about the order activities come in, not about a particular child. The order is worth managing on its own terms.

In our view, the first activity raised the bar for what feels worth doing next. That view comes from studies in rats and from addiction research. It was not measured in children. So it is a reason to manage the order. It is not a finding about your child.

Whether screens moved school results is a separate question. The research we hold on it is further down this page.

Why some apps are hard to put down

In many apps, some taps and scrolls bring a reward. You cannot guess which ones. A new like shows up. Something new appears as you scroll. Slot machines pay out the same way.

Skinner studied this kind of reward schedule in animals. The slot-machine study we hold is James and colleagues (2016). It studied how long adults kept playing a slot-machine game. Every version of the game gave rewards you could not guess. It did not compare them with rewards you can guess. It measured nothing about children or learning.

So this describes the design. It is not a verdict on your child, or on technology.

Does learning software count?

Not all screen time is the same. VanLehn (2011) reviewed controlled studies of tutoring software. Some software responded to each step of a student's work. It did nearly as well as a human tutor. Software that checked only the final answer did much less well. In our view, even good software adds to teaching. It does not replace a teaching adult.

Did screens cause the drop in test scores?

The Nation's Report Card (NAEP) shows US reading and math scores have fallen. The agency that runs it says, "NAEP is not designed to identify the causes of performance differences." NAEP has published nothing linking the drop to devices.

The Education Recovery Scorecard puts state test results for grades 3 to 8 on one national scale. It comes from Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth. It finds the drop began around 2013. That was before the pandemic. The Scorecard names two changes from that time. One is schools being held less to account for test scores. The other is more social media use by teenagers. It does not choose between them. Neither do we.

Wyckoff (2025) weighed five possible causes, phones and social media among them. Wyckoff's conclusion: "No single factor explains the pre-pandemic learning loss." No study we hold separates screens from the other causes.

What about phones at school? Beland and Murphy (2016) compared schools in England before and after phone bans. Test scores rose a little, mostly among students who were behind. The schools chose their own bans, so the real gain may be smaller. Figlio and Özek (2025) studied one large Florida district after the state's ban. Every school in the district had the ban. They compared schools with more and less phone use before it. So they could not measure the full effect of a ban. Test scores rose a little in the second year. Suspensions rose in the first year, then fell back. In the first year, in-school suspensions for Black students rose by about 30 percent. Everyone in these two phone studies was in middle school or older.

A school ban is not the same as less screen time overall. Goodyear and colleagues (2025) studied students aged 12 to 15 in 30 English schools. They compared schools with strict and loose phone rules. They found no clear difference in English or math scores. That was a survey at one point in time, so it cannot show cause.

For children under about 10, we hold no research on screens for fun and school results.

What the research we hold says, and where it stops

We do not lead with studies that count screen hours and track children's outcomes. That is not a claim that those studies are wrong. Our case is about the order of the day and about sleep.

We hold no study that tests the plan on this page as a whole. The age limits are the AAP's and the WHO's advice. The steps are our practice, for building the family plan the AAP suggests. The sleep step rests on the light studies above.