The official recommendations agree more than the headlines suggest: no screens before 2, up to an hour a day until 5, and around one to two hours of entertainment for older children, as a guide rather than a rule. What children do on screens now counts as much as how long.
Parents still need a place to start. This article gives you both: what the guidelines actually say, the limits we suggest for each age, and what it takes at home for a limit to hold when time is up.
Screens run through almost every part of a child’s day, from schoolwork to the evening movie. So the question for parents is rarely whether children spend time in front of a screen. It is how much, on what, and what happens on the evening when the agreed time is up and nobody wants to stop.
The two references quoted most often are the World Health Organization (WHO) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The WHO advises no screen time before 2, then no more than one hour a day until 5, and says less is better.
The AAP updated its guidance in its 2026 policy statement. Hours are no longer the main rule: what comes first is the quality of the content and the healthy activities, such as sleep, movement and time together, that screens should not push out. Where the AAP does mention time, it gives a flexible range: under one hour a day for toddlers and preschoolers, and one to two hours or more of entertainment media for school-aged children and teens, adjusted to each family’s routine.
Some national guidelines give firmer figures. Australia and Canada recommend no more than two hours of recreational screen time a day from 5 to 17. Sweden’s Public Health Agency recommends no more than one to two hours of leisure screen time a day from 6 to 12, and two to three hours from 13 to 18.
So the guidelines agree more than the headlines suggest. Next to them, you will find the starting points we suggest. They are ours, not a medical rule, and they are meant to be adjusted to your child. Like the official figures, they cover entertainment; schoolwork is a separate question, covered further down.
| Age | What health authorities say | Our suggested starting point per day | The limit model that fits |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 to 2 | No screen time (WHO) | None, apart from video calls with family | Screens out of reach, face-to-face play first |
| 2 to 5 | No more than one hour, less is better (WHO); under one hour (AAP) | Up to one hour of slow-paced, high-quality content, ideally watched together | Short fixed slots tied to moments of the day |
| 6 to 9 | One to two hours or more, quality first (AAP); one to two hours at most (Sweden); two hours at most (Australia, Canada) | About one hour on school days, up to two on weekends | Fixed daily limit, devices in shared spaces |
| 10 to 12 | Same as 6 to 9 | About 1.5 to 2 hours | Weekly allowance with a daily cap, for example 12 hours a week and 3 at most per day |
| 13 to 17 | One to two hours or more, quality first (AAP); two to three hours at most (Sweden); two hours at most (Australia, Canada) | No fixed number: a frame you agree on together | Bedtime and device-free bedrooms rather than an hour count |
Under 5, the hour matters less than what fills the rest of the day: physical play, sleep, social contact and creative activities. The WHO guidance is as much about movement and sleep as it is about screens.
From 6 to 9, specific rules start to help: no screens at certain times of day, homework and chores before the tablet, devices used in shared rooms rather than behind a closed door. The AAP itself notes that school nights and weekends can be handled differently.
From 10 to 12, school and friendships increasingly happen on a screen too. A single daily figure starts to fit badly, and an agreed limit is worth more than an imposed one.
From 13, routines matter more than the number, and the AAP is concrete here: phone-free mealtimes, bedrooms and homework, no screens in the hour before bed, and a family media plan that the whole family discusses.
These are orientation figures, not a daily quota. On a rainy day a child may sit in front of a screen longer than after an afternoon of sports and friends. The point is not to count every minute, but to notice when school, sleep, movement, friends and shared family time start to lose out.
When does a phone come in? There is no single right age, and the AAP notes that research does not point to a specific age for smartphone readiness. Many families do well with a staged path: a basic phone around 9 to 11, a managed smartphone from 11 to 14, then growing freedom. Some agencies are more specific: Sweden’s Public Health Agency recommends waiting with a smartphone until the year a child turns 13. Readiness matters more than birthdays, and the five questions to ask before a first phone help you judge it.
The rules that go with these numbers, what to say when your child begs for five more minutes and a family agreement to print are all in our free Family Screen Time Guide.
It makes a difference what a child is doing there:
Passive consumption, such as watching a show, mostly displaces movement. Interactive use, such as a good learning app or a creative tool, can build problem-solving skills instead. That is why the quality of the content deserves at least as much attention as the duration: an educational app or a documentary is worth more than an endless video feed, and watching together turns a program into something you can talk about afterwards.
Good content, however, does not stop being screen time. It is no contradiction to think a program is worthwhile and still limit it.
Two questions follow from this, and both have their own article:
Knowing roughly how much is one thing. What shape the limit takes is another, and it is where family rules quietly fail. Four models cover almost everything parents try:
| Model | What it is good for | Where it fails in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Fixed daily limit | clear, little to renegotiate, suits younger children | pushes the child to use the time at once, because it expires; fits badly with days that are not alike |
| Weekly allowance | the child divides the time up; a long movie or a games evening becomes possible | can be gone by Monday, with six days still to go |
| Screen time earned against other activity | ties screens to something else, feels fair | turns into bookkeeping, and sports end up looking like a currency |
| No time limit, content filter only | no daily argument, the child regulates itself | works while the amount stays reasonable by itself; with older children, it often does not |
The first two are the real decision; the other two are answers to the fact that neither of the first two fits everywhere.
A fixed daily limit suits younger children. The span is easy to grasp, the rule is unambiguous, and it becomes a routine instead of a negotiation every afternoon. Its side effect is that unused time is lost, so the child spends it immediately, and scarcity makes screens more interesting rather than less.
A weekly allowance works from roughly 10 upwards, and it aims at the right thing: the child divides up the time, does not have to break off mid-project, and can save hours for something worth saving them for. But it assumes planning across seven days. A child who can already do that at 12 rarely needs a limit; a child who cannot sits on Tuesday in front of a week they have spent already, and the argument the model was meant to avoid arrives anyway, later and louder.
What helps is not falling back on the daily limit but building a brake into the weekly one: a cap per day, so the whole week cannot go in a single afternoon. The child keeps the planning, and the worst case is ruled out.
One rule of thumb holds across every age: the younger the child, the shorter the period they have to keep in view. Under 5, short fixed slots tied to occasions; from 6 to 9, a daily limit with the first exceptions; from about 10, a weekly allowance with a daily cap; from about 13, a negotiated frame rather than a fixed number. At that age, bedtime is usually a more effective boundary than the hour count.
And where the time sits in the day matters as much as how long it is. Screen time before homework turns into a countdown; the same half hour afterwards is a reward. The same applies in the evening: what runs directly before bed works differently from the same half hour in the afternoon.
Almost every limit holds until the moment it actually bites. That moment is worth preparing for, because it is where the rule is either kept or lost, and with games it is harder than with anything else.
None of that is an excuse, but it explains why so much of the conflict happens at exactly this point. “Off, now” asks for something the game does not provide. Saying that out loud already takes some of the heat out of it, on both sides.
What works instead is simple to describe and takes some discipline from the adult side. The end has to be predictable, and your child has to see it coming.
The difference between this and simply taking the device away is not strictness: the time can be identical. The difference is that your child can plan the end instead of suffering it.
And a word on taking everything away, because it is the advice you will read most often: with older children it is also the riskiest. What it removes is not only the game but the circle of friends inside it, and what usually follows is not a new hobby but resentment. As a short-term emergency brake in a situation that has escalated it can be the right call. As a standing answer to “plays too much” it almost never is.
A limit that a child understands is defended far less often than one that simply appears.
Revisit the arrangement as your child grows. What suited a 7-year-old rarely suits the same child at 12.
Agreement is one half; the ordinary Wednesday afternoon is the other. Four things help more than a stricter number:
The number of minutes alone does not decide that. What matters more is whether your child’s behavior changes. A few intense weeks, with a new game or an absorbing project, can be entirely normal.
The signals worth taking seriously are different ones: trouble sleeping, schoolwork slipping, withdrawal from friends and hobbies, noticeable irritability or aggression, not being able to stop even when they want to, or signs of cyberbullying. If these persist, it is worth seeking advice from a healthcare provider, a counselor or a therapist rather than tightening the limit again. Our Family Screen Time Guide lists free helplines by country.
Agreements need someone to keep the time, and that someone should not have to be you with a stopwatch. Salfeld Child Control sets daily, weekly or monthly limits, filters out unsuitable websites, and can restrict individual apps or games, during homework time or after bedtime, for instance. With Roaming, the time a child spends on the PC and on the phone is added up under one shared limit. All four models above can be set up this way, including a weekly allowance with a daily cap. It runs on Android phones and Windows PCs; on iPhone and iPad, Apple’s built-in Screen Time does the job.
It can also give the warning before the end, at intervals you choose, and that matters more than it sounds: a reminder that does not come from you is not an invitation to negotiate.
The activity logs show where the time actually went: which apps, which sites, how long. That is usually the most useful part, because it turns a suspicion into something you can talk about. Extending a limit, or seeing how much time has been used today and which limits are coming up, works from your own phone through the parent app, without opening the portal.
Software does not replace the conversation, though, and it should never be installed in secret. A block that appears without warning is read as an attack; the same block, set up together beforehand, is an agreement.
The guidelines give you a frame: no screens before 2, up to an hour a day until 5, and around one to two hours of entertainment for older children, with content and routines counting as much as the clock. Our starting points turn that frame into something you can apply at home, but the number matters less than everything around it: that all screens count toward one limit, that everyone knows what counts at all, that the model fits your child’s age, that the end of the time is visible before it arrives, and that your child knows why.
Last updated October 2026.
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