AIBU that reducing under 5s screen time is way more complicated than just issuing guidelines?

[Lovelygreenpen]

This guidance is welcome. We need to know facts and risks to make informed choices. But choices often aren’t made entirely freely. Think about healthy eating and exercise guidance and how complicated these can be to follow due to costs and time.

How would following this under 1 hour rule change your daily routine?
Most parents need to work all the hours with COLC and decades of rising housing costs. working life also often expands to expect parents to be in contact from home outside of paid work hours.
How are busy parents supposed to manage? How are solo working parents specifically supposed to manage? Any family with more than one child?
And what about the screens used in childcare settings?
What are the responsibilities of the makers of the crazy overstimulating content for babies and kids?

We know women often have to do more domestic labour than men, even where they live with a male partner. Also, that the makers of the content aimed at kids specifically employ addictive techniques.

So how is this pressured wider environment going to change to make this recommendation more realistic?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1d936n7445o

A four year old only needs a screen to keep them occupied if they know it exists. No two/three/four/five year old needs any screen time other than some tv or a movie. If you start making books/colouring/a toy/a game/a puzzle the 'normal' 'sshush mummy needs to answer some emails' distraction, they will survive.

OP it's like you can't fathom that there was a world before screens and children where children often needed to be kept occupied and quiet for a bit.

I have older teens now and I PROMISE you, that all the casual screentime you do or don't allow, will pay you back one way or another.

My children were little 15-20 years ago and none of us in the family had an iPhone or a tablet at that time. They did watch telly but at set times of day (usually while I was making them lunch or dinner). They usually watched together, and they watched a few specific programmes they liked- we very rarely just had the TV on in the background while we did other things.

Lots of parents had busy lives at that time too. The world does feel more stressful now than it did 15 years ago, but a big part of that is bloody screen and social media!

Mine watches a couple of Julia Donaldson on rotation once a day whilst we sit with them so that’s 30mins, and some of the BBC wildlife documentaries in the evening whilst playing and we point out the animals. Nothing in a phone or tablet. Listens to audio books whilst eating sometimes.
wondering what counts as screen time. Like yoto/tonnie audio books or wildlife programmes on a tv?

That sounds fine to me. Lovely mix of time together, education and fun. Who doesn’t love a bit of Julia Donaldson!

We are fairly lax, I don’t time it, some days they might have a lot, then none for days, so I struggle to care about it as they are very good kids, we have no behavioural issues, they are well behaved, smart, polite, usually the best behaved kids in most settings we go to (and they don’t have screens out and about other than long journeys), so I figure we are doing good enough and that’s fine for me.

If I had to parent some of the horrors that I see other parents wrestling with then I’d maybe think differently.

I do think the landscape around childrearing and parenting has changed massively and not entirely to do with screens. It’s no longer seen as acceptable by many to turf your children out and have them on their bikes going around the town for 5-6 hours, which is what I did as a kid. We were all out for hours. Now it’s all managed play - a class here for an hour, etc. I read an article recently about how the ‘casual neglect’ of parenting in 60s/70s/80s inadvertently created incredibly resilient children and subsequently adults, which I found interesting as resilience in children seems to be an increasing issue in today’s world.

Are screens the cause or more like a symptom because the expectations on parenting and what children are allowed to do independently has changed massively.

I reduced my child screen time not giving her a screen. Yesterday she designed a dress for a dolly and we cut the fabric after tea. Others days we do screen time together watching educational videos. Other we make jigsaw, Lego etc. I'm very conscious of the time we use on devices and I'm a full time single mother so keeping them busy with a screen is always very tempting. I'll try to do my best to balance because is very easy to get drag online and even with parental control some things are not for them to watch. There is plenty of crap for kids out there.

Exactly. Some people probably think that for children interactive is better than passive watching, but I disagree. The repeated, addictive dopamine hits you get from clicking, getting points/rewards/ likes etc on everything from computer games to social media are well documented. This is surely just as true of seemingly benign little activities and games that little children do on tablets. Watching a nice tv show with a storyline is much less problematic imo.

I think the screens are the cause, not the symptom. There have always been working parents. Outsourcing our human interaction and experiences to technology has made us scared of allowing our kids to experience and interact with the real world.

This is the article with links to the research. It’s quite interesting.

https://siliconcanals.com/d-research-says-the-1960s-and-70s-accidentally-produced-one-of-the-most-emotionally-durable-generations-in-modern-history-not-through-better-parenting-but-through-benign-neglect-that-forced-ch/

Why do they listen to audiobooks whilst eating? Meals are prime time for conversation.

Feeding this thread in (apologies if it has been linked before). Why is no one talking about Ed Tech taking over schools?

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/sponsored_discussions/5502971-minister-for-children-and-families-olivia-bailey-wants-to-hear-from-you?page=3&reply=151335209

I think being told an hour a day might make some parents think about the actual screen time their under 5s have and reduce it. Not to under an hour but reduce it.

When you are out a screen is an easy go to. But we didn’t use one when DC were little, but the availability of child friendly games etc were not as plentiful now. So we used card games, colouring, books (even talking to each other!)

When I was a child it wasn’t common to eat out as much as it is now, again many more child friendly restaurants. Playing out with friends much more common, or just left to your own devices (excuse the pun) whilst household chores being done

Will it now, because I have an older teen I didn't restrict screen time for as a young child and he could not be less bothered about screens now.

Holy shit, take some parental responsibility.

See them ipads, screens and whatever else your children have. Either take them off them, or turn them off.

If you havent got the control to be able to do that with your young child, well thats your issue, not everyone elses.

It’s just guidelines though. A bit like lockdown, some followed it completely to the letter and others did what they wanted. It won’t make a lot of difference really, but it’s there to try to warn the use of too many screens and what it could do to younger children if it’s not policed enough. I suppose the next thing will be the ban for under 16s to have mobiles ( or whatever is currently happening in Australia) but older ones will get round those rules I bet.

Absolutely same here the only thing I have on DD tablet is games and puzzles so no youtube! We have the tv on during the day but mainly normal tv or something for her but she will play with her toys and not watch it so its more background noise. Car journeys if its a toss up between tablet or danger nap the tablet wins hands down but other than that I dont give it.

We go out loads and obviously that is screen free so I even it out, right now her dad is sick in bed and im feeding the baby shes asked to play a game on her tablet and has it!

Did they though?

There was usually one parent at home, and that parent generally sent the children out from the morning until the evening without adult supervision- except very rich children with nannies and governesses.

My 6yo daughter and I are currently reading The Magic Faraway Tree series in their original form. The children are portrayed as being all under 10-ish. They spend most of their time performing household labour including helping their mother who takes in laundry to earn money, and the rest of the time they are left completely unsupervised to go off into the woods by themselves, including being sent off for tea with adults who are strangers to their parents, and sometimes staying out overnight. This would result in social services action now.

Unfortunately some areas of the country are really battling their local council about this - look at the horror stories about tech use in this: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/sponsored_discussions/5502971-minister-for-children-and-families-olivia-bailey-wants-to-hear-from-you

Holy shit, take some parental responsibility.

That kind of comment sounds simple, and before my child started in a local council nursery/started school, I'd have agreed without much thought, but it ignores how little control parents actually have once devices and screen-based learning are mandated during the nursery or school day. This isn’t just about kids being on tablets at home, it’s about hours of compulsory screen exposure in a classroom environment, where parents are not present and often not even fully informed (as happened in my case!!). When a school or council decides that large parts of the curriculum are delivered through screens, that immediately limits a parent’s ability to "take responsibility" in any meaningful way.

Even where parents do try to set boundaries at home, those efforts are being aciively undermined by what happens in school. If children are already spending a significant portion of their day on devices, being told to then strictly limit screen time in the evening can create conflict and imbalance. It’s not a level playing field,parents are effectively being asked to compensate for institutional decisions they didn’t make and, in many cases, weren’t consulted on.

There’s also a safeguarding dimension that goes beyond simple screen time limits. Locally, i've heard SO MANY reports of inappropriate content getting through school and nursery filters, young children interacting with AI tools, and unclear safeguards. Those are not things a parent can control remotely. If a child is exposed to harmful or distressing material during a supervised lesson, responsibility cannot realistically be pushed back onto families to keep their kids safe, especially when the devices, platforms, and controls are chosen and managed centrally by the lcoal LA.

Basically, the idea of "parental responsibility" assumes parents have REAL choice. But here where we are, we have unclear or ineffective opt-out processes, and in some cases parents being told they don’t have the right to refuse device use. When participation isn’t genuinely optional, responsibility has to sit with the authority designing and enforcing the system. Parents absolutely have a role to play - but they can’t override a compulsory, system-wide approach on their own.

My family is at its wits' end with what our local authority has done - rolled out individual iPads to my P1 daughter without even informing us, signing her up to 14 (yes 14) different edtech apps, some of which look really low quality and without any real educational justification - there's a particularly bad maths app which looks more like a gambling/gamification game that I really resent themintroducing her to.

And I work in IT myself, so I'm NOT anti-tech, before anyone starts with that potential attack (which is what has been hinted at by Scottish borders council before, to shut parents up).

Playing with other children or sitting alone on a screen?

We've always followed those recommendations as they are essentially what the AAP in America have recommended for years and in the absense of guidelines here and looking for some guidance I used those. As it's all my kids have ever known there is very little push back and my kids read, draw or play with their toys when I can't give them attention, my oldest is obsessed with reading and can read a book a day on a slow day in the holidays; she gets very grumpy if she geels she hasn't had enough time to read. As more than an hour of screens is allowed after 6 it doesn't feel overly restrictive. If the childminder or after-school club showed a movie that day they didn't get screens at home that evening. It was particularly tricky in covid lockdowns but luckily our jobs allowed us to be pretty flexible so we just about managed to stick to the one hour limit.

“Did they though”

Yes! It’s called independently playing with toys and making their own fun (and more parental interaction when not working due to not being glued to their own phones.)

Both parents working does not coincide with the advent of smartphones/tablets. Two working parent households have been extremely common for decades now.

Love it when stuff like this is published because everyone becomes a parenting expert.

Everyone’s circumstances are different. And more importantly, every kid is different. Do I think kids should watch tv all day? No.

But to say ‘we never used to have screens back in the day’ is a ridiculous statement. We also lived in a society where you didn’t need two incomes to live, parents had more time and there was more of a community to lean on. Now, parents are constantly in survival mode, trying to balance hundreds of little things while working, caring for their children, trying to keep the house sort of clean and doing life admin.

something has to give. Instead of the government making it easier for people to live, they release shitty articles which then others (mainly boomers) then use to shame others.

How about you all just mind your own?!

Also TELEVISIONS have existed for a while, they are a SCREEN. I watched the tv after school so my mum could cook dinner, kids also get tired too and sometimes need to chill. They aren’t always ready to play and read books ffs

It's good the guidelines especially are there but for anyone bothered about child brain development then most good parents would naturally restricted screen use already.

People are careful about their diets during pregnancy and what they feed their child. I can't believe that they then fail to see that screen time for the under 5s should be minimal.

I wouldn't personally put tv on at breakfast but I'm assuming if it's on in most households it the news or Breakfast tv not cbeebies.

It's not hard to entertain a child without a screen. Though I am currently sat next to a woman who is ignoring her baby for her phone! No wonder kids are growing up screen addicted.

@Lovelygreenpen of course parents are overstretched, but parents have been overstretched throughout history so it’s not a unique and new thing.

It sounds like you’re making lots of excuses (child unfriendly society, COL, no garden/ balcony etc) to fully show up I’m afraid.

But if you don’t parent your properly now you probably get the bill for that once they’re teens. Screen overuse has long term effects.

Parenting with minimal, calm and interactive screen time is the minimum you can do. It’s not an ‚extra pressure‘ invented for modern parents.

But there wasn't parental interaction, at least not how we consider it now. Children were not supervised like they have to be now, and there were very high expectations on them in terms of performing household chores. I'm sure my 6 yo would also have a lot of fun if she went of with her friends to play on building sites and in woods all day. Many parents aren't even allowing their children to walk to the nearest park until they are too old to play at the park!

Smartphones and tablets may have worsened the problem but lots of children when I was growing up were spending hours sat in front of a TV or on video games too, and things have got much worse in terms of allowing children freedom.

Screens have existed for a long time and what has changed is the attitude to childhood.