It is half past seven on a weekday evening. The pressure cooker has just let out its third whistle, the smell of tadka hangs in the flat, and a two-year-old sits still on the sofa with a phone held close to her face. A cartoon song plays for the fourth time. Her thumb moves, the colours change, and she does not look up when her grandmother calls her name. For the first time all day the house is quiet. Nobody in this scene is a bad parent. Everyone is tired, and the phone works.
Almost every Indian family with a small child knows this moment. What the evidence says about it is more useful, and less dramatic, than what we usually hear.
What the studies find
Start with the guidelines. In 2019 the World Health Organization advised that babies under one should have no screen time, that sedentary screen time is not recommended for one-year-olds, and that children of two to four should have no more than an hour a day, with less being better. The Indian Academy of Pediatrics went a step further in 2022. It said children below two should not be exposed to screens at all, and that children from two to five can have up to an hour of supervised use.
Behind these numbers sit long studies that follow the same children over years. Sheri Madigan and her colleagues tracked about 2,400 children in Calgary, Canada. More screen time at two predicted lower scores on a developmental screening questionnaire at three, and more at three predicted lower scores at five. The reverse pattern did not show up. In Japan, Ippei Takahashi and his team followed more than 7,000 mother and child pairs. One-year-olds with four or more hours of daily screen time were several times more likely to show delays in communication at two, with weaker but still visible links at four.
Where the evidence runs out
This is where honesty matters. These are observational studies. Parents reported the screen time, and parents filled in the developmental questionnaire, which is a screening tool and not a diagnosis. Madigan’s effects were small. Takahashi’s team could not tell educational viewing apart from anything else. A child who is already struggling may also be the child who is handed a phone more often, and no questionnaire fully untangles that.
A 2020 review by Madigan’s group pulled together 42 studies of screens and language. More screen time and more background television went with weaker language. But educational programmes and watching together with an adult went with stronger language, and children who started later did better. The authors themselves called these links small to moderate and noted signs of publication bias. So the evidence supports caution and limits. It does not support panic, and it does not tell us that a screen damages a young brain the way smoke damages lungs.
A screen does not answer back
The most revealing studies are not about hours at all. In 2003 Patricia Kuhl and her colleagues gave babies of about nine months twelve short sessions of Mandarin. Babies who heard a live speaker began to tell Mandarin sounds apart. Babies who watched the same speaker on video learned nothing measurable. Ten years later, Sarah Roseberry, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff taught two-year-olds new verbs. The children learned from a live person and from a video call, but not from a recorded video of the same teacher.
What separated the conditions was not the glass. It was response. A person on a video call waits, notices and replies. A recording carries on whatever the child does. This is what embodied cognition has been telling us. A young child does not take in language as a stream of sound. She learns it inside a back-and-forth between two bodies, in the turn of a head, a pause, a smile that arrives at the right moment. Researchers call this participatory sense-making. Grandmothers call it talking to the baby.
Not a question of minutes
Most public talk about screens is still talk about time and outcomes. How many minutes, how much damage to attention, what it will do to marks later. That framing treats the child as a machine whose output we are protecting. I want to put the question differently. A two-year-old is a body that learns by moving, by copying the people around her, by playing with things that push back. The real cost of the phone on the sofa is not only what it does. It is what it replaces, which is the hour of being answered.
This does not mean the tired mother is wrong. It means the remedy is not guilt but company. Sit beside the child, name what you both see, pause the video, ask her to show you with her hands.
So go back to that sofa at half past seven. The house is quiet. What would it take, in your home or your classroom, for that quiet to come from a child who has been answered all day, rather than from one who has stopped asking?
Put it into practice: P22 Call and response: language through rhythm, P51 Free play: what the teacher does while children play, P17 Finger games for small hands
Read next: R10 Participatory sense-making: how two bodies understand together, R42 Imitation: children learn by becoming others
Notes
- World Health Organization (2019). Guidelines on physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep for children under 5 years of age. Geneva: WHO. Summary in the news release “To grow up healthy, children need to sit less and play more”, 24 April 2019. https://www.who.int/news/item/24-04-2019-to-grow-up-healthy-children-need-to-sit-less-and-play-more
- Gupta, P., Shah, D., Bedi, N., et al. (2022). Indian Academy of Pediatrics Guidelines on Screen Time and Digital Wellness in Infants, Children and Adolescents. Indian Pediatrics, 59(3), 235–244.
- Madigan, S., Browne, D., Racine, N., Mori, C., & Tough, S. (2019). Association between screen time and children’s performance on a developmental screening test. JAMA Pediatrics, 173(3), 244–250. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2018.5056
- Takahashi, I., Obara, T., Ishikuro, M., et al. (2023). Screen time at age 1 year and communication and problem-solving developmental delay at 2 and 4 years. JAMA Pediatrics, published online 21 August 2023. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2023.3057
- Madigan, S., McArthur, B. A., Anhorn, C., Eirich, R., & Christakis, D. A. (2020). Associations between screen use and child language skills: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Pediatrics, 174(7), 665–675.
- Kuhl, P. K., Tsao, F.-M., & Liu, H.-M. (2003). Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(15), 9096–9101. doi:10.1073/pnas.1532872100
- Roseberry, S., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2013, online). Skype me! Socially contingent interactions help toddlers learn language. Child Development. doi:10.1111/cdev.12166