Screens Without the Shouting: A Calm Guide from 2 to 18

Under five: the age with actual limits

This is the one band where current guidance sets numbers: the World Health Organization recommends no sedentary screen time before age two, and no more than an hour a day — less is better — from two to four; the UK's 2026 guidance for under-fives (welcomed by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health) points the same way. The long-standing, best-evidenced concern is displacement: what heavy screen time replaces — talk, play, sleep, and being bored into inventing something. Practical rules: co-watch when you can and talk about it like a book; keep the bedtime hour clear; and release yourself from the babysitter guilt — dinner needs cooking, and a child who watched some television and was talked to a lot is very likely to be fine.

Five to fourteen: guard the load-bearing hours

School-age advice is less about minute-counts and more about protecting what matters: sleep (screens out of bedrooms overnight remains the single strongest lever — the evidence linking bedroom devices to worse sleep is consistent), meals (the phone-free table starts as the adults' discipline), and boredom (some idle hours have to survive, because that's where play and invention live). Make rules with reasons — "sleep is when your brain files the day, and the phone is built to steal it" — and apply the shared ones to the whole household, adults included: the exemption is the tax that kills the law.

Fourteen to eighteen: hand over the engineering

At this age your rules are expiring on a legal timer, so the job changes: teach them to see the engineering on themselves. The app deleted before exam term because they know their own weak hour; the phone that charges outside the bedroom because they've read how feeds are built; decisions made before the party, not at it. Every piece of "I know what I'm like when…" ships with them at eighteen — the parental controls don't.

And at every age, the promise that outranks every setting: if anything online ever goes wrong — a message, a picture, a person, a mistake you made yourself — telling me, or another safe adult, is safe. You will not lose the phone for reporting a problem. A child who fears confiscation stops reporting; the promise keeps the reporting lane open, which is where safety actually lives. (For online sexual harm — grooming, pressure for images, sextortion — report to CEOP; never view, save or forward any images; and know that Childline's Report Remove tool exists to help under-18s get sexual images of themselves taken down from public online content.)