Children’s screen time: The Government intervenes again
One of the Government’s more palatable interventions in family life is the recently issued ‘new screen time guidance for the parents of under-fives’. The guidance was issued on the strength of a report by the ‘Early Years Screen Time Advisory Group’, which was led by Dame Rachel De Souza, Children’s Commissioner for England, and the DfE’s former chief scientific advisor, Professor Russell Viner. The justification for the report and subsequent ‘guidance’ is that, according to the charity ‘Kindred’, 28% of children starting school do not know how to use a book — and, according to the Prime Minister, parents are crying out for the Government to tell them how to use technology in their own homes, especially with their own children.
The report indicates that 90% of a child’s brain development happens before a child is five, and that the best way to ensure good development is through positive interactions with a responsive parent (or carer, of course). The expert-led panel concluded that excessive use of screens limits the time a child spends communicating and talking, and this, in turn, damages the child’s language and social-emotional development:
‘Too much screen time in the early years crowds out the talking, play and real–world interaction that children’s development depends on.’
As a result of the report the Government has issued some clear advice to parents which includes: no solo screen time for children under-2, and no more than an hour a day for 2–5-year-olds. The guidance also admonishes parents not to allow their infants to chat with AI bots or to use social media. The advice can be found on the Government’s ‘Best Start in Life’ website.
Even if some parents disagree with the advice because it overlooks the positive uses of technology, the fact that the Government is issuing this Guidance raises important questions. If it is genuinely the case that children are arriving at school unable to turn a page or listen to a story, that is deeply concerning. However, the Government should be consistent. If it is emphasising parents’ responsibility to manage their children’s screen use, then parents should also be placed at the centre of wider policy on children’s wellbeing, rather than positioned behind state services and schools.
The concern that the state wishes to redistribute responsibility from parents to the State is real – we recently covered the Government’s policy paper ‘Every child achieving and thriving’ (23 Feb 2026) which makes it clear that the Government views parents as ‘co-operators’ with the State in the raising of their children, and that professionals (such as teachers and health workers), as well as relevant agencies, have a stake in children’s development. It is a document that presents a utopian collectivist vision for the raising of children:
Our plans will wrap services around children and schools. Our schools are a truly universal public service which can touch the lives of every child and family. Services must be designed to work together, recognising and strengthening the anchor role that schools play in communities and working hand-in-hand with school staff to get support to children and families. Isolated services do not transform outcomes; we will design new collective accountability for our children within a community. (pg 11-12)
In addition, the Government has introduced a range of interventions to ‘help’ parents of young children, such as the introduction of ‘free breakfast clubs’ and toothbrushing lessons in primary schools – notably, toothbrushing was introduced in the 2019 RSHE Guidance and is also part of the EYFS curriculum. Obviously, children need to be provided with breakfast, and they need to brush their teeth, but these tasks are the responsibility of parents, not teachers and other state officials.
In the final analysis, we can say that Starmer’s screen time guidance is inoffensive and may well be useful to some parents who appreciate specific guidance about how much time they should allow their children in front of the TV or tablet. There are questions to be asked though about how far we wish the State to go in managing family life. Considered in the context of the current Government’s interventionist approach, screen time guidance might feel a bit like mission creep. It is worth noting too, that Starmer’s collectivist vision leaves little room for the natural family unit and so the vision will ultimately fail – the family is the unit on which society is built, not vice versa.
ParentPower Team
