Screen time and reading apps

For a decade American parents had one line to remember, and most of them still do. It came from the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2016.

In January 2026 the Academy replaced that approach. Its policy statement Digital Ecosystems, Children, and Adolescents sets no fixed daily limit at all.^[2] The Academy's own explanation for parents tells them to go beyond simple limits and focus on “quality, context and conversation.” ^[3]

Elsewhere the Academy gives the reason without softening it: “there isn't enough evidence demonstrating a benefit from specific screen time limitation guidelines.” ^[4] A round number is easy to remember. That is not the same as it being right.

England had no national screen-time guidance for the under-fives. As of 2026 it does, and it arrived in two pieces.

First an expert panel. The Early Years Screen Time Advisory Group was set up by the Department for Education and the Department of Health and Social Care, co-chaired by a paediatrician and by the Children's Commissioner for England, and reported in March 2026.^[5] It recommended that government guidance to parents should say this:

The government published its parent advice on 27 March 2026, carrying the hour, the mealtime rule and the hour before bed, and advising parents of under-twos to avoid screens except for shared activities that encourage bonding and conversation.^[6] The 30-minute chunk sits in the panel's report rather than on the parent page we were able to read, so take it as the experts' advice rather than the official line.

Then in July 2026 the Department for Education published guidance for nurseries and childminders that goes further than anything in the American version. Screen time for ages 2 to 5 “should be limited to 1 hour a day, less if possible”; for under-twos, staff should “avoid screen time altogether other than in exceptional circumstances such as a video call with parents and carers”. And then the line that changes what a screen is for.^[7]

This is the part that did not make the news. The panel that produced the hour was candid about where the hour came from.

On thresholds the report is blunter still: “There is no clear evidence for a single ‘safe’ threshold.” And on short sessions, once long stretches, fast-paced or unsuitable content and screens at bedtime or mealtimes are taken out of it: “we found no convincing evidence that short periods of screen use, of up to 30 minutes, were in and of themselves harmful for young children aged two and over.”^[5]

So the hour is a sensible round number, chosen to protect sleep, play and talking, and openly labelled as such by the people who chose it. If you have been feeling guilty about a ten-minute reading lesson, you can stop.

Take the numbers away and the two sets of guidance say the same thing. What matters most is whether an adult is there, and whether anybody is talking.^[1][3][5][7]

That is also the part with the better evidence behind it, and the part a parent can act on tonight without buying anything.

The cleanest test we could find is a 2013 experiment. 81 parents watched storybook videos with their 3-year-olds over four weeks, split into four groups: parents trained to pause and ask questions about the story; parents who paused and commented but asked nothing; videos with the questions built in and asked by an on-screen actress; and videos watched as usual.^[8]

The children whose parents asked the questions scored higher on story comprehension and story vocabulary than both the commenting group and the group with no intervention.^[8] Pausing and commenting was not enough. Asking was.

Now the result that matters for an app. The group with the questions built into the video, which is the closest thing in the literature to a prompt inside a piece of software, landed between the two: better than nothing, short of a person.^[8]

We build prompts into Plimmery. That experiment is the reason we do not claim they stand in for you.