Society stresses quality in toddler screen use

New pediatric guidelines encourage parents to prioritize age-appropriate material for youngsters

The Canadian Paediatric Society has ditched a hardand-fast time limit for screen use among toddlers and preschoolers, encouraging instead that parents prioritize educational, interactive and age-appropriate material.

New guidance released Thursday morning still urges no screens at all for kids younger than age two, except to video-chat with others such as grandparents, and says kids aged two to five should restrict “sedentary screen time” to one hour a day.

But a previous recommendation that set a firm cap of one hour per day for two- to five-year-olds has been relaxed to allow for interactive and engaging forms of screen use such as educational programs and family movie nights, says Calgary pediatrician Dr. Janice Heard, a member of the group’s digital health task force.

She says parents would do better to focus on reducing passive screen use, coviewing with kids and modelling desired behaviour.

“The best thing they can do for their child is to interact with them one-on-one, if they can,” says Heard, suspecting that pandemic lockdowns reversed pre-COVID-19 momentum to curb screen use among various age groups.

“Then they’ll just naturally decrease the amount of time their children spend on screens when they recognize that it’s not teaching them anything, it’s not helping them in any particular way. And, for the very small children, it’s actually quite harmful.”

Heard says screens themselves are not inherently bad but they displace activities that are key to child development. She says excessive screen use for young kids can interfere with language development, prosocial behaviour and executive functioning.

The new guidance stresses four principles — minimizing, mitigating, mindful usage and modelling healthy use of screens.

But it’s the move away from recommended time limits that Heard hopes will encourage parents and families to actively establish boundaries to passive consumption and examine when, how and why they permit screen use for young kids.

Heard says the same principles can be extrapolated to older kids and teens, for whom the pediatric society issued similar guidance in 2019 that encouraged limits based on the individual child, without hard time cut-offs.

The pediatric society’s time limits have long been a source of stress for many families unclear on what’s acceptable, says Natalie Coulter, director of the Institute for Research on Digital Literacies at York University.

The new guidance stresses four principles — minimizing, mitigating, mindful usage and modelling healthy use of screens