It was a busy Sunday morning. I woke up at 6 to get everything ready for the guests arriving for lunch. But it’s like my two-year-old daughter could hear my eyes open. Emilia sat up in bed, grinning from ear to ear, eager to start the day.
She wasn’t supposed to be up until 8. There went the two quiet, productive hours I’d planned.
So I made coffee and her breakfast, pulled her toddler tower up next to me, and got cooking.
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We got a few things done together, but as the hours passed, I was undeniably running late. The nicely cleaned house was now covered in flour and toys, and the more I let her run around, the more chaotic everything became.
So I made a decision. I sat Emilia at the kitchen counter with some snacks and put Ms Rachel on TV while I finished cooking and cleaning up after the two-year-old tornado that had swept through our house that morning.
When the guests started arriving, someone jokingly remarked, “Wow, it’s like kids are zombified by the TV, right?”
I looked at Emilia and could see what he meant. Her eyes were glued to Ms Rachel singing “The Wheels on the Bus” as she slowly chewed her food.
That comment stayed with me. I already worried about how much television Emilia watched, and the research I started reading wasn’t exactly reassuring.
Four in ten two-year-olds already own a tablet
According to the 2025 Common Sense Census, 40% of American two-year-olds have their own tablet. By four, that figure reaches 58%. And by eight, nearly one in four children, 23%, have their own cellphone.
These figures came from a nationally representative survey of 1,578 parents conducted in August 2024.
The same report found that children aged eight and younger spend an average of two hours and 27 minutes a day using screens. For two- to four-year-olds, the average is two hours and eight minutes.
Emilia doesn’t own a tablet. She mostly watches television, occasionally using my phone when we’re away from home. I’d estimate her daily screen time at around an hour and a half.
I’m still worried about the “side effects” caused by that hour and a half a day.
A 2024 study published in JAMA Pediatrics followed 315 Canadian children, measuring tablet use and expressions of anger and frustration at approximately three and a half, four and a half, and five and a half years old.
The researchers found that children who used tablets more at three and a half tended to show greater anger and frustration a year later.
Interestingly, the reverse wasn’t true at first. Children who were already more easily frustrated at three and a half didn’t necessarily use tablets more the following year.
But by four and a half, the relationship began running in the opposite direction too. Children who expressed more anger and frustration at that age tended to use tablets more by five and a half.
It looked like a potentially vicious cycle. More tablet use was associated with greater frustration, which was then associated with more tablet use.
I reached out to Caroline Fitzpatrick, a professor at the Université de Sherbrooke and the study’s lead author, to understand what this actually meant.
“This type of chicken-and-egg dilemma has been a challenge in early childhood screen use,” she explained.
Her team tried to address it by following the same children over several years. The findings suggest that tablet use and emotional difficulties may reinforce each other, although the study cannot prove that one causes the other.
But I had another question. Emilia doesn’t own a tablet. She mostly watches television. Does that make a difference?
Fitzpatrick explained that tablets are particularly interesting because they’re portable, connected to the internet, and offer practically unlimited content on demand.
Those features make them “very handy, but also very potentially disruptive to on-going activities and interactions,” she wrote.
Unfortunately, traditional television is not harmless either.
In earlier research, Fitzpatrick and her colleagues followed children who grew up in the early 2000s, before tablets became widely available. They found associations between greater preschool television exposure and less favorable academic, physical, and social outcomes later in childhood.
What parents are doing while their children watch
Most parents I know are raising their children without grandparents nearby, ready to step in whenever they need help. My own parents and in-laws live thousands of kilometres away, so we have to make do.
That’s why I wasn’t particularly surprised to learn that the Common Sense Census found that 66% of parents sometimes use screens to occupy their children while they get things done or have time for themselves.
Looking at my life from the outside, I can see how someone might judge. She has a nanny. Her daughter goes to daycare. Surely she doesn’t need the television too?
And yes, we’re fortunate to have that help. But our paid childcare covers the hours when my husband and I are both working. The moment daycare and nanny hours end, we clock into our second shift of the day, looking after two very young children.
Somewhere between the playing, bonding, baths and bedtime routines, dinner still needs cooking, the laundry needs sorting, and the house needs cleaning.
Since our second daughter, Laura, was born, even ordinary tasks have become more complicated. Feeding or settling a baby sometimes requires my full attention, while Emilia is busy investigating everything she’s not supposed to touch.
I involve her whenever I can. She loves cooking with me and washing dishes. But not every task is suitable for a curious two-year-old, and sometimes I simply can’t be in two places at once.
I recognized a similar struggle in a BBC documentary about children’s screen time.
In March 2026, England introduced new guidance encouraging parents to limit screen time to one hour a day for children aged two to five, watch alongside their children when possible, and replace some viewing with activities such as reading and playing together.
The BBC followed Alexis, a Manchester mother of two boys, as her family tried reducing their screen time for a week.
At first, they seemed to be doing well. They replaced morning television with dancing and limited the number of episodes the children could watch after school.
But by Thursday, Alexis admitted the experiment wasn’t going quite as she’d imagined. Replacing television with other activities was taking up time she needed for everything else.
“So I need that time,” she explained.
She couldn’t realistically replace every television session with sitting down to read with her children.
I knew exactly what she meant.
Watching television together may offer benefits compared with leaving children to watch alone. But many parents turn on the television precisely because they don’t have those minutes to sit down.
In a 2026 study published in the Journal of Family Psychology, researchers interviewed 63 lower-income American mothers about how screens fit into their family lives.
The mothers described using screens not only for entertainment and learning, but also to manage routines and occupy children while they worked or completed household chores.
Many had their own rules about which devices, apps and programs their children could use.
The researchers concluded that recommendations to substantially reduce screen time need to consider what those screens allow parents to accomplish, and the additional demands restrictions could place on families.
Additionally, Common Sense Census revealed that children from households earning less than $50,000 annually averaged three hours and 48 minutes of daily screen time, compared with one hour and 52 minutes among children from households earning at least $100,000.
The survey doesn’t establish why this gap exists. But access to childcare, outside activities and household help varies enormously between families.
It’s a distinction I wish came up more often in conversations about screen time. Knowing that less screen time might benefit a child doesn’t necessarily mean a parent has an extra hour available to replace it.
What should parents actually worry about?
So, I asked Professor Fitzpatrick one last question: rather than focusing on a single daily screen-time number, what should parents actually watch out for?
“If a child’s screen use is interfering with important activities such as sleep, eating, socializing, playing,” she wrote, parents should pay attention.
She also warned about children losing interest in other activities or screen use creating distress for the family. In those cases, she recommended consulting an early-childhood or health professional.
I found that advice more useful than another number to worry about.
Emilia still prefers playing outside to watching television. She loves cooking with me, washing dishes, and getting involved in everything we’re doing. And when we turn off the TV, she rarely complains.
Of course, that doesn’t mean our screen habits are harmless. Some developmental associations may only become apparent years later, and I intend to keep that in mind.
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ updated guidance also recognizes that children’s digital lives are shaped by far more than individual parenting choices, including family circumstances and the way digital products are designed.
I’m learning that taking the research seriously and acknowledging the realities of parenting don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
I want to make thoughtful decisions about what Emilia watches and how much. I also need to feed my family, care for her baby sister, work, and occasionally get through a Sunday morning without everything falling apart.
When our guest walked into the kitchen that day, he saw a little girl completely absorbed in a television show.
He didn’t see the toddler tower I’d pulled up beside me hours earlier, the breakfast we’d made, or the flour and toys scattered around the house.
Both were part of Emilia’s morning, and yet only one prompted a comment.
Sources
- Common Sense Media, The 2025 Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight, February 2025.
- Fitzpatrick et al., Early-Childhood Tablet Use and Outbursts of Anger, JAMA Pediatrics, 2024.
- Caroline Fitzpatrick, personal email correspondence, October 16, 2026. Correspondence on file.
- Flanagan et al., Views of Preschool-Age Children’s Screen Time Among Mothers With Low Incomes, Journal of Family Psychology, 2026.
- BBC News, What screens really do to your child’s brain development, April 2026.
- England’s screen-time guidance for children under five, March 2026.
- American Academy of Pediatrics, Digital Ecosystems, Children, and Adolescents, January 2026.