The numbers, by age.
The American Academy of Pediatrics rewrote its advice in early 2026, and the new version deliberately moves past a daily minute count. What it keeps is the age line: under 18 months, children learn best from real people and real things, and heavy solo screen use at that age is linked to slower language and social development. Past that, the advice is about quality, context and conversation rather than a number: choose content made for children, turn autoplay off, and watch and play alongside your child rather than handing the device over.
The World Health Organization still gives numbers, from 2019: no sedentary screen time before two, and no more than an hour a day for two to four year olds, with less being better. Their concern is as much about what the screen displaces, sleep, movement and play, as about the screen itself.
Notice what neither body says. Neither says a toddler who sees a screen is harmed, and the one hour the WHO allows arrives with "less is better" attached rather than as a ration to spend guilt-free. Both are pointing at the same two questions: what is on the screen, and who is next to the child while it is.
For the parent who wants the number anyway, here is every number the major bodies give, year by year. The rows repeat on purpose: every one of these bodies works in bands, not a ladder, so a three year old and a four year old get the same hour. Nobody publishes a figure that climbs with each birthday.
| Age | WHO, 2019 | Canadian Paediatric Society, 2022 | Indian Academy of Pediatrics, 2022 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under 2 | None. Sedentary screen time is not recommended for babies or for one year olds. | None, apart from video chatting with caring adults. | None, of any type. |
| 2 to 3 | No more than 1 hour a day, and less is better. | About 1 hour or less a day of routine or sedentary screen time. | At most 1 hour a day, supervised. |
| 3 to 4 | No more than 1 hour a day, and less is better. | About 1 hour or less a day. | At most 1 hour a day, supervised. |
| 4 to 5 | No more than 1 hour a day at four; the guideline stops before the fifth birthday. | About 1 hour or less a day, to the end of the 2 to 5 band. | At most 1 hour a day, supervised, until five; from five the band is under 2 hours. |
Sources: WHO guidelines for under fives, CPS position statement, IAP guidelines, Indian Pediatrics. The AAP is missing from the table on purpose: since February 2026 it gives no daily number at all, only the advice above.
Two things the table cannot show. All three treat the hour as a ceiling, not a target: the WHO adds "less is better", the IAP says "maximum". And two of the three write an adult into the number itself, "supervised" for the IAP, co-viewing for the CPS, which is the same point the rest of this page keeps making.
Together is a different activity.
The most useful single fact in this research is that very young children learn poorly from a screen on its own. In a well-known experiment, nine month olds picked up the sounds of a foreign language from a live person but not from the identical material on video. A screen alone is close to noise for a baby; a person is a teacher.
Which is why "screen time" is a blunt measure. Ten minutes of a toddler alone with autoplaying videos and ten minutes on your lap, naming pictures and talking about them, share nothing except the glowing rectangle. In the second case the screen is a prop in a conversation, and the conversation is where the learning is. Sit together, say what you see, and let your child answer. The screen works when it gives the two of you something to talk about.
What to look for in an app.
"High quality media" is the phrase every guideline uses and none of them defines at the shop shelf. This is the checklist we would use, and it is mostly a list of absences:
- No ads. A toddler cannot tell an advert from the app, and an ad-funded app is built to hold attention, which is the opposite of stopping while it is still going well.
- Nothing that plays itself. Autoplaying the next thing takes the decision to stop away from you. A good app ends, and waits.
- A slow pace and a clear picture. One thing on screen at a time, time to look at it, no cuts every two seconds. If it feels frantic to you, it is.
- No tracking, no accounts. An app for a two year old has no business collecting anything about them. Read the privacy label on the store page; it is short when there is nothing to confess.
- Room for your voice. The best apps leave gaps a parent can talk into rather than narrating every second.
The honest paragraph.
Wibbo is built against that checklist because we wrote the checklist from the same guidance: no ads, no tracking, no accounts, nothing autoplaying, one photograph at a time, and a session that ends. It is still a screen. If your child is under two, the guidance above applies to us too, so skip the app and print the cards instead; they are the same photographs on paper and they cost nothing.
And whatever the app, the way to use it is the way we wrote up in the flash card guide: short sessions, side by side, your voice doing the part that matters.