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A<\/span>t Stoke primary school in Coventry, there are many four-year-olds among those starting in reception class who can\u2019t sit still, hold a pencil or speak more than a four-word sentence. Lucy Fox, the assistant headteacher and head of foundations, is in no doubt what is causing this: their early exposure to screens, and a lot of it. When the children experiment with materials and creativity, and make things in the classroom, she says, \u201cWe notice a lot of children will cut pieces of cardboard out and make a mobile phone or tablet, or an Xbox controller. That\u2019s what they know.\u201d<\/p>\n At another school in Hampshire, a longtime reception teacher says in the last few years she has noticed children getting frustrated if activities aren\u2019t instant and seamless \u2013 something she thinks comes from playing games on a phone or tablet. There is a lack of creativity and problem-solving skills, noticeable when the children are playing with Lego or doing jigsaw puzzles and turning the pieces to fit. \u201cI find their hand-eye coordination isn\u2019t very good, and they find puzzles difficult. Doing a puzzle on an iPad, you just need to hold and move it on the screen. They get really frustrated and I feel like there are certain connections the brain is not making any more.\u201d<\/p>\n There is also something of an attitude shift, she says \u2013 a kind of individualism that she\u2019s convinced comes from playing alone on a device. \u201cWe are having to model to children how to be with others, how you work as a team, how you share things, because they\u2019re so used to having their own time, doing their own thing. We\u2019re losing a big part of being human, and if these young children don\u2019t get all those skills, they\u2019re not going to pick them up later on.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>Creative play is crucial for brain development.<\/span> Photograph: Posed by models; PeopleImages\/Getty Images\/iStockphoto<\/p>\n Earlier this month, the government announced it would be issuing new guidance on screen use for under-fives in April, after a report it commissioned found 98% of two-year-olds were watching screens on a typical day, with the average duration more than two hours. Those who spent the most time \u2013 around five hours \u2013 had limited vocabulary compared with those who spent the least, and were twice as likely to show signs of emotional and behavioural difficulties.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a trend that we\u2019ve been seeing for quite a long time,\u201d says Pasco Fearon, a professor of developmental psychopathology at University College London and the director of the Children of the 2020s study. \u201cLook at studies getting all the way back to the turn of the century \u2013 you can see that screen time, on the whole, has been increasing.\u201d That\u2019s true for all of us, not just for children. Of the impact on children, Fearon says: \u201cI\u2019m sure it\u2019s a factor that a lot of parents, like the rest of us, are on their phones. It\u2019s becoming very dominant in everyone\u2019s lives.\u201d The data in this study, he says, \u201ccan be quite a useful focal point to start thinking: Wait, is this what we want? A little bit of a reset might be useful for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n This report comes on the back of other recent research showing very young children\u2019s screen access is increasing. In October, the American research organisation Pew found that 38% of parents of under-twos said their child uses or interacts with a smartphone, and 8% of under-fives had their own smartphone. In the UK, Ofcom\u2019s research has found that 19% of children aged three to five had their own mobile phone in 2024, and that 37% of children this age \u2013 more than 800,000 kids \u2013 were using at least one social media app, up from 29% in 2023 (though the majority use it with their parents\u2019 supervision).<\/p>\n The Conservatives have just pledged to follow Australia and ban social media for under-16s, and the Labour government has said it will consider doing the same. (Australia\u2019s ban, incidentally, includes YouTube but not YouTube Kids, which is aimed at younger viewers \u2013 so it does not necessarily address the problem of excess screen time.)<\/p>\n Unlike for teenagers, little research has been done on the impact of social media on the youngest children. At the extreme end, all children are at risk of sexual abuse online. In November last year, the NSPCC reported online grooming crimes had reached record highs, with the youngest victim being just four.<\/p>\n More is becoming known about the impact of young children exposed to excessive screen time, though. In 2025, a New Zealand study found that young children who had watched more than 90 minutes a day had below-average vocabulary, communication and numeracy at the ages of four and eight, and that more screen time meant even poorer outcomes.<\/p>\n Today Kindred Squared, an organisation that campaigns for early years education and development, releases its latest report on children\u2019s school readiness. It found that more than half of teachers believed spending too much time on screens \u2013 by children and their parents alike \u2013 was the single biggest factor contributing <\/strong>to the child not being ready to start school. \u201cWe know that screen time is a problem,\u201d says the CEO, Felicity Gillespie. This year, reception teachers reported 28% of children were unable to use a book correctly, for instance tapping or swiping the pages as if it were an electronic device.<\/p>\n \u201cIn cases of higher usage,\u201d says Gillespie, \u201cthere is a real negative impact on language acquisition. It\u2019s not that surprising when you think about how language is developed in babies, that it is through that serve-and-return interaction with adults \u2013 the baby makes a noise, the parent makes a noise back. The baby smiles, the parent smiles. It\u2019s that two-way interaction that fires the baby\u2019s brain. Nought to two is the period when our brains are growing at their fastest rate, so the earlier you put babies in front of screens, the more they are missing out [on] those early interactions, which is where the hard-wiring of the brain is happening.\u201d<\/p>\n The early years, says Gillespie, \u201care the foundation for everything that follows, for mental and physical health, wellbeing, your happiness, your success in relationships. I think it comes back to this need for better information for parents and clear, simple, unequivocal guidance. Tell them the truth. Tell them what the evidence says.\u201d<\/p>\n The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends children under two should get no screen time at all, and for those aged two to four, a maximum of one hour. Is that realistic in today\u2019s parenting world? Gillespie acknowledges the latest study showing two-year-olds are watching two hours a day. \u201cThen what we then need to do is give parents the information about why the WHO advises that, to inform people about the preciousness of these early years and the importance of brain development.\u201d The government, she hopes, will \u201cgive parents the kind of practical, real-world guidance that takes account of the fact that, I think, we\u2019ve probably missed the boat on the WHO guidance\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/span>Covid forced many parents to rely on screen-based entertainment. The Covid pandemic accelerated screen use (many children in current reception classes and year 1 were born in that first year), but it had been steadily rising before that. \u201cMy referrals have been increasing over the past 10 years,\u201d says Sandy Chappell, an early years speech and language therapist. During the lockdowns, she says, it was \u201cnot just that children were isolated from other children, but also that parents were relying more on screens to pacify young children. I had many parents in impossible situations, where they were trying to work from home and had babies and toddlers to entertain at the same time, so they had no choice but to rely on screens.\u201d<\/p>\n She has sympathy for parents who rely on screens now. \u201cAbsolutely. It\u2019s unbelievably difficult.\u201d Fearon too, talking about the research that is driving the government\u2019s advice, stresses it\u2019s not about blaming parents. The study found children from disadvantaged families were more likely to spend time on screens. \u201cThis is about understanding the context in which this is happening, and how people are making the day work when there are challenges families are experiencing, financially, and in terms of work and all the pressures of daily life. If we\u2019re trying to support families, it\u2019s partly about giving them really clear advice, but also about giving more help to families, particularly those who are experiencing economic disadvantage. That\u2019s going to give them a bit more slack to be able to play more, talk to their children more, be more engaged in the way that they\u2019d like to.\u201d<\/p>\n In Chappell\u2019s clinic, she is seeing children with \u201cpoor attention and listening skills, poor turn-taking and social skills, as well as poor vocabulary and expressive language\u201d. Many have their own electronic devices, and although Chappell has seen the stats about social media use, it\u2019s not something she\u2019s aware of. \u201cParents don\u2019t tend to tell me that\u2019s what\u2019s happening, because I think instinctively they know it\u2019s not a good thing.\u201d And while some content is better than others \u2013 \u201cthings like [the BBC\u2019s] CBeebies, where [many programmes are developed with] educational value by psychologists and educationists\u201d \u2013 what matters more is duration. \u201cWe really need to cut the time down,\u201d says Chappell.<\/p>\n She can spot the children who have spent a lot of time on screens: she has seen preschoolers, she says, who will spend seven or eight hours a day on a screen. Other children might be shy to begin with, but will soon start talking to her or will go straight to investigate her toy collection. Those who have spent a lot of time on screens, she says, don\u2019t tend to interact with her and \u201cdon\u2019t seem to be particularly interested in toys. They can\u2019t follow simple instructions. They\u2019re wandering around the room \u2013 and I\u2019m not talking about young toddlers here, but three- and four-year-olds. They start school without even the basic skills that they need in order to be able to learn.\u201d<\/p>\n This is often when the child is referred to her, with parents worrying they\u2019re not ready for school. \u201cPreschool children can catch up to a certain extent if the screens are reduced to a bare minimum and time is spent on building other skills. It becomes more difficult once they get to school, and we are finding that these issues are following children right through school. Their language levels at age four are one of the biggest predictors of their later academic achievement at GCSE level and beyond. So it really is important that we put the work in with children way before they go to school.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018Children are used to doing their own thing.\u2019<\/span> Photograph: Posed by model; Caia Image\/Getty Images<\/p>\n By the time they join reception, many children will already be familiar with a tablet, and in 2025, for the first time, children used a touchscreen device to take the 20-minute test known as the reception baseline assessment. \u201cThere were children who couldn\u2019t speak a sentence who did very well in the assessment, because they could scroll,\u201d says Fox, sounding exasperated. \u201cIt became not an assessment of what children academically could do, and where they were developmentally, but an assessment of how computer-literate they were \u2013 and that\u2019s what horrified me.\u201d<\/p>\n To accommodate 60 reception children, but without space within the school, Stoke Primary turned a wooden \u201croundhouse\u201d (a simple octagonal wooden structure), which had been in their forest school area, into a new classroom, complete with rugs, fairy lights and, inadvertently, no wifi \u2013 and therefore no screens. At first, as Fox wrote in TES (formerly the Times Educational Supplement), this seemed an \u201cinconvenience\u201d and a \u201churdle\u201d. It ended up transforming her thinking on screens in schools; her previous job had been in a school which prided itself on giving each child an iPad.<\/p>\n \u201cVery quickly we realised the impact that it was having on the children,\u201d says Fox now. By the end of that first autumn term, 72% of the \u201croundhouse\u201d children were considered to be \u201con track\u201d compared with 44% of the children in the traditional classroom. When they switched the classes later in the year, they got similar results.<\/p>\n The roundhouse style, in which children sit in a circle, \u201cforces communication and language to come before anything, which is so important. We have quite a significant amount of English as an additional language compared with other schools \u2013 60% of our children in reception last year \u2013 so the language skills that it\u2019s pulling out of them is remarkable.\u201d Instead of the usual schemes, or structured lesson plans that use PowerPoint and other software, \u201cthere is none of that in the roundhouse. It forces you to go back to basics. I had to build up the confidence of those teachers to feel they could do that, and could make their own decisions about what they knew was best for their children. We all know that we live in a digital age, and there is no stopping digital growth. But to what extent are we using tech to replace the things that we know are best for our children?\u201d Both reception classes no longer use screens for teaching, though the older classes do.<\/p>\n Fox is turning her attention to the newest generation of teachers coming through. \u201cThey\u2019re from a different generation,\u201d she says \u2013 people who have grown up with screens themselves. \u201cHow can we give them the confidence to know what\u2019s best, and to put the scheme down and just connect with their children?\u201d<\/p>\n Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At Stoke primary school in Coventry, there are many four-year-olds among those starting in reception class who can\u2019t sit still, hold a pencil or speak more than a four-word sentence. Lucy Fox, the assistant headteacher and head of foundations, is in no doubt what is causing this: their early exposure to screens, and a lot<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42414,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[9844,1285,166,761,3546,3056,1560,286,18594],"class_list":{"0":"post-42413","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-affects","9":"tag-big","10":"tag-children","11":"tag-human","12":"tag-losing","13":"tag-part","14":"tag-screen","15":"tag-time","16":"tag-toddlers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/span> Photograph: Posed by models; Giselleflissak\/Getty Images<\/p>\n