At Stoke primary school in Coventry, there are many four-year-olds among those starting in reception class who can’t 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, “We notice a lot of children will cut pieces of cardboard out and make a mobile phone or tablet, or an Xbox controller. That’s what they know.”

At another school in Hampshire, a longtime reception teacher says in the last few years she has noticed children getting frustrated if activities aren’t instant and seamless – 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. “I find their hand-eye coordination isn’t 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.”

There is also something of an attitude shift, she says – a kind of individualism that she’s convinced comes from playing alone on a device. “We are having to model to children how to be with others, how you work as a team, how you share things, because they’re so used to having their own time, doing their own thing. We’re losing a big part of being human, and if these young children don’t get all those skills, they’re not going to pick them up later on.”

Creative play is crucial for brain development. Photograph: Posed by models; PeopleImages/Getty Images/iStockphoto

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 – around five hours – had limited vocabulary compared with those who spent the least, and were twice as likely to show signs of emotional and behavioural difficulties.

“It’s a trend that we’ve been seeing for quite a long time,” says Pasco Fearon, a professor of developmental psychopathology at University College London and the director of the Children of the 2020s study. “Look at studies getting all the way back to the turn of the century – you can see that screen time, on the whole, has been increasing.” That’s true for all of us, not just for children. Of the impact on children, Fearon says: “I’m sure it’s a factor that a lot of parents, like the rest of us, are on their phones. It’s becoming very dominant in everyone’s lives.” The data in this study, he says, “can 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.”

This report comes on the back of other recent research showing very young children’s 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’s 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 – more than 800,000 kids – were using at least one social media app, up from 29% in 2023 (though the majority use it with their parents’ supervision).

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’s ban, incidentally, includes YouTube but not YouTube Kids, which is aimed at younger viewers – so it does not necessarily address the problem of excess screen time.)

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.

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.

Today Kindred Squared, an organisation that campaigns for early years education and development, releases its latest report on children’s school readiness. It found that more than half of teachers believed spending too much time on screens – by children and their parents alike – was the single biggest factor contributing** **to the child not being ready to start school. “We know that screen time is a problem,” 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.

“In cases of higher usage,” says Gillespie, “there is a real negative impact on language acquisition. It’s not that surprising when you think about how language is developed in babies, that it is through that serve-and-return interaction with adults – the baby makes a noise, the parent makes a noise back. The baby smiles, the parent smiles. It’s that two-way interaction that fires the baby’s 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.”

The early years, says Gillespie, “are 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.”

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’s parenting world? Gillespie acknowledges the latest study showing two-year-olds are watching two hours a day. “Then 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.” The government, she hopes, will “give parents the kind of practical, real-world guidance that takes account of the fact that, I think, we’ve probably missed the boat on the WHO guidance”.

Covid forced many parents to rely on screen-based entertainment. Photograph: Posed by models; Giselleflissak/Getty Images

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. “My referrals have been increasing over the past 10 years,” says Sandy Chappell, an early years speech and language therapist. During the lockdowns, she says, it was “not 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.”

She has sympathy for parents who rely on screens now. “Absolutely. It’s unbelievably difficult.” Fearon too, talking about the research that is driving the government’s advice, stresses it’s not about blaming parents. The study found children from disadvantaged families were more likely to spend time on screens. “This 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’re trying to support families, it’s partly about giving them really clear advice, but also about giving more help to families, particularly those who are experiencing economic disadvantage. That’s 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’d like to.”

In Chappell’s clinic, she is seeing children with “poor attention and listening skills, poor turn-taking and social skills, as well as poor vocabulary and expressive language”. Many have their own electronic devices, and although Chappell has seen the stats about social media use, it’s not something she’s aware of. “Parents don’t tend to tell me that’s what’s happening, because I think instinctively they know it’s not a good thing.” And while some content is better than others – “things like [the BBC’s] CBeebies, where [many programmes are developed with] educational value by psychologists and educationists” – what matters more is duration. “We really need to cut the time down,” says Chappell.

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’t tend to interact with her and “don’t seem to be particularly interested in toys. They can’t follow simple instructions. They’re wandering around the room – and I’m 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.”

This is often when the child is referred to her, with parents worrying they’re not ready for school. “Preschool 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.”

‘Children are used to doing their own thing.’ Photograph: Posed by model; Caia Image/Getty Images

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. “There were children who couldn’t speak a sentence who did very well in the assessment, because they could scroll,” says Fox, sounding exasperated. “It became not an assessment of what children academically could do, and where they were developmentally, but an assessment of how computer-literate they were – and that’s what horrified me.”

To accommodate 60 reception children, but without space within the school, Stoke Primary turned a wooden “roundhouse” (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 – and therefore no screens. At first, as Fox wrote in TES (formerly the Times Educational Supplement), this seemed an “inconvenience” and a “hurdle”. 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.

“Very quickly we realised the impact that it was having on the children,” says Fox now. By the end of that first autumn term, 72% of the “roundhouse” children were considered to be “on track” compared with 44% of the children in the traditional classroom. When they switched the classes later in the year, they got similar results.

The roundhouse style, in which children sit in a circle, “forces 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 – 60% of our children in reception last year – so the language skills that it’s pulling out of them is remarkable.” Instead of the usual schemes, or structured lesson plans that use PowerPoint and other software, “there 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?” Both reception classes no longer use screens for teaching, though the older classes do.

Fox is turning her attention to the newest generation of teachers coming through. “They’re from a different generation,” she says – people who have grown up with screens themselves. “How can we give them the confidence to know what’s best, and to put the scheme down and just connect with their children?”