While the campaign launched in 2006 on the theme “no screens before three” has still not managed to produce the expected effects (two-year-olds’ screen time is approaching an hour a day), health professionals have just proposed a new target: “no screens before six”. It is true that they are on the front line in seeing children who are victims of massive screen overuse and in measuring its catastrophic effects. Besides the fact that such a ban risks seeming unrealistic to many parents and runs into enforcement problems, recent studies show that there are many protective factors which, if put in place, would reduce both screen time and its most problematic consequences, in other words the risk factors.
First of all, it is essential to take into account the distinction between accompanied and unaccompanied screens. Several studies have indeed shown that while background television and total screen time reduce young children’s language skills, co-viewing and educational content are on the other hand associated with increased language skills. Literacy falls when children are left alone in front of screens, but rises when parents watch programmes with them. In other words, it is possible to have not only socialising but also learning activities with screens. Accompaniment does not necessarily mean watching programmes as a family, either. The Elfe study published in 2024 shows that having meals without the television is associated with better verbal reasoning scores at two years old, and with better cognitive development at three and a half and 5. In other words, the idea that time spent in front of screens is time lost for fundamental learning applies only to children abandoned in front of a screen who have no opportunity to talk about it, and even then that time has to be considerable: more than five hours a day. This raises the question of the difficulties parents face that explain such a volume of time in front of screens. Underlying problems such as depression could encourage this overexposure.
A second aspect of current studies concerns social inequalities. Children are very unequally protected and accompanied in their discovery of digital tools depending on their social background. Parents who are preoccupied daily with meeting their family’s basic needs are not very available to make sure screen time is limited, and even less so if they live in a single room and a television left on continuously is the only possible escape from their problems. As children grow up, the possibility of talking about shocking content they have seen online is also very unequally distributed socially. Finally, one last form of inequality concerns access to alternative activities to screens. Most of them are paid for and in practice reserved for children from well-off families. As for “playing in the street”, many parents experience it as a greater source of risk than screens. From this point of view, it is urgent for municipalities to realise the need to open school playgrounds and gyms on Saturdays and Sundays.
Finally, parents’ use of their own digital tools while interacting with their child (known as technoference) is now pointed out as being just as problematic as leaving a child alone in front of a screen. A parent who uses their smartphone while talking or playing indeed speaks in shorter sentences and responds with poorer facial expressions to their child’s overtures. They therefore provide less educational support and do less to foster secure attachment.
This research argues in favour of developing protective factors. They are many and involve the State, municipalities, child psychiatry, national education and parenting education alike.
The State, in addition to its regulatory role within the European framework, must encourage the use of every available means to inform parents about the risks of screens, which also implies a parenting support plan and the creation of resource persons able to answer their questions in schools. A 2022 UNAF study showed that nearly one parent in two does not feel, or does not feel sufficiently, supported to regulate their children’s screen consumption.
From nursery school onwards, education about the specific features of digital technology can be developed without any need to use screens, as shown by a programme set up in Switzerland in the cantons of Vaud and Neuchâtel. In primary school, education should cover the history of machines, how algorithms work, coding, and how the brain functions when faced with screens. And obviously, this requires a reform of teachers’ initial and continuing training so as to integrate the dimension of digital technology and screens. On the medical side, the development of child psychiatry is essential in order to respond to requests for help regarding adolescent suffering and prevent it from becoming chronic.
It is quite obvious that once these protective factors are in place, their effects will only be felt several years later. But failing that, advocating a ban on screens before six risks encouraging parents to follow the advice given for several years in the United States by manufacturers of digital products: replacing, for their children, screens “whose harmfulness is proven” with smart speakers. The problem is that children quickly form close emotional bonds with them, to the point of making them privileged confidants. With the risk of seeing in these machines, or in connected toys, the imaginary companion every child looks for, and of finding by comparison communication with their peers difficult and often disappointing. This would only expose children and society to even greater risks in terms of fracturing the social bond and manipulation of all kinds. Screens are only the most visible tip of a gigantic iceberg, that of connected objects. Before calling for their banishment, let us concern ourselves with what could replace them, and put in place prevention that concerns our entire digital environment.
