Since the start of the 2025 school year, the City of Paris has introduced an innovative scheme in its nurseries: opening on Saturday mornings, from 9 am to 11.45 am, to welcome families with their children around free activities suited to toddlers. This initiative, called “Samedis en Famille” (Family Saturdays), offers a friendly alternative to Saturdays spent in front of screens, encouraging interaction, discovery and experimentation as a family.
A nursery for everyone, a stronger bond
The main idea of Family Saturdays is to allow children who do not attend nursery to be gently introduced to life in a group, while giving children who are already enrolled the chance to experience nursery differently, alongside their parents. Families are free to visit their neighbourhood nursery or to go and explore another Paris facility. The workshops, aimed at children aged 0 to 6 and their parents, vary according to the partner associations: stories, games, motor skills, yoga, singing, visual arts…
The aim is not just to entertain, but to create a new relationship with nursery and with parenthood. The activities involve adults as much as children, and are designed so that they can be continued at home. Since its experimental launch in 2021, the scheme has grown: every Saturday, 170 families take part, spread across 28 nurseries (at least one per arrondissement) out of the 450 facilities run by the City of Paris. The aim is to widen access, in particular for low-income families who are often less well informed.
A project that answers our advocacy in every respect
It must be said that the spirit of “Family Saturdays” answers the advocacy carried out for more than ten years by the 3-6-9-12+ association and Serge Tisseron. Our conviction: to regulate children’s screen use, we need to offer more public spaces devoted to play, talk and sharing. Serge Tisseron champions the idea of a city built at a child’s height, where spaces for socialising are accessible to everyone, fostering development, mutual help and the regulation of digital practices.
Even though Paris and a few municipalities in the Île-de-France region took the turn in 2025, the rollout remains timid. But the “Family Saturdays” scheme marks a concrete step forward, at last translating at local level this desire to place children and families at the heart of the city.
An alternative to screens for “Playing, talking, switching off the TV!”
“No TV before age 3!”, a well-known slogan, has become for 3-6-9-12+ “Play, talk, switch off the TV!”. The workshops in the nurseries open on Saturdays embody this principle: interaction, play and learning are placed at the centre of the parent-child relationship. Serge Tisseron highlights three fundamental axes: Guidance (talking to the child about their experiences with screens), Alternation (offering varied activities, encouraging all screen-free activities), and Learning self-regulation (setting limits, learning to wait).
Before the age of six, the child structures their relationship to time and frustration: they learn to wait, to finish an activity, to move from one discovery to the next, on screen or off. The workshops offer handling of paper books, sensory games, moments of free movement and stories to act out, supporting creativity and openness to the world. In a safe and caring setting, parents experiment alongside their children, guided by trained professionals.
It is less about banning screens than about valuing all the alternatives to screens, guidance and the quality of interactions. This approach, which involves parents in the workshops, also fights “parental technoference”, that is, the risk that parents are absorbed by their phone at times when they are looking after their child. This phenomenon indeed causes repeated breaks in the parent-child relationship, and distracts parents from the attention and support their child needs in shared moments.
Public policy issues: cities and early childhood
Screens bring no benefit before the age of three, which is why Santé Publique France recommends limiting screen time to thirty minutes a day at three, one hour at six, and insists on the presence of an available adult. But various studies (McDonald, 2018; Jonathan Bernard, 2024) show that, outside of very high exposure times, the impacts of screens are reduced once you take into account the lack of access to toys, leisure, outdoor facilities, and the lack of people who are available, physically or psychologically, for interaction.
Prevention therefore goes beyond digital regulation alone: it is rooted in urban planning and equal access to spaces for meeting, play and leisure. UNICEF launched the “Child Friendly City” label in France as early as 2002. Today, nearly 300 cities hold this label out of the 35,000 French municipalities – real progress but still insufficient to guarantee every child a suitable environment.
Developing open nurseries, museums and play areas for the youngest is becoming a priority to fight family isolation, excess screen use and social inequality. These spaces give children, under the watchful eye of adults, the chance to move around freely, discover at their own pace, and gradually build a balanced relationship with the digital world.
Thus, more than a simple scheme, “Family Saturdays” embody a policy of proximity, openness and inclusion, in which connection, play and conviviality are placed at the heart of the educational and social project for early childhood.
CNV
