The evidence is nuanced, but the short answer is yes: excessive passive screen time does crowd out the open-ended, hands-on play that builds a young child's creative and imaginative life.
If you have ever watched a two-year-old abandon a pile of wooden bricks in favour of a glowing tablet, you will know the particular mix of relief and unease that follows. The screen buys you ten quiet minutes; the question nagging at the back of your mind is what it might be costing. Research gathered over the past two decades gives us a clearer picture than many parents realise. The core finding is not that screens are poisonous, but that time is finite. Every hour a toddler spends passively consuming content is an hour not spent in the messy, effortful, wildly productive business of make-believe, construction and exploratory play, and it is precisely that kind of play that lays the neural foundations for creativity, language, and flexible thinking.
That framing matters because it moves us away from guilt and towards practical choices. Developmental psychologists Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff have spent decades mapping what genuinely drives early learning, and their conclusion is consistent: children learn best through active, engaged, meaningful play that involves other people. Screens, at their most passive, offer the opposite of all four qualities. Understanding why helps parents make confident, evidence-led decisions rather than anxious ones.
Creativity in toddlers is not about producing art for the fridge. It is the cognitive capacity to hold a symbol in mind, to let a banana become a telephone or a cardboard box become a rocket ship. Piaget called this symbolic or representational thought, and he identified it as one of the great leaps of the second year of life. Vygotsky added that pretend play is where children first operate at the very top of their developmental ability, stretching just beyond what they can manage alone. When a three-year-old assigns roles, narrates a plot and solves the problem of what to do when the teddy bear "dies," she is doing something cognitively extraordinary. That is the capacity worth protecting.
The World Health Organization recommends no screen time at all for children under two, and no more than one hour of sedentary screen time per day for children aged three to four. The American Academy of Pediatrics echoes this, with a narrow exception for video-calling, which preserves the social, contingent exchange that makes screen interaction genuinely educational. These are not arbitrary numbers. They reflect a body of evidence showing that heavy screen exposure in the earliest years is associated with reduced language development, shorter attention spans, and less time in imaginative play.
What the evidence shows
Madigan and colleagues, in a large longitudinal study, found that higher screen time at age one was associated with poorer performance on developmental screening measures at ages two and three. The relationship ran in one direction: screens predicted developmental scores, not the other way around. Dauch and colleagues similarly found that the presence of electronic toys during parent-child play reduced the quantity and quality of language used by both parent and child.
Sosa's work is particularly striking for parents of toddlers. She observed parent-child interactions with three types of toys: electronic toys, traditional toys, and books. Electronic toys produced the least parental speech, the fewest conversational turns, and the lowest quality of language. The lights and sounds, in other words, did not enhance the interaction. They replaced it.
Trawick-Smith, whose TIMPANI study systematically evaluated toy types against developmental outcomes, found that open-ended, manipulative toys consistently produced the richest and most sustained pretend play. Screens, by contrast, tend to script the child's experience. The child presses, swipes, and responds to prompts designed by an adult. There is very little room to be the author of the story. Christakis has argued that background television, even when not directly watched, disrupts the quality and duration of toddler play by fragmenting attention. A child who cannot yet sustain a thread of imagination for more than two minutes is a child whose creative capacity is developing more slowly than it might.
Panksepp identified what he called the SEEKING system, a primary emotional circuit that drives curiosity, exploration and the pleasure of discovery. It is activated not by being entertained but by actively engaging with an uncertain environment. When a toddler stacks a tower and watches it fall, she is not just playing. She is running an experiment, forming a hypothesis, and filing away a physical memory of cause and effect. Diamond's research on executive function shows that this kind of self-directed, embodied play is one of the most reliable routes to building the inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility that children will depend on throughout their school years and beyond.
The language dimension
Hart and Risley's foundational work established that the sheer quantity and quality of language a child hears in the early years has profound effects on vocabulary and later literacy. Suskind, building on this research, emphasises that it is the serve-and-return conversation during play, not passive listening, that does the work. A child playing with a set of wooden shapes with a parent or sibling is generating language. A child watching a screen is, at best, absorbing it.
At Jaques of London, established in 1795 and the world's oldest games company, the philosophy behind every toy begins with the same question: what does a child's hand, mind and imagination actually need? Wooden toys answer that question with physical reality. They have weight, texture, temperature and resistance. They do not tell the child what to do next. A set of wooden stacking rings can be stacked, rolled, mouthed, sorted by colour, used as wheels for an imaginary vehicle, or simply arranged on the floor in a pattern that pleases a twenty-month-old for reasons entirely her own. That cognitive freedom is not a gap in the design. It is the whole point.
Traditional games, meanwhile, introduce something screens handle badly: the experience of playing with another person under shared rules, negotiating, losing graciously, and discovering that fun is something you make together rather than something that happens to you. These are not trivial social skills. Pellegrini and Gray both identify rule-governed play as a critical site for the development of self-regulation and social cognition.
Explore Jaques wooden toys, crafted to spark open-ended play in the under-fivesVygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development reminds us that a sensitive adult, or an older child, can stretch a toddler's play to levels she could not reach alone. This does not mean directing the play. It means being present, following the child's lead, adding a word, a prop, or a gentle "what happens next?" at the right moment. Berk's research on private speech shows that children who engage in rich pretend play with adults develop stronger self-regulatory inner dialogue. The parent sitting on the floor with a set of educational wooden toys is doing developmental work that no app can replicate, not because the app is harmful, but because it cannot listen, adapt, and respond to this particular child in this particular moment.
Browse Jaques educational toys designed for shared, creative playAlmost certainly not. The research identifies patterns of heavy, sustained, passive screen use as associated with developmental differences, not the occasional episode of tablet time that keeps a small person happy on a long car journey. What matters far more than any single day is the overall balance of your child's waking hours. If most of those hours involve talking, playing, being read to, and exploring physical objects, a daily dose of screen time sits well within a healthy developmental picture. Worry less, and invest the energy saved into one more session on the floor with a pile of bricks.
The WHO recommends no sedentary screen time for under-twos, and a maximum of one hour per day for children aged three to four. The AAP takes a similar position. These guidelines are best understood as prompts to think about displacement: what is screen time replacing? If it is replacing sleep, physical movement, conversation, or imaginative play, then even modest amounts may be worth reducing. If it is a contained part of an otherwise rich day, the occasional overshoot is unlikely to matter greatly.
Some apps are better than others, and Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff's framework of mind-minded design gives us useful criteria: does the app require the child to be active rather than passive, engaged rather than distracted, meaningful rather than random, and socially connected rather than isolated? Very few apps meet all four criteria, and none of them offer the physical, sensory, embodied dimension that underlies deep creative learning in the under-fives. An app can teach a toddler to recognise letters. It is far less likely to build the imaginative flexibility, fine motor control, and narrative thinking that genuine play provides.
The evidence consistently points to open-ended, manipulable materials with no single correct use. Wooden blocks, stacking and sorting toys, simple figures without fixed narratives, threading toys, shape sorters, and natural materials all score highly in studies by Trawick-Smith and others. Montessori's principle that the toy should do as little as possible so that the child can do as much as possible remains a reliable guide. At Jaques, our range of wooden and educational toys is built around precisely this idea: beautiful, durable objects that invite a child's imagination rather than replacing it.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.