Developmental-behavioural paediatrician Dr. Jenny Radesky, lead author of American Academy of Pediatrics guidance on digital media in early childhood, has examined what happens when the device becomes the default way to settle a distressed child.
Dr. Jenny Radesky is a developmental-behavioural paediatrician at the University of Michigan, and the lead author of American Academy of Pediatrics guidance on digital media in early childhood. That combination is worth pausing on. A developmental-behavioural paediatrician is the specialist a family is sent to when a young child's behaviour, attention or emotional development is causing real concern, so her view of screens is formed not in a lab alone but in clinic rooms, where advice has to survive contact with actual family life.
And as the lead author of the AAP's guidance, she has done the unglamorous work of sitting with the whole body of evidence, including its gaps, and turning it into recommendations that paediatricians across America hand to parents. When the question is mobile devices and very young children, she is one of the people the profession itself listens to. Notably, she is no campaigner: her published work is careful, hedged where the evidence is thin, and openly interested in what interactive media might do well. That makes her warning about one specific habit all the more striking.
In 2015, Radesky and her colleagues Jayna Schumacher and Barry Zuckerman published a review in the journal Pediatrics with an unusually honest title: Mobile and Interactive Media Use by Young Children: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown. Tablets and smartphones were still new in young children's lives, and rather than pretending to certainty, the review mapped what was known. Its organising conclusion was that the most useful questions about mobile media are not "how bad is it?" but two more precise ones: what does this use displace, and how is the device actually being used in this family, at this moment?
The source
Radesky, Schumacher & Zuckerman (2015), Mobile and Interactive Media Use by Young Children: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown, Pediatrics · Read the original
Within that framework, the 2015 review singled out one pattern of use for specific concern: the device handed over to calm a distressed child. Every parent knows the move, because it works. The toddler is mid-meltdown in the supermarket queue or the back seat, the phone comes out, and within seconds the crying stops. The screen is an astonishingly effective pacifier. That is exactly the problem. A toddler's tantrum is not just noise to be silenced; it is a developmental moment. Being upset, and then finding a way back to calm, is how a young child gradually builds self-regulation, the internal machinery for managing frustration, boredom and disappointment. If a screen reliably does that settling from the outside, the child gets fewer chances to practise doing it from the inside.
Notice how this concern follows directly from the review's two questions. What does the soothing screen displace? Not minutes of play this time, but repetitions of a skill: the slow, fumbling practice of calming down. And how is the device being used? Not as an occasional treat or a shared activity, but as the default response to distress, which is the use the review specifically warned against. Radesky and her colleagues were careful about what the evidence could and could not show. In 2015 there were no long-term trials of toddlers soothed by tablets, and the worry was a reasoned one, built from what developmental science already knew about how self-regulation is learned. The honest summary is that the displacement logic is strong, the mechanism is well grounded, and the long-run data was, as the title admits, still partly unknown.
The first practical point is reassurance. This is not an argument that any screen use harms your child, or a verdict on the day you handed over your phone on a delayed train. Radesky's framework resists blanket judgements: it asks about patterns, not incidents. The concern begins when the device becomes the routine answer to every wobble.
The second point is that the early years are precisely when this matters most. A child under five is doing the foundational work of self-regulation: learning that big feelings rise, crest and pass, and that there are things you can do with your hands, your breath and your attention while they pass. Each tantrum that resolves without an external silencer is, unromantic as it sounds, a rep.
The third point is the useful reframe hiding inside the research: the question is never just "screen or no screen?" but "if not the screen, then what?" A distressed toddler still needs somewhere to put that distress. Removing the digital soother without offering anything in its place is a recipe for a very long afternoon. What the displacement logic actually asks of parents is a substitution, not a subtraction.
In many homes the substitution takes a wonderfully low-tech form: the calm-down basket. A small basket kept where the child can reach it, holding a handful of real, repetitive, hands-occupying things. Smooth wooden blocks that ask to be stacked and restacked. A chunky threading toy. A wooden puzzle whose pieces fit with a soft knock. Nothing in the basket flashes, rewards or escalates. Everything in it gives the hands something rhythmic to do while the feeling passes through.
Watch it work and you can see the difference between settling and silencing. The screen stops the crying by capturing attention from the outside; the child goes quiet but stays passive, parked rather than recovered. The basket works from the other direction. A furious two-year-old who picks up a beech block does not stop being furious, but the weight of the block in the hand gives the feeling somewhere to go. Stack, topple, stack again. The repetition is the point: rhythmic, predictable movement is one of the oldest regulation tools there is, which is why upset adults pace and shuffle cards. A basket of solid wooden toys built for exactly this kind of repetition → is not a distraction from the feeling. It is a way through it, with the child doing the steering.
At Jaques London we have been making toys that occupy small hands since 1795, longer than any other games company in the world, and the oldest items in our catalogue run on the same quiet principle. The chess set we created in 1849 and the croquet we gave Britain in 1851 are, at bottom, instruments of self-regulation: wait, watch, take your turn, try again. For an under-5, the same tempo lives in a first wooden puzzle with pieces sized for toddler fingers →, where every piece is a small cycle of frustration met, managed and resolved. A parent assembling a calm-down basket needs only three or four such objects, rotated occasionally, kept boring by design. The screen will always soothe faster. The basket is slower precisely because the child, not the device, is doing the calming, and that is the skill being built.
The original review, Mobile and Interactive Media Use by Young Children: The Good, the Bad, and the Unknown, remains one of the most level-headed short reads on this subject, and a model of how to be honest about uncertainty. For the wider picture, our guide to the science of play and screens places Radesky's questions alongside the rest of the evidence, our practical guide to reducing toddler screen time walks through the substitution approach step by step, and our plain-English screen time guide covers what the official recommendations actually say.
An occasional rescue is not the concern, and no one should feel guilty about the flight, the waiting room or the desperate Tuesday. Radesky's warning is about the default: when the device becomes the routine answer to distress, the child loses repeated chances to practise calming down, and that practice is how self-regulation is built. Judge the pattern across weeks, not any single moment.
Real, repetitive, hands-occupying objects: a few smooth wooden blocks, a simple chunky puzzle, a threading toy, something with a satisfying weight. The test for each item is that it occupies the hands rhythmically without escalating excitement, so nothing electronic, nothing with lights or sounds. Three or four objects are plenty; rotate them occasionally and keep the basket somewhere your child can reach it without asking.
Start outside the storm. A mid-tantrum toddler will not accept a wooden block as a swap for a tablet, so introduce the basket during calm play first, then at low-stakes moments of mild frustration before attempting the big ones. Expect protest in the first week or two: that rough patch is not failure, it is the sound of a child practising a skill the screen had been doing for them.
No. Her 2015 review is explicitly titled "the good, the bad, and the unknown", and it takes the potential upsides of interactive media seriously while being honest about how little long-term evidence existed. Her framework asks two questions of any screen use: what is it displacing, and how is it being used? Screen use as the default soother fails both tests; plenty of other uses do not.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.