What the 2019 commentary from the UK Chief Medical Officers said about children and screens, why they chose precaution over panic, and how four simple family norms protect the things that matter most.
The Chief Medical Officers are the most senior medical advisers in the United Kingdom: one each for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They are the doctors governments turn to when the country needs a clear-eyed reading of the evidence, and their job is precisely that, reading the evidence rather than the headlines. When the CMOs speak jointly, it carries a particular weight, because it means four independent offices, serving four different administrations, have looked at the same body of research and reached the same view.
That is what makes their 2019 intervention on children and screens worth a parent's attention. This was not a campaign group with a position to defend, or a commercial interest with something to sell. It was the UK's senior doctors, asked a question every family was asking, and answering it with unusual honesty about both what the science showed and what it did not.
In 2019 the four CMOs published a joint commentary on screen time and social media use in children and young people, built on a commissioned map of the research evidence. Their reading of that evidence was strikingly candid. The studies linking screen use to poorer outcomes in children were largely associational: they showed that heavy screen use and problems like poor sleep or lower wellbeing tend to travel together, but they could not prove that the screens were the cause. The CMOs refused to overstate the science, and they said so plainly. That restraint is rare in this debate, and it is exactly why the advice they gave deserves trust.
Because here is the crucial move. Having admitted the evidence could not deliver a verdict, the CMOs did not shrug and walk away. They reached instead for a precautionary principle, and they applied it where it costs nothing. Their commentary advised practical family norms rather than alarming limits: keep mealtimes screen-free; put devices away in the hour before bed; keep screens out of children's bedrooms overnight; and notice when screen time is displacing the things childhood demonstrably needs, play, talk, exercise and sleep, then swap some of it back.
The source
UK Chief Medical Officers (2019), Commentary on Screen Time and Social Media Use in Children and Young People · Read the original
Notice the logic underneath the list. Each recommendation is a one-way bet. If the associations in the research turn out to be causal, the family that ate dinner without phones and kept screens out of bedrooms has dodged a real harm. If they turn out not to be, that family has lost nothing at all, and has gained a conversation at the table and a child who sleeps in a room without a glowing rectangle in it. The CMOs were not claiming certainty. They were pointing out that you do not need certainty to protect sleep, talk, exercise and play, because those four things are not in dispute. The evidence that children need them is about as solid as evidence in child development gets. The precaution is free; the things it protects are priceless.
The commentary addressed children and young people broadly, but its logic lands hardest in the early years, because under-5s are the age group most dependent on exactly the four currencies the CMOs named. A toddler's language is built from talk, thousands of small exchanges a day. A toddler's body is built from movement. A toddler's brain consolidates the whole lot in sleep, and play is the workshop where all of it gets practised. Every hour of a small child's day spent on a screen is an hour drawn from one of those accounts, and the accounts are not large.
It is worth keeping the CMOs' own honesty in view. The evidence on screens and young children remains largely associational, and a calm parent reading it should feel informed rather than frightened. The point of the precautionary framing is that you are not being asked to believe screens are poison. You are being asked to notice displacement. The question is not "how many minutes is safe?" but "what did this hour replace?" If the answer is the pre-bed wind-down, the chat over dinner, the run around the garden or the game on the floor, the swap is worth making, and it costs nothing to make it.
For a family with young children, the four norms translate almost without effort. Meals happen with no screens at the table, the adults' included, because under-5s copy what they see far more reliably than they obey what they are told. The hour before bed belongs to the bath, the book and the unhurried routine. No device sleeps in the child's room. And when an afternoon has drifted into the tablet, the remedy is not guilt but substitution: something to do with hands, with another person, preferably within arm's reach.
Of the four norms, the screen-free mealtime is the one that rewards a little stagecraft, because the gap it opens needs filling. A toddler who has surrendered the tablet at the table will not sit in contemplative silence; the silence has to be replaced with something better, and the something better has been sitting in British kitchens for generations. It is a shelf, within reach of the kitchen table, with games on it.
Picture the ten minutes after the plates are cleared, which is precisely when screens used to creep in. Instead, a hand reaches for the shelf. A box of dominoes comes down, and there is that sound, the slither and click of pieces tipped onto the table, that a child learns to recognise before they can count the spots. Small fingers stand the tiles on their edges in a wobbling line. Someone starts a round of snakes and ladders and a four-year-old discovers the particular agony of the long snake on row five. The pieces have weight. The dice rattle in a cupped hand. Somebody has to wait their turn, and somebody has to lose without the world ending, which is a lesson no app has ever taught as gently as a grandparent does. This is the talk the CMOs wanted protected, happening on its own, because a game is a machine for conversation.
The shelf does not need to be grand. A compact stack of family board games → covers the after-dinner slot from toddlerhood to the teenage years, and a basket of simpler classic games → handles the younger end. Jaques has been making them since 1795, longer than any games company in the world, which means the firm was equipping British dinner tables for two centuries before anyone needed a reason beyond the pleasure of it. The CMOs have now supplied the reason. The table is where the talk happens; the shelf is what keeps the screens away from it.
The full commentary, together with the map of evidence reviews it drew on, is published on gov.uk, and it is short enough to read over a cup of tea. On this site, our screen time guide turns the CMOs' norms into an age-by-age plan, reducing toddler screen time covers the swap in practice, and first board games will help you stock the shelf by the kitchen table.
No, and that was deliberate. The CMOs judged that the evidence was not strong enough to justify a precise daily limit, so instead of inventing one they recommended practical family norms: screen-free mealtimes, no screens in the hour before bed, no devices in bedrooms overnight, and swapping screen time for play, talk, exercise and sleep where it has crowded them out.
Because the advice is a bet with no downside. The steps the CMOs recommended cost nothing, and the things they protect, sleep, conversation, exercise and play, are beyond dispute as necessities of childhood. If screens do cause harm, the norms shield your child; if they do not, your family has merely gained better dinners and better bedtimes. Precaution is the rational response to uncertainty when the precaution is free.
Because those are the two moments where screens displace the most valuable alternatives. Mealtimes are the most reliable daily slot for family conversation, the talk young children build language from, and the hour before bed is when screen use is best placed to disturb sleep, both by keeping a child stimulated and by pushing bedtime later. Protect those two windows and you have protected a large share of what matters.
The norms work best as household rules rather than child rules. Young children learn from what they watch adults do, and a screen-free table only feels normal to a four-year-old if it applies to everyone sitting at it. Many parents find this the hardest part and the most rewarding: the phone in the kitchen drawer at six o'clock turns out to improve the adults' evening as well as the child's.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.