Honest Parent Diary: Going Screen-Free for the Summer Holidays With a Toddler and Baby

The short answer, for anyone who has arrived here in a panic the night before the school holidays begin: yes, it is genuinely possible, no, it is not serene, and the toys matter far more than the intention. We are a family with a three-year-old and an eight-month-old. We are not minimalists. We live in a semi-detached house in south Leeds, and by the end of week one we had breadsticks ground into the sofa cushions and a newfound respect for wooden stacking rings. What we did not have, for the first time in two years, was the low hum of a tablet in the corner of every room.

The most honest thing we can tell you is this: the first four days were genuinely hard, the second week was surprisingly manageable, and by week four we had stopped noticing the absence of screens at all. Language was the first thing that changed visibly. Then sleep. Then, quietly and incrementally, the way our toddler and baby looked at each other.

Why We Decided to Try a Screen-Free Summer

The decision was not dramatic. It was more of an accumulation: a toddler who had begun asking for the tablet before she had fully woken up, a baby who turned his head towards any lit screen with an intensity that unsettled us, and a growing feeling that we were managing days rather than living them. We had read enough to know that the World Health Organization recommends no screen time at all for children under two, and sedentary screen time of no more than one hour per day for children aged three to four. Our toddler was well over that. Our baby, technically, should have had none.

What we were truly afraid of was simpler: the specific, escalating, eleven o'clock boredom of a three-year-old who has exhausted her own ideas and wants someone to solve it for her. And the parallel fear of entertaining a baby whilst simultaneously preventing the toddler from dismantling the kitchen. We had no plan, only a rule and a box of wooden toys we had been given and never properly introduced.

The First Week: Chaos, Tears, and the Toys That Saved Us Before Lunch

Day one was manageable because novelty carried it. Day two was the hardest day of the entire summer. Our toddler asked for the tablet forty-three times. We counted. She cried at ten o'clock in the morning with the particular grief of someone who has been told the thing they most want does not exist. We sat on the kitchen floor with her and opened the wooden toy box. There was a shape sorter, a set of stacking cups, a simple jigsaw, and a bag of wooden threading beads. She was not immediately enchanted. She threw a bead at the radiator. Then, slowly, she sat down.

The baby was delighted by the stacking cups almost immediately. He mouthed one, hit another against the floor, and achieved a look of profound satisfaction. The toddler watched him, then rebuilt the tower he had knocked over, then knocked it over herself. This lasted forty minutes, before lunch, without a screen, without an adult doing anything except being nearby. That felt, at the time, like a miracle.

Week Two Onwards: What Both Ages Actually Played With

By the second week, patterns had emerged. The baby was most engaged by things he could grasp, mouth, bang, and transfer between hands: simple wooden objects with weight and texture, cloth books, and anything his sister was using. The toddler cycled between about five activities in rotation, returning to each with a different angle each time. The puzzles were returned to most frequently, always with new urgency, always with the same quiet absorption once she found her rhythm.

The toys that did not hold attention were the ones with a single correct answer. The ones that lasted were open-ended: stacking and nesting toys, simple wooden figures that could be anything, threading beads that became necklaces and then abacuses and then, memorably, a pretend birthday cake. Researcher Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and her colleague Roberta Golinkoff have written extensively on the conditions under which children learn most deeply through play, and one of their consistent findings is that child-directed, open-ended play produces richer language and more sustained attention than adult-structured activity. We did not know this at the time. We just noticed that the toys with the most possible uses were the ones she came back to.

Browse Jaques London educational toys, chosen for open-ended play from birth to five

The Unexpected Wins: Language, Siblings, and Sleep

The language leap was the thing that stopped us in our tracks. By week three, our toddler was narrating her play aloud in a way she had not done before: long, rambling monologues about what her wooden figures were doing and why. She invented names for them, gave them problems, and solved those problems herself. This kind of private speech during play, what Vygotsky described as a bridge between social and internal thought, is associated with the development of self-regulation and early literacy. We were not expecting to witness it so clearly, or so soon.

The sibling moments surprised us most. Without the gravitational pull of a screen, the two of them oriented towards each other. The baby watched his sister with an attention that was almost scientific. She, in turn, began performing for him: building towers to be knocked down, making sounds to hear him laugh, handing him objects and watching his reaction. These interactions were not long, but they were real.

Sleep improved for both children by week two. We cannot prove causation. But the evenings were calmer, the wind-down required less effort, and both children slept longer in the mornings. Research by Madigan and colleagues on screen time and sleep in young children consistently finds an association between evening screen exposure and reduced sleep duration. Removing that variable seemed to make the hours before bed considerably quieter.

The Hard Days: Rain, Meltdowns, and Nearly Giving In

There were eight days of sustained rain across our six weeks. On day three of the first rainy stretch, we came very close to abandoning the whole thing. The toddler had been awake since 5:40 a.m. The baby was teething. The house felt very small. What saved us, practically speaking, was having enough physical things to rotate. A fresh puzzle brought out mid-morning worked with the reliability of a reset button. A set of wooden skittles set up in the hallway bought us forty minutes we genuinely needed. Water play in the kitchen sink, deeply unglamorous, bought us another thirty.

The meltdowns, when they came, were best met with presence rather than distraction. That sounds obvious in writing; it was very difficult in practice. Offering a simple, familiar toy alongside calm physical closeness worked more consistently than anything else we tried. The meltdown was rarely about boredom. It was usually about something else, and the screen would have postponed rather than resolved it.

The Toys That Did the Heavy Lifting

Vague recommendations are not useful in the middle of a long Tuesday in August, so here is what actually earned its place: a set of graduated stacking rings used by both ages differently for the entire six weeks; a simple wooden jigsaw with chunky pieces returned to almost daily by the toddler; threading beads with thick laces used for thirty to sixty minutes at a stretch, often with narration; a set of wooden skittles adapted into dozens of different games indoors and out; and a small wooden figure set that anchored the toddler's imaginative play for weeks at a time.

Jaques London has been making and curating toys of exactly this kind since 1795, the world's oldest games company, and the quality of the materials makes a perceptible difference to how children engage. There is a weight and warmth to well-made wooden toys that cheaper alternatives do not replicate, and children under five are sensitive to that in ways that are not trivial.

Explore the Jaques London wooden toys collection, made to last and designed to grow with your child

What the Research Actually Says

The evidence on play and early development is consistent and extensive. Jeffrey Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI study, which measured the play value of toys across age groups, found that open-ended toys, including blocks and simple figures, produced significantly more and higher-quality play than single-function or electronic alternatives. Dauch and colleagues found that fewer toys in a play environment led to longer, more focused, more creative play sessions in toddlers. Adele Diamond's work on executive function identifies child-directed play as one of the key experiences that builds self-regulation in the early years, precisely the skill that reduces meltdown frequency over time.

None of this means screens are categorically harmful in every context. What the research does show, clearly, is that unstructured play with simple objects is not a lesser substitute for screen-based activity. It is, in many respects, the primary thing: the experience that builds language, attention, emotional regulation, and the capacity for imagination. The screen is often the substitute.

Honest Takeaways: What We Would Do Differently

We would introduce the toy rotation more deliberately from the start, rather than tipping everything out at once. We would plan one physical activity outdoors each morning as a structural anchor, even if only twenty minutes in the garden. We would accept that some days will be harder than others, and that a hard day does not mean the approach has failed. And we would be less ambitious about what screen-free means: we allowed one family film on Friday evenings and nobody was diminished by it. The goal was never purity. It was presence, and a different quality of attention in the ordinary hours of the day.

What we would keep is almost everything else. The language, the sibling connection, the sleep, the toddler's capacity to entertain herself for stretches of time that would have been unimaginable in May: these did not vanish when September arrived. They stayed. That, in the end, is the most honest thing we can report.

Common Questions

Does going screen-free have to mean all or nothing when you have a baby and a toddler at the same time?

No, and attempting perfection is one of the fastest routes to abandoning the whole effort. The WHO guidelines set evidence-based upper limits, but the spirit of the guidance is about replacing sedentary screen time with active, interactive, responsive play, not about inducing parental guilt. A Friday film, a video call with grandparents, a single episode on a difficult afternoon: none of these undermine a broadly screen-light approach. What matters is the texture of the ordinary day, and whether play, conversation, and physical activity are the default rather than the exception.

How do you handle a toddler meltdown when you cannot put something on the television to reset the mood?

The honest answer is that you cannot always reset it quickly, and accepting that changes your relationship with the meltdown. What worked most consistently for us was co-regulation: sitting close, staying calm, and offering one familiar, low-demand object without pressure to engage. A wooden toy the child already knows is better than something new in that moment. The meltdown, once it has passed its peak, often resolves into absorbed play quite naturally. The screen would have interrupted the cycle rather than completed it, and the next meltdown would have arrived sooner as a result.

Which toys genuinely kept both ages busy without an adult directing the whole time?

For parallel play across a baby and toddler age gap, the toys that worked hardest were stacking and nesting sets, each age using them differently with no competition over correct use; chunky wooden puzzles for the toddler alongside simple grasping objects for the baby; and open-ended figure sets that the toddler could narrate whilst the baby watched and reached. The key quality was that none of these had a single correct answer. Both children could engage at their own developmental level without frustrating each other. A nearby adult helps, but does not need to be directing.

What if my toddler has already had screens every day for months? Is it too late to change things over summer?

It is not too late. The early years brain is, above all things, plastic: responsive to new experiences and new environments, continuously. Gopnik's work on the learning brain in early childhood is unambiguous on this point. The first few days of a change will be the hardest, because what the child is adjusting to is not the absence of screens but the presence of boredom, and boredom, handled well, is the beginning of imagination. Give it five days before drawing any conclusions. Have enough toys, enough outdoor time, and enough patience for the transition, and the pattern will shift. What feels entrenched at three years old is rarely fixed: that is, in the most literal sense, the good news.