The clearest answer the science can offer, what it means in your living room, and what to offer your one-year-old instead.
The short answer, for parents who need it quickly: UK Chief Medical Officers advise that children under two should have no recreational screen time at all, with one important exception: video calls with family. That recommendation aligns closely with guidance from the World Health Organization, and it has remained consistent as the body of evidence behind it has grown. If your one-year-old does watch some television, you are far from alone, and this page is not written to make you feel bad about that. It is written to explain what the evidence actually shows, why the guideline sits where it does, and what you can offer instead.
The WHO is equally direct: children under two years of age should not have sedentary screen time at all. The American Academy of Pediatrics echoes this, carving out only video-chatting as a meaningful exception. The threshold of two years is not arbitrary. It corresponds closely with a critical window in language acquisition, neural pruning and the development of attention, all of which depend heavily on the type of input a child receives in those months.
The first two years of life are a period of extraordinary neurological sensitivity. Synaptic connections are being formed and refined at a rate that will never be matched again. The quality and type of stimulation a child receives during this window shapes the architecture of the developing brain in ways that persist for years.
The Video Deficit Effect
Researchers Patricia Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff demonstrated that infants learn language reliably from live human interaction but fail to acquire the same learning from identical content delivered via a screen. This "video deficit" effect appears to be rooted in the absence of contingent, responsive communication: the back-and-forth that a real face provides and a screen cannot.
Hart and Risley's foundational research on early language exposure showed that the quantity and quality of words a child hears from a real, responsive person in the first three years has measurable consequences for vocabulary, reading comprehension and academic outcomes years later. Screens may fill a room with words, but those words are not addressed to the child, do not respond to the child's gaze or gesture, and cannot adjust to what the child appears not yet to understand.
Anna Sosa's research found that infants playing with electronic toys produced fewer words, fewer conversational turns and fewer parental responses than those playing with traditional toys or books. Dauch and colleagues showed similar results: the more complex and stimulating a toy appeared on the surface, the shorter and shallower the play it generated. Jenny Radesky and Sheri Madigan have both published work associating early and heavy screen use with delays in expressive language and attention regulation. None of this is cause for panic. It is, however, cause for thoughtfulness.
Harvard child development researchers frame the mechanism clearly through the concept of serve-and-return interaction: a child makes a sound or gesture, a caregiver responds, and the child responds again. That loop, repeated thousands of times a day, is how neural connections are built. A screen can initiate but it cannot return. It cannot see that your child looked away, or notice the moment of confusion, or slow down.
The guidelines are not a single undifferentiated rule. Background television, the kind that plays in a room where a one-year-old is doing something else, is the most straightforwardly problematic category. Dimitri Christakis's research on background media found that even television playing in another room measurably reduces the quantity and quality of parent-child verbal interaction. The child may not be watching, but the adult's attention is divided.
Video calls are explicitly outside the main guidance. A grandparent on a tablet screen is a real, contingent, responsive human being who can adjust their tone when the child looks bored and laugh when the child waves. That is meaningfully different from a streaming programme. Keep calls short, face-centred and conversational, and they represent exactly the kind of human interaction the guidelines are trying to protect.
What About "Educational" Apps?
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff's research on transfer of learning cautions that even apps designed with genuine educational intent carry significant caveats for children under two. The transfer problem, the gap between learning something on a screen and applying it in three-dimensional reality, is particularly wide at this age. A shape on a tablet and a shape in the hand are processed very differently by a one-year-old's brain.
Jean Piaget described the first two years of life as the sensorimotor stage: a period in which the child builds understanding of the world entirely through physical action and its consequences. Banging a wooden block produces a sound. Dropping a ball produces a roll. Stacking two rings and watching them fall teaches something about gravity that no animation can replicate, because the child's own hand caused it. The body is the laboratory.
Lev Vygotsky's insight was complementary: a child's development is pulled forward by interaction with a more capable partner, a parent, sibling or key worker who works just above the child's current level. This social scaffold is irreplaceable. Adele Diamond's research on executive function shows that hands-on, unpredictable play, the kind where you do not know what will happen when you push the brick or open the box, is precisely what builds the early foundations of self-regulation and flexible thinking.
Jaak Panksepp and Sergio Pellis have each demonstrated the neurological importance of open, exploratory play, showing that it activates brain systems associated with positive affect, curiosity and the motivation to persist. Alison Gopnik describes toddlers as the research-and-development department of the human species: learning by doing, forming hypotheses, testing them and revising. Maria Montessori put it most memorably: the hand is the instrument of the intellect.
At twelve months, the developmental work is rich and specific: posting objects through holes, stacking and knocking down, pulling things out of containers and putting them back, fitting simple shapes together. These actions are not merely entertaining. They are the cognitive labour by which a one-year-old builds spatial reasoning, fine motor control, cause-and-effect understanding and early problem-solving.
Jeffrey Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI research, which directly observed children playing with a wide range of toys and coded the quality of play produced, found consistently that simple, open-ended objects made from natural materials generated the longest, most cognitively engaged and most language-rich play. Novelty and electronic features tended to shorten and narrow engagement rather than deepen it.
Wooden toys represent the most durable practical expression of these findings. Their weight, texture and the honest way they respond to force, not with a programmed sound but with simple physics, make them uniquely suited to the sensorimotor learner. A wooden ring-stacker teaches more about size, order and spatial relationship than any app built around the same concept, because the rings are real, the child's hands are real, and the consequences of each action are immediate and physical.
Explore Jaques of London's wooden toys, crafted for curious hands and built to lastJaques of London has been making play objects since 1795, longer than any other games company in the world. That tradition of quality and simplicity maps naturally onto what the research recommends for this age group. Simple puzzles, stacking toys and open-ended wooden objects from the educational range offer exactly the tactile richness, open-ended possibility and durable engagement that developmental science points towards.
Browse educational toys from Jaques of London, designed to grow with your childThe most important principle is to replace, not merely remove. Turning a screen off while a one-year-old has nothing interesting in front of them will produce protest. Having a basket of wooden toys, a simple puzzle or a set of stacking cups ready before you switch off gives the child somewhere to go. Transitions become easy when the alternative is genuinely engaging.
Dana Suskind's "three Ts" framework offers a warm and practical guide for screen-free time: Tune In to what your child is looking at or doing, Talk More about it in simple, descriptive language, and Take Turns by pausing to let the child respond. This turns an ordinary moment of play into the serve-and-return interaction that builds language and connection simultaneously.
Natural anchors help: mealtimes, the first thirty minutes after waking and the hour before bed are all periods where screen-free patterns are relatively easy to establish and maintain. Christakis's research is a useful reminder that adult screen habits matter here too. A caregiver absorbed in their own phone is, from the child's perspective, much like a television playing in the corner. Reducing screens gradually, without guilt and at a pace that is sustainable for the whole family, is both achievable and entirely normal.
A Note on Gradual Change
No family moves from heavy screen use to none overnight, nor do the guidelines expect that. The evidence supports the direction of travel: less passive screen exposure, more face-to-face interaction and hands-on play. Small, consistent changes accumulate into significant differences over weeks and months.
Background television is the category most consistently associated with reduced parent-child interaction in the research, but "harm" is a strong word for an occasional necessity. The more useful question is whether it has become the default. If television is on for most of the day, there is good reason to reduce it gradually. If it is twenty minutes while dinner is made, the more important thing is what happens before and after: how much talking, playing and responding takes place in the rest of the day. Christakis's research suggests the cumulative picture matters more than any single episode.
For a one-year-old, the evidence is quite clear that they are. The video deficit effect documented by Kuhl and Meltzoff, and the transfer-of-learning caveats raised by Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, mean that even well-intentioned apps face a fundamental limitation: a one-year-old learns through touch, weight, consequence and responsive human interaction, none of which a screen provides. Wooden toys offer tactile richness, open-ended possibility and the kind of cause-and-effect learning that the sensorimotor stage demands. Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI research provides direct observational evidence that simple, open-ended objects produce the deepest and longest developmental play.
The hour before bed is one of the most important periods to protect from screens, because the light emitted and the stimulation involved can interfere with the settling process itself, creating a cycle where more screen time is needed to achieve the same effect. The replace principle is especially useful here: introduce a consistent wind-down sequence, a bath, a wooden toy explored quietly together, two or three board books and a familiar song, before reducing the screen rather than simply removing it. Predictable sequences become self-soothing in themselves over two or three weeks. Gentle persistence, rather than abrupt removal, is the approach most likely to work without significant distress for child or parent.
No, not in the way that passive viewing does. Both the UK Chief Medical Officers' guidance and the American Academy of Pediatrics explicitly exempt video calling from the under-two screen-time recommendation, precisely because it involves a real, contingent, responsive person. A grandparent who reacts to your child's babble, makes a funny face in return and asks a question is providing something meaningfully different from a streaming programme. Keep calls conversational and face-centred, let your child lead the interaction where possible, and consider ending before restlessness sets in. Daily video calls with distant family are, by any reasonable reading of the evidence, something to feel warm about rather than worried by.
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