The clearest, most evidence-backed answer for parents wondering whether that glowing rectangle is doing their baby any harm.
The short answer, if you need it immediately: for newborns and babies under two years of age, the World Health Organization and the UK's Chief Medical Officers recommend zero recreational screen time. Not a little. Not fifteen minutes here and there. The guidance is explicit, and it is not born of puritanism or nostalgia but of a growing body of neuroscientific and developmental research. If your newborn is currently near a screen while you read this, please set it aside without guilt and read on, because understanding why the guidance exists is far more useful than simply knowing the rule.
The important qualifier is this: the guidance refers to recreational or passive screen exposure. A brief video call with a grandparent who responds to the baby, makes eye contact and speaks warmly is a meaningfully different situation, and most researchers treat it as such. What matters most to a newborn brain is contingent, responsive human interaction, and any screen that provides that, however imperfectly, sits in a different category from background television or scrolling videos. Everything else in this article flows from that single principle.
In 2019 the World Health Organization published guidelines stating that infants under one year of age should not be exposed to electronic screens at all, and that children aged one to two should have no screen time other than video chatting. The UK Chief Medical Officers' guidance echoes this position, recommending that parents minimise screen exposure in the earliest years and prioritise physically active, socially engaged play. These are not fringe opinions. They represent the considered consensus of the bodies responsible for public health in this country and internationally.
WHO Guidelines at a Glance
The World Health Organization advises zero recreational screen time for children under two, and no sedentary screen time for children under five. The guidance emphasises that time spent on screens displaces the active, interactive play that is essential for healthy neurological, physical and social development.
A newborn arrives in the world with a brain that is, in the words of developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, something closer to a lantern than a torch: broadly receptive, acutely sensitive, and calibrated above all else to human presence. The visual system of a newborn is drawn instinctively to faces. Research by Andrew Meltzoff demonstrated that babies as young as 42 minutes old will imitate a human face making expressions, suggesting that the machinery for social learning is active from the very first moments of life.
Screens, however vivid and colourful, cannot replicate this. They do not respond to the baby's gaze, change expression in reply to a smile, or modulate their tone when the baby cries. Patricia Kuhl's work on language acquisition makes this point with striking force: babies learn phonemes, the building blocks of language, from live interaction with a speaker, and studies in her laboratory showed that the same content delivered by a screen produced no measurable learning in infants under a year old. The screen is a mirror with no reflection.
The concern is not that screens are actively toxic in the manner of lead paint. It is subtler and, in some ways, more important: screens displace. Every minute a baby spends gazing at a screen is a minute not spent making eye contact with a carer, babbling and receiving a response, reaching for an object, or feeling a texture. Research by Hart and Risley on early language environments demonstrated how profoundly the quantity and quality of verbal interaction in infancy shapes later vocabulary and cognitive outcomes. Dimitri Christakis has shown that background television reduces the number of words spoken to infants and disrupts the conversational turn-taking that is fundamental to language development.
The Displacement Principle
Christakis and colleagues have found that for every hour of background television, babies receive significantly fewer adult words and conversational exchanges. It is not primarily what the screen puts in that concerns researchers; it is what the screen crowds out.
Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff, whose decades of research have shaped how we think about early learning, argue that play is the engine of cognitive development. Specifically, they identify hands-on, object-based play as the context in which babies develop spatial reasoning, cause-and-effect understanding, and the executive functions that will underpin later learning. A wooden rattle teaches a baby that actions have consequences. A soft stacking ring teaches proportion. A simple object permanence toy, of the kind that Piaget used in his foundational studies, teaches the extraordinary lesson that things continue to exist when they cannot be seen.
None of this requires anything elaborate or expensive. Simple, well-made wooden toys that respond honestly to touch and manipulation, that have weight and texture and sound, provide the sensory richness that a flat, glowing surface cannot. At Jaques London, we have been making toys that serve exactly this purpose since 1795, and the principle has not changed: a toy that rewards curiosity and responds to physical engagement is doing developmental work that no screen application can replicate.
Explore Jaques London Wooden Toys for Babies and Young ChildrenAdele Diamond's research on executive function development makes a compelling case for unstructured, open-ended play in infancy. When a baby handles an object without being directed by a screen or a predetermined outcome, they are exercising attention, inhibition and cognitive flexibility. Dauch and colleagues found that toddlers engaged in deeper, more creative play with fewer, simpler toys than with larger collections, suggesting that restraint in toy choice is not a privation but a gift.
The senses deserve particular attention in the first year. A baby explores the world orally, tactilely and proprioceptively. They want to mouth, grasp, bang and shake. Wooden toys chosen with care for safety and material quality honour this instinct. A set of simple wooden blocks or a beautifully crafted shape sorter gives a baby's developing nervous system exactly the multi-sensory input it is seeking.
Browse Jaques London Educational Toys for Early DevelopmentA screen-free day with a newborn does not need to be programmed or performance-like. The following suggestions are simply frameworks:
The guidance above is aspirational, and the researchers who produce it know perfectly well that parents are not operating in laboratory conditions. You are tired. You are, at some points, alone. The television goes on sometimes, and your phone is in your hand more than you would like. None of this makes you a poor parent, and occasional exposure to background television will not derail your baby's development. What matters, as Kenneth Ginsburg and the American Academy of Pediatrics have consistently emphasised, is the overall pattern: a childhood rich in responsive human interaction, physical play and sensory exploration is robustly protective, and a little screen exposure within that context is not a catastrophe.
What the evidence does ask of us is that we are thoughtful rather than habitual, and that we reach for a toy, a song or a walk before we reach for a screen. That is a gentle ambition, not a punishing one.
A Note on Parental Wellbeing
The American Academy of Pediatrics reminds us that parental mental health is itself a developmental input. A parent who is calm, present and emotionally available does more for their baby's brain than any curated, screen-free schedule managed in a state of exhaustion. Be kind to yourself as a first principle.
It does count, and research suggests it matters more than many parents expect. Christakis and colleagues found that background television significantly reduces the number of words spoken to babies and interrupts the back-and-forth conversational exchanges that are essential for language development. The baby may not appear to be watching, but the ambient noise and light affect adult attention and interaction. Where possible, keep the television off during periods of baby-carer interaction, and treat it as an adult activity for times when the baby is asleep.
The honest answer is that the guidance reflects what we now know, not what we always suspected. Neuroimaging technology that allows researchers to observe infant brain activity in response to different stimuli has only matured in the last two decades. Earlier generations were not harmed by television in easily measurable ways partly because exposure was lower and partly because the science to detect subtler effects simply did not exist. The question is not whether previous generations survived screens, but what we now know about optimising the conditions for early brain development. The evidence base has grown, and the guidance has followed it.
Most researchers treat them as meaningfully different, and the WHO guidance specifically exempts video chatting from its zero-screen recommendation for children aged one to two. The key quality that distinguishes a video call is contingency: a grandparent on a video call responds to the baby's expressions, pauses when the baby vocalises, and adjusts their speech in real time. This is the responsive interaction that infant brains are wired to seek. It is not identical to in-person contact, but it is categorically different from passive video viewing. Keep calls short, interactive and warm, and they represent a reasonable exception to the general guidance.
A baby's fascination with a screen is real, but it does not indicate benefit. Infant visual systems are drawn to high contrast, rapid movement and bright light, all of which screens provide in abundance. This is closer to a reflexive response than a sign of engagement or learning. Patricia Kuhl's research demonstrates precisely this point: even when babies appear attentive to screen-based content, measurable learning of the kind that occurs in live interaction does not take place. Fascination and benefit are not the same thing, and a baby is equally, often more, fascinated by a human face, a wooden toy with interesting weight and texture, or the pattern of light through a window.
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