A warm, practical plan for navigating the most screen-saturated day of the year with young children, without falling out with anyone you love.
You do not need to ban screens, police every relative, or deliver a lecture over the turkey. What you need is a room so full of genuinely compelling play that nobody reaches for a tablet in the first place. That is the whole strategy, and everything below builds it hour by hour. If you take nothing else from this page, take this: the research consistently shows that the quality of the play environment, not the removal of devices, is what makes the difference for children under five.
Researchers Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, whose decades of work on playful learning remain among the most practically useful findings for parents, argue that children learn best when play is active, engaged, meaningful and socially interactive. A Christmas table scattered with wooden skittles, a shape puzzle and a classic family game meets every one of those criteria. Knowing that is not guilt-tripping anyone. It is simply useful information to have in your pocket when the conversation becomes difficult.
Christmas with young children is uniquely exhausting because it combines disrupted sleep, broken routine, unfamiliar faces, sugar and high emotion, all before ten in the morning. Grandparents, with the very best intentions, reach for tablets because tablets work. They are a reliable, immediate source of calm. The problem is not malice. It is that the alternative, genuinely engaging multigenerational play, requires a little preparation that most families have never been shown how to do. This guide is that preparation.
What the evidence says about play and young children
Researcher Dimitri Christakis has shown that early play environments shape neural circuitry in ways that screens do not replicate. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that, video chatting aside, children under eighteen months avoid screen media entirely, and that for two-to-five-year-olds, screen time be limited to one hour per day of high-quality programming, co-viewed with a caregiver. Christmas Day, with its hours of unstructured family time, is one of the year's best opportunities to offer something richer.
Set out three or four play invitations the evening before. A low coffee table with a wooden puzzle. A basket of building blocks near the sofa where grandparents will naturally sit. A traditional game on the dining table, waiting like a centrepiece. When guests walk in and see a room that looks ready for play, the social script shifts before a single word is spoken. Nobody reaches into a bag for a tablet when there is already something interesting on the table in front of them.
Keep tablets and phones in one designated spot: a drawer, a shelf, somewhere visible but not central. You are not hiding them. You are simply not featuring them. There is a meaningful difference, and grandparents tend to receive it well when it is framed as a positive choice rather than a prohibition.
The first two hours are chaos by nature and barely manageable by anyone. Do not attempt structured games. Instead, have a single open-ended toy ready for the very first waking moments: a set of wooden blocks, a shape sorter, or a pull-along toy that a toddler can carry through the house while adults find their feet. Unwrapping itself is excellent play for young children. Resist the urge to rush through it. Tearing paper, discovering objects, handing things to grandparents for inspection: this is rich, connected, joyful activity that needs no supplement.
This is your golden window. Children are rested, adults have had coffee, and there are still hours before the meal. A traditional game that travels across generations is the single most powerful tool you have. Skittles requires no reading, no fine motor precision, and no explanation beyond pointing at the pins. A two-year-old and a seventy-five-year-old can play together on equal terms, laughing at the same moment. That shared laughter is the point. Vygotsky's insight, that children develop most powerfully in the company of more capable others, applies just as much to grandparents as to parents.
Explore Jaques London's traditional games, chosen for multigenerational play since 1795This is the danger zone. Everyone is full. The toddler is overtired. The grandparents are sitting back, comfortable, and the bag with the tablet is right there. Your counter-move is a quiet, low-energy play invitation that does not require anyone to stand up: a wooden puzzle on a lap tray, a set of stacking cups on the floor beside the sofa, simple sorting games with coloured wooden pieces that a grandparent can facilitate from an armchair. Alison Gopnik's research on early childhood finds that children do not need adults to perform or instruct; they need adults to be present and responsive. An engaged grandparent sitting on the floor with a shape sorter is doing more developmental good than an hour of the best educational app ever made.
On the power of open-ended toys in early play
Jeffrey Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI study, which evaluated dozens of toys for their learning potential, found consistently that open-ended, manipulable objects, particularly building and construction toys, produced the highest levels of language, problem-solving and social interaction in children under five. The finding held across ages, genders and settings.
By late afternoon, the goal is deceleration. A wooden puzzle is ideal: it is absorbing, it has a clear endpoint, and it gives a child something to feel proud of at the end of an overwhelming day. Resist any screen as a wind-down strategy, even well-meaning grandparents offering "just one episode." Research by Jenny Radesky has shown that touchscreen use in the hour before bed disrupts sleep onset in young children, and a disrupted bedtime on Christmas night makes the 26th significantly harder for everyone.
Browse Jaques London's wooden toys, crafted for the early yearsThe tone is everything. "Oh, how kind, but shall we try this game instead?" is almost always sufficient, and it flatters rather than corrects. If pressed, a simple "we are keeping screens for later today" makes a rule without making an argument. If the pressure continues, be direct but warm: "It genuinely matters to us on this particular day. Let me show you what she does with these skittles." Showing beats explaining every time. The moment a grandparent sees their grandchild's face light up over a physical game, the tablet disappears without another word needed.
Send the list in October. Frame it as helpful rather than prescriptive: "We thought this might save you the trouble of choosing." Include two or three specific items with clear descriptions of why your child would love them. Traditional games, wooden toys, puzzles with large pieces: these are the categories to favour. When grandparents have chosen a beautiful wooden skittle set themselves, they are considerably more invested in seeing it used on Christmas morning. The gift list is not a control mechanism. It is an invitation to be part of the play.
Acknowledge her experience warmly before adding, simply, that the evidence has moved on since then, much as it has on car seats or sunscreen. The American Academy of Pediatrics now sets specific limits for under-fives based on decades of research that did not exist when she was raising children. You are not questioning her parenting. You are working with newer information. Then move on quickly: offer her the skittles, put the puzzle in her lap, and let the play do the persuading.
A completely screen-free day is realistic, but it requires preparation rather than willpower. The protest that comes with removing a tablet is almost always a reaction to losing something engaging, not an attachment to the device itself. When the replacement is genuinely compelling, a set of brightly coloured wooden toys, a game that includes her, something she can throw or stack or sort, the transition is far less distressing than you expect. Start the day with physical play before any screen appears, and you will likely not need the screen at all.
The games that work across the widest age range share three qualities: they require no reading, they involve physical action, and they produce visible, shared results. Skittles is the classic example. Simple card-matching games work well too. Any game where a two-year-old can genuinely participate, rather than being managed by an adult pretending she is participating, will hold the room. Jaques London has been making games for precisely this kind of multigenerational occasion since 1795, and their traditional games collection is a reliable place to start.
Lead with gratitude and curiosity: "We know you love choosing something special for her, and we thought a few ideas might be helpful." Send the list by message rather than raising it in person, which removes any awkwardness from the exchange. Include a range of price points, give a sentence on why each item suits her at this stage, and be genuinely enthusiastic about whichever they choose. When it works, and it usually does, grandparents feel more confident shoppers and you wake up on Christmas morning already knowing the toys in the room are the ones most likely to keep everyone happy.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.