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One thing worth trying this week
Guidance figures: World Health Organization (2019) for under-5s; UK Chief Medical Officers' commentary (2019) for older children, which sets no daily limit but advises screen-free mealtimes and avoiding screens in the hour before bed. This is general guidance, not individual medical advice: speak to your GP or health visitor with any specific concerns. Nothing you enter here is stored or sent anywhere.
The maths is deliberately simple. We take your daily estimate, multiply it out to a week, a month and a year, and convert the annual total into full 24-hour days. Most families have never seen their screen time expressed that way, and the number is usually surprising in both directions: smaller than the guilt suggests for some, larger than expected for others. Either way, it is just arithmetic, not a verdict on your parenting.
The comparison line uses the guidance most relevant to UK families. For children under 5, the World Health Organization recommends no sedentary screen time before age 2, and no more than one hour a day between 2 and 4, with less being better. For school-age children the UK's Chief Medical Officers deliberately set no daily limit, because the evidence does not support a single magic number. Their advice is practical instead: keep mealtimes screen-free, and keep the hour before bed screen-free. We show you the gap where a benchmark exists, and we show you the honest absence of one where it does not.
Sources
World Health Organization (2019). Guidelines on physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep for children under 5 years of age · UK Chief Medical Officers' commentary on screen-based activities and children's mental health (2019)
If the gap feels big, you are in the majority, and the worst response is a dramatic overnight ban that collapses by Thursday. The approach that tends to stick is a single small swap: one 20 or 30 minute block, at the same time each day, replaced with something real. Our guides on reducing screen time without meltdowns and the screen-free weekend cover the how in detail.
No. It multiplies your estimate and shows you the result next to published guidance. Most families who use it land above the under-5 guidance, which tells you how normal that is. The enemy here is the attention economy, which is very good at its job, not the tired parent managing a long afternoon.
In the WHO figures, yes: the under-5 guidance covers sedentary screen time of any kind. Research on educational content for under-3s consistently finds that children learn far less from a screen than from the same interaction with a real person, a finding known as the video deficit. Quality matters more for older children, but for toddlers the medium itself is the limitation.
Because a swap you impose on a 3 year old is a negotiation with a 13 year old. For older children the evidence supports working on agreements together: phones out of the bedroom overnight, screen-free meals, and a family standard the adults visibly follow too. A rule teenagers helped write survives contact with real life far better than one handed down.
Nowhere. The calculation runs entirely on your device, there is no sign-up, and we could not see your answers even if we wanted to. The share card is drawn in your browser and only leaves it if you choose to download and post it.
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