The evidence is clearer than the headlines suggest: what toddlers do instead of screens matters just as much as the screens themselves.
Yes, excessive screen time can affect how a toddler's brain develops, particularly in the areas of language acquisition, attention, and self-regulation. The science is not about demonising a tablet left on while you cook dinner; it is about understanding what the developing brain genuinely needs in those first five years, and what can quietly crowd it out. The short answer: a toddler's brain is built for conversation, touch, movement, and responsive human relationship. Screens, by their nature, offer very little of those things.
The longer answer requires a look at what researchers have found when they study children who spend significant portions of their waking hours in front of a screen before the age of five. The findings are consistent across disciplines, from neuroscience to developmental psychology, and form a coherent picture. Understanding that picture does not require a degree; it requires only a willingness to look at what a child's brain is actually doing during those critical early years.
The infant and toddler brain grows through contingency: through actions that produce responses, through faces that reflect emotions, through voices that adjust to what a child already knows. As developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik has argued, the young mind is not a vessel to be filled but a flame to be lit. Screen content, however well designed, is non-contingent. It plays on regardless of what the child does, says, or feels.
Andrew Meltzoff at the University of Washington has demonstrated that very young children learn imitation and social understanding through live human interaction in ways that video cannot replicate. Patricia Kuhl's work on language shows that babies and toddlers exposed to a second language via video alone do not acquire it, while those exposed through a real person in the same room do. The brain, it appears, knows the difference between a screen and a person.
What the Science Shows
Patricia Kuhl's research found that infants exposed to a second language through video failed to show the same neural mapping gains as those who heard the same language from a live speaker. The human social context appears to be a biological prerequisite for early language learning, not merely a welcome addition to it.
Dimitri Christakis at Seattle Children's Research Institute has published extensively on the relationship between fast-paced television viewing in early childhood and later attentional difficulties. His research suggests that the rapid scene changes and high stimulation of typical children's media condition the brain to expect a level of novelty that real life, and later a classroom, simply cannot match. Self-regulation, the ability to manage impulse and sustain focus, is one of the most important cognitive capacities a child can develop before school age, and it is built largely through play, not passive viewing.
Jenny Radesky, a developmental paediatrician whose research has focused on mobile media use in young children, has found associations between heavy device use in toddlerhood and difficulties with emotional regulation. The mechanism is not mysterious: a child who is handed a screen whenever they are frustrated never fully practises the effortful work of calming themselves or negotiating with their environment.
The landmark research by Betty Hart and Todd Risley established that the volume and quality of words a child hears from caregivers in early life has a profound and lasting effect on vocabulary, reading, and academic outcomes. Words heard from a screen do not appear to carry the same weight. A study by Anna Sosa published in JAMA Pediatrics found that electronic toys and devices produced markedly fewer adult words, fewer child vocalisations, and less conversational turn-taking than traditional toys or books. Turn-taking, the back-and-forth of a real conversation, is the very scaffold on which early language is built.
Dana Suskind, founder of the Thirty Million Words initiative, frames this as a call to action rather than a counsel of despair: every real conversation a parent has with a toddler, however brief and ordinary, is an act of brain-building. Screens cannot have a conversation. A simple puzzle, a set of skittles in the garden, wooden stacking rings: all of these invite a child to act, and invite a parent to respond.
Jean Piaget's foundational insight was that children learn through physical action on the world. They do not absorb concepts passively; they construct them through touching, manipulating, arranging, and experimenting. Maria Montessori built an entire educational philosophy on the same observation: the hand leads the mind. Neither thinker could have anticipated the smartphone, but both would have recognised its fundamental limitation as a learning tool for the very young.
More recently, Adele Diamond's work on executive function has shown that the cognitive skills most predictive of school success, including working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control, are strengthened through active, playful, socially embedded experiences. Passive screen consumption does not exercise these capacities. Open-ended play with real objects does.
The Hands-On Difference
Researchers Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff, whose work on playful learning has been widely cited by the American Academy of Pediatrics, argue that the best learning for young children is active, engaging, meaningful, and socially interactive. They describe these as the four pillars of learning, and note that few screen experiences for toddlers genuinely meet more than one of them.
The World Health Organization recommends no screen time at all for children under two, and no more than one hour per day of sedentary screen time for children aged three to four, with an emphasis on interactive, co-viewed content when screens are used. The American Academy of Pediatrics echoes these thresholds, noting that for children under 18 months even video calls should be limited and supervised. The UK Chief Medical Officers have called for a precautionary approach, acknowledging that while the evidence base is still developing, the opportunity cost of screen time is real: every hour in front of a screen is an hour not spent in physical play, conversation, or creative activity.
The case for play is not sentimental. Stuart Brown, whose research draws on decades of animal and human studies, argues that play is a primary biological drive, as fundamental to healthy development as sleep or nutrition. Jaak Panksepp's neuroscientific work identified play as one of the core emotional systems of the mammalian brain. When children play with real objects, in real space, with real companions, they are not merely passing time; they are wiring the neural circuits that will serve them for life.
At Jaques London, we have been making toys and games since 1795. That longevity is not nostalgia; it is evidence. Generation after generation, the toys that endure are those that ask something of the child: a puzzle that requires patience, a set of wooden toys that can become anything, a traditional game that teaches turn-taking and graceful losing. These are precisely the experiences the research says matter most.
Browse our range of educational toys or explore our full collection of wooden toys for young children, each chosen to offer exactly the kind of active, open-ended, hands-on play the evidence supports.
A Note for Parents Who Feel Guilty
The research is not an indictment of imperfect parenting. Screens exist, families are busy, and children are resilient. The goal is not zero screens but a rich daily diet of conversation, movement, and hands-on play. Every small swap towards active play counts, and the brain's plasticity in the early years means that positive change at any point makes a difference.
For children under about two and a half, even high-quality educational content produces what researchers call the video deficit: children learn markedly less from screens than from the same information delivered by a person in the room. Older toddlers can begin to extract some learning from well-designed, slow-paced programmes, particularly when a parent watches alongside and talks about what is happening. The learning is always shallower, however, than it would be through direct, physical experience. A programme about shapes teaches far less than twenty minutes with a set of wooden shape-sorters and a curious adult.
No. The early brain is highly plastic, and the research consistently shows that enriching the play environment at any point in the first five years produces positive developmental change. The associations found in screen time studies are population-level correlations, not individual verdicts. What matters most going forward is increasing the quality and quantity of responsive interaction, physical play, and language-rich activity. You do not need to undo the past; you need only to enrich the present. That is both the honest scientific answer and the genuinely reassuring one.
The World Health Organization recommends no sedentary screen time for children under two, and no more than one hour per day for children aged three to four. The American Academy of Pediatrics suggests that for two-year-olds any screen use should be limited, high quality, and watched together with a caregiver. These are guidelines rather than bright lines, and context matters enormously. A video call with a grandparent is a social experience; thirty minutes of solo tablet use is not. The key question is always: what is this replacing, and is the child passive or engaged?
The research points consistently towards open-ended materials that invite physical manipulation, imaginative extension, and social interaction. Simple wooden building blocks, shape sorters, threading toys, puzzles, stacking games, and traditional outdoor activities such as skittles all offer exactly what a screen cannot: resistance, unpredictability, and consequence. A block tower falls; a puzzle piece does not fit; a ball rolls somewhere unexpected. These small frustrations and surprises are, in developmental terms, precisely the point. They build the problem-solving, persistence, and self-regulation that no amount of educational screen content reliably produces.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.