The people who build our devices are quietly choosing something older, simpler and far more tactile for their own children, and the science explains exactly why.
When senior engineers at Apple and Google send their children to low-technology schools and keep tablets out of the bedroom, it is tempting to read that as professional irony. It is, in fact, something closer to informed caution. These parents are not anti-technology ideologues; they are people who understand, perhaps better than most, how compellingly these products are designed to hold attention, and who have quietly decided that the developing brains of under-fives deserve a different kind of stimulus entirely. The short answer to why they do it: the evidence on early childhood learning is unambiguous. Before the age of five, children learn most efficiently through touch, movement, conversation and responsive human relationship. Screens, however well produced, cannot replicate those conditions.
For UK families, the relevance is direct. The UK Chief Medical Officers' guidance recommends that screen time for the under-twos should be avoided beyond video calling, and that for two-to-four-year-olds quality, co-viewing and strict limits are all essential. The American Academy of Pediatrics reaches similar conclusions. Neither body is telling parents they have failed; both are pointing to the same underlying developmental biology. What children need most in their first five years is what screens are least equipped to provide: unpredictable, multi-sensory, socially embedded play.
Reports from Silicon Valley of screen-restricted nurseries and no-phone dinner tables have circulated since at least 2011, when a New York Times profile of a Waldorf school in Los Altos noted its unusually high proportion of tech-industry families. Since then the pattern has become more documented, if not more loudly advertised. Those who do offer explanations tend to use the language of design: they know that recommendation algorithms and variable reward loops are built to maximise engagement, and they would rather not test those mechanisms on a three-year-old's still-forming prefrontal cortex.
What the research shows
Psychologist Adele Diamond, whose work on executive function has shaped early years policy across several countries, has demonstrated that the skills most predictive of long-term wellbeing, inhibitory control, working memory and cognitive flexibility, develop most robustly through active, embodied play in the first five years. These capacities are exercised when a child negotiates a tower of blocks, not when she swipes a screen.
The UK Chief Medical Officers' guidance on screen time is clear, if often misquoted. It does not say screens are poison; it says that time spent with a screen is time not spent in physical activity, face-to-face conversation or sleep, all of which have robust developmental effects. The World Health Organization's 2019 guidelines for children under five echo this framing precisely, recommending that sedentary screen time should be zero for under-twos outside of video calls, and no more than one hour of high-quality programming for three-to-four-year-olds, always with a caregiver present. These are not moral judgements; they are statements about opportunity cost.
Alison Gopnik describes the under-five brain as a lantern rather than a spotlight: broadly alert, absorbing patterns from the entire environment rather than focusing narrowly on a single task. Patricia Kuhl has shown that infants learn language sounds most effectively from live human interaction; the same sounds played back from a screen produce measurably less neural activation. Andrew Meltzoff's research on imitation confirms that babies are wired to mirror and respond to the subtleties of a human face, subtleties that a flat display cannot return. The lesson is consistent across laboratories: real-world sensory feedback, with all its glorious unpredictability, is the medium in which early learning happens most efficiently.
Jeffrey Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI study, which rigorously evaluated the developmental value of different toys, found that open-ended, manipulable objects, blocks, simple figures, art materials, generated the richest language, the most sustained play and the widest range of cognitive challenge. Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff's decades of research into playful learning arrive at the same conclusion: children are not passive recipients of content; they are active constructors of understanding, and they need materials that respond to what they do with them.
Hart and Risley's landmark research on early language environments established that the quantity and quality of conversation a child hears before the age of three has profound effects on vocabulary, reading readiness and academic achievement. Screen content, even high-quality programming, does not generate the same conversational density as a parent narrating a walk, a sibling squabble over a puzzle or a grandparent telling a familiar story. Jenny Radesky's research has added a sharper concern: when caregivers are themselves absorbed in devices, the contingent, responsive interaction that drives language acquisition quietly disappears. This is not a reason for guilt; it is a reason for design. Choosing an environment in which hands-on toys are more prominent than screens is a structural decision that makes good interaction the path of least resistance.
Language and the 30-million-word gap
Dana Suskind, drawing on the Hart and Risley corpus, has described the cumulative effect of conversational exposure as a thirty-million-word gap between the most and least language-rich early environments. Every object a child handles and names, every game that prompts a question, every puzzle that requires a parent to say "what do you think goes here?" narrows that gap. A tablet playing a cartoon does not.
Vygotsky argued that play is the leading activity of early childhood, the arena in which children practise being slightly more capable than they currently are. Piaget saw it as the mechanism by which schemas are built and revised. More recently, Jaak Panksepp's neuroscientific work identified play as a primary emotional system, as fundamental to mammalian wellbeing as hunger or fear. Stuart Brown and Peter Gray have both written compellingly about the cost to children when this system goes under-stimulated. What all of these thinkers share is an insistence that play must be self-directed, physically engaged and open to uncertainty, conditions that a well-chosen wooden toy or traditional game meets far more reliably than any app.
The preference for wooden and traditional toys is not nostalgia, though nostalgia is not entirely irrelevant: toys that have survived centuries have done so partly because children keep finding them compelling. The deeper reasons are developmental. Wood offers genuine tactile feedback: weight, temperature, grain. A set of wooden blocks responds to gravity, to a child's grip strength, to the angle of placement, generating instant, honest, physical information. Dauch and colleagues found that toddlers engaged in longer, more complex play episodes with fewer, simpler toys than with larger collections of feature-rich alternatives. Fewer choices, more depth.
Jaques of London, established in 1795 and the world's oldest games company, has been producing toys and games of precisely this character for over two centuries. The collections are built around the principle that the best play object does least of the work itself, leaving the child's imagination and problem-solving to do the rest.
Explore Jaques educational toys for under-5s Browse the Jaques wooden toy collectionThe goal is not a screen-free life, which would be both impractical and unnecessary. The goal is an environment in which the default activity is physical, social and open-ended. A few approaches that developmental research supports: keep screens out of bedrooms and away from mealtimes, where conversation naturally happens. Co-view rather than use screens as a babysitter, so that language and narrative can be built around what appears on screen. Create a play space where accessible toys, puzzles, building sets, simple games, are more visible and reachable than any device. And resist the anxiety that your child is somehow behind if they are not using educational apps: the evidence consistently shows that the richest early learning environments are the simplest ones.
Almost certainly not. The research on screen time is about patterns and proportions, not single exposures. What matters most is the overall texture of your child's day: how much time is spent in physical play, in conversation, in sleep, and in the kind of contingent back-and-forth interaction that builds language and attachment. If tablet time is occasional, bounded and often shared with you, it sits within what the evidence considers a reasonable range. The question is less "has this harmed my child?" and more "what would I like this hour to look like instead?", and that is a question worth asking with curiosity rather than fear.
Both the World Health Organization and the UK Chief Medical Officers explicitly carve out video calls from their screen time guidance, and for good reason. A video call with a grandparent who knows your child's name, responds to their expressions and maintains genuine conversational turn-taking is a very different experience from passive viewing. Kuhl's research on language acquisition suggests that social contingency, the sense that another person is responding specifically to you, is what drives learning. A grandparent on a screen provides that; a cartoon does not. Call the grandparents as often as you like.
Vygotsky's concept of scaffolding is useful here: children cope better with transitions when they are given warning, agency and a compelling alternative. A two-minute warning before screens go off, a consistent and predictable routine around when screens appear, and a genuinely attractive alternative waiting nearby, a puzzle on the table, a game set up on the floor, all reduce the friction considerably. The battle usually arises not from the limit itself but from the abruptness of the change and the absence of anything equally engaging to move towards. Your role is to make the alternative irresistible, not simply to remove the thing they want.
Both things can be true simultaneously, and the science does not require us to choose. The preference for simple, open-ended materials has genuine empirical support: Trawick-Smith's TIMPANI research, Dauch's work on toy complexity and play duration, and Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff's studies on playful learning all point in the same direction. Materials that do less allow children to do more, more imagining, more problem-solving, more language, more sustained engagement. Wooden toys tend to have these properties by virtue of their simplicity. The fact that they are also beautiful, durable and carry a certain historical warmth is not a flaw in the argument; it is a reasonable additional reason to choose them.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.