Screen time for 1 year olds: what a 10-year study found

If you want the short answer on screen time for 1 year olds: the main guidelines still say little or none, apart from video calls with family. A new study from Singapore adds weight to that. It found that screen time at age 1 had the clearest link to weaker school performance and working memory years later, though the link is small for any single child and the study can't show that screens caused it.

In August you may also have seen a headline suggesting screen time made kids sharper. That was a different study, about teenagers. Below is what each one found, how the two fit together, and what's realistic when you have a baby on your hip and need twenty minutes to cook.

A Singapore study followed 502 children from age 1 to 10

The study comes from GUSTO, a long-running Singapore birth cohort, and was published in the World Journal of Pediatrics this year. Parents reported how much time their child spent watching screens at six points: ages 1, 1.5, 2, 3, 6 and 8.

Years later, trained psychologists tested the same children. They measured academic skills at age 9 and working memory (holding and juggling information in your head) at age 10.5. Then the researchers looked at which ages of screen time lined up with the later scores.

That first number is worth sitting with. If your 1-year-old watches a couple of hours a day, you are close to the average in this group of families.

Screen time at age 1 had the strongest link of any age

Before accounting for things like family background, more screen time at every age went with poorer results. Once the researchers adjusted for those factors, the links shrank, but some held. Screen time at ages 1, 1.5 and 6 was linked to lower academic scores at 9. Screen time at ages 1 and 6 was linked to lower working memory at 10.5.

Ages 2 and 3 showed no significant link, and the link came back at 6, around when formal school starts. According to the EurekAlert release, the authors described the age-1 effects as the largest of any point they examined, and called early infancy a window:

About one and a half points per daily hour

Each extra hour a day of screen time at age 1 went with an academic score roughly 1.5 points lower at age 9, and a working memory score about 1.1 points lower at 10.5. Those are modest shifts. The authors say themselves that an extra daily hour may not visibly harm an individual child, but small shifts across a whole population add up, which is why they back a "less is better" approach (ScienceDaily).

The study also has real limits worth knowing:

• It shows associations. Families with more screen time may differ in ways the adjustments didn't capture.
• Screen time was reported by parents, who may over or underestimate.
• All the children were in Singapore.
• It didn't record what children watched, or whether a parent watched with them. The authors want future research on exactly that.

The 'screens make kids smarter' headline was about 15-year-olds

A week earlier, a University of Jyväskylä release reported that Finnish children who built up more screen time over eight years had better cognitive processing as teenagers. The sample was 260 young people with an average age of 15.8, tested on learning, attention and working memory.

It started when the children were already at school, so it tells us nothing about babies. Lead researcher Petri Jalanko suggests that what children do on screens is probably the key factor, and the team stresses the results are associations only. A teenager coding a game and a baby watching autoplay videos are doing very different things, so both findings can be true at once.

Why age 1 might matter: screens crowd out talk

The leading explanation is displacement. At 1, babies learn language and attention mostly through back-and-forth with adults: they babble, you answer, they point, you name the thing. Every hour a screen is on is an hour with less of that.

A 2020 meta-analysis in JAMA Pediatrics pooling 42 studies fits this picture. More screen use, and more background TV, went with weaker language skills. Educational content, watching together and starting screens later went with stronger language. All of those effects were small, which matches the Singapore findings.

Toddler screen time guidelines in 2026: what still applies

The WHO's 2019 guidance is the one with numbers. No screen time under 1, sedentary screen time not recommended at age 1, and no more than an hour a day from 2 to 4, with less being better.

The American Academy of Pediatrics now frames things around its 5 Cs: your child, the content, calm (how your child settles and regulates), crowding out (what screens replace) and communication. For under 18 months, video chats are fine and other media isn't recommended. The AAP also suggests avoiding screens as the go-to for stopping crying, getting a baby to sleep, or keeping them busy at meals.

A February 2026 AAP policy statement pushes further in the same direction, putting more attention on how apps are designed to keep people watching. So the guidance has shifted away from a single minute count, but the advice for babies hasn't softened.

Your own phone is part of the picture

If displacement is what matters, then the screen doesn't have to be in the baby's hands. Twenty minutes of you scrolling on the sofa while they play on the rug is also twenty minutes of less talk. This isn't a reason for guilt. Parents of small children are tired, and feeds are built to be hard to put down (more on that in our piece on passive scrolling).

The fixes are boring and they work: leave the phone charging in another room during floor play, or move feed apps off the home screen so checking messages doesn't turn into half an hour of Reels.

A low-effort plan for the next few weeks

1. 01
   Turn off background TV

   if nobody is actually watching, switch it off, since background TV was linked to weaker language.

2. 02
   Keep video calls

   calls with grandparents are back-and-forth talk, and the AAP treats them as fine for babies.

3. 03
   Pick one swap moment

   choose mealtimes, nappy changes or bedtime and replace the screen there with narrating what you're doing.

4. 04
   Drop one hour

   if your baby watches two or three hours a day, cutting one daily hour moves things in the right direction.

5. 05
   Think ahead to age 6

   the link returned at school entry, so household screen habits set now are worth keeping in mind.