Jonathan Bernard is a researcher at the Center for Research into Epidemiology and Statistics. Bernard conducts research on the exposure of young children to screens and its influence on their development and health. He published a major study on the subject in September 2023, using data from almost 14,000 children from 2-5.5 years old has, like others before it, demonstrated a negative relationship between screen exposure time and child development. He explained that it also showed that this relationship is reduced when family environment is taken into account.

Children’s overexposure to screens has become a political issue. But at what point, at what threshold, are we doing “harm?” Many parents are asking themselves this question.

The word “overexposure” has entered common parlance, but I have certain reservations about using it because of its vagueness. It refers to children’s exposure going beyond health recommendations, without precisely defining this “beyond.” Is it by a little? By a lot? By how much, precisely? And at what age, exactly?

Moreover, the word cannot be understood if we don’t keep in mind the diverse and sometimes conflicting official recommendations on the subject. Both the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend that children should not be exposed to screens before the age of two. In France, the ANSES [National Agency for Food Security, Environment and Work] takes the same line, but other bodies, such as the High Council for Public Health, recommend waiting until the age of three, corresponding to the age at which children start kindergarten.

There are also the “3-6-9-12” guidelines developed by psychiatrist Serge Tisseron: no screens before age 3, no portable games consoles before age 6, no internet before age 9, and no unaccompanied internet before age 12. Rather than talking about scientific thresholds or prohibitions, I prefer to talk about benchmarks.

Do we know how many young children are exposed beyond these benchmarks? And for how long?

We examined data from almost 14,000 children in the French ELFE cohort [the first nationwide longitudinal study devoted to tracking children from birth to adulthood]. These are children born in 2011 on whom we collected data from the ages of two to five and a half years, between 2013 and 2017. Parents reported their daily screen time.

We were able to deduce, for example, that at age two, the average daily exposure is 56 minutes, and that already 2% of children of this age are being exposed to a screen – usually television – for more than four hours a day. For an age group with 750,000 children, that means 15,000. So, this is a figure to be put into perspective, even though it’s already far too many. At the age of three and a half, average exposure is 80 minutes, and 4% of children are watching TV for more than four hours a day. At 5 and a half, we’re averaging an hour and a half of exposure every day, with 5% of the cohort exceeding four hours a day, or one child in 20. This is more than enough time to fill several pediatric consultations.

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