Screen Time by Age Chart
A reference card for the fridge. The AAP replaced its hour limits in February 2026, so this prints what the guidance says now, and what it means at home.
Screen Time by Age Chart
Nearly every chart of this kind prints an hour count per age band. The American Academy of Pediatrics moved away from that framing in February 2026, replacing the clock with five questions about the child, the content, and what the screen is displacing. This card carries both: the risks named for each age, and the five questions that replaced the limits.
| Age | What the guidance names as the risk | What that looks like at home |
|---|---|---|
| Under 18 months | Infants learn from real-world interaction. Heavy solo screen use is linked to language delay, social difficulty and disrupted sleep. | Video calls with a person on the other end. Nothing playing in the background while they play. |
| 18 months to 5 years | Developmental delay, sleep problems, and time lost to screens that would have gone to play and exploration. | Watch it with them and talk about it afterwards. Keep the hour before bed clear. |
| 6 to 12 years | Sleep disruption, difficulty at school, attention problems, less physical activity. | Screens out of the bedroom overnight. Homework in a room with other people in it. |
| 13 to 18 years | Sleep loss, peer pressure, less exercise, and exposure to content promoting self-harm or disordered eating. | Phones charge outside the bedroom. Agree what they will bring to you, rather than what you will monitor. |
The five questions that replaced the hour limits
- Child. This particular child. Their age, their temperament, and what they are like in the ten minutes after a screen goes off.
- Content. What is actually on the screen, and whether anyone is watching it with them.
- Calm. Whether the screen has become how they settle themselves, and what else is available when they need to.
- Crowding out. What the screen is displacing: sleep, movement, play, homework, time with people.
- Communication. Whether you talk about what they see, and whether they would tell you if something went wrong.
The hour counts still circulating come from guidance that has been replaced. Two hours of a film watched together was never the same as two hours of autoplay alone in a bedroom, and a number on its own could not tell them apart.
If you want one number anyway, the hour before sleep is the one worth defending.
Sources
no-distractions.com
Why these are paper
Because a tracking app that lives on the phone is asking the device causing the problem to also be the place you reflect on it, and because opening an app to log something is one more reason to unlock a screen. A sheet on a kitchen counter or a fridge door is visible to everyone it concerns without anyone having to go looking, which matters most for the household ones: an agreement nobody can find is an agreement nobody follows.
Every printable here is free, sits behind no email address or account, and is yours to edit. Print it, or save it as a PDF from your browser’s print dialog.
How to actually use one
- Fill it in at a fixed time. A log completed from memory at the end of the week is a different measurement from one completed each evening, and the difference is larger than most people expect.
- Do not change anything in the first week. Measuring a habit tends to shift it before you have deliberately changed anything, so a baseline collected while you are already trying to improve is not a baseline. Watch first, act second.
- Write the reason, not just the number. A total tells you how much. The column that changes behaviour is the one recording what you opened the phone for, because the useful finding is usually how many pickups had no purpose you could name afterwards.
- Fill in the household ones together. A rule written by one person and handed to another is a rule that gets tested. The clause most templates leave out is what happens when it gets broken, and agreeing that in advance, while nobody is defending anything, is the whole reason to write it down.
What a sheet cannot do
It cannot tell you whether your number is bad, because there is no threshold to compare it against: four hours in two deliberate sittings is a different situation from four hours in ninety scattered pickups, and no printable can distinguish them for you. It also cannot make a change stick on its own. The tracking is what tells you which change is worth making, and the change is a separate piece of work.