Some basic guidelines for helping parents decide how to use electronic media and social media appropriately and safely for their children would include ... As I said for the very young, really extremely limited screen time for children less than two. And really the feeling is, for 18 months to two years, screen time should be used only in terms of FaceTiming or Skype to communicate with relatives, friends at a distance.
After two years of age, if using appropriate software, there is some feeling and studies that support the positive benefit of using electronic media as a learning tool for children. Though again, hands-on learning with real toys and parental interaction and reading to children in a real way is still thought to be more beneficial overall.
We still feel that just one hour of screen time a day for children two years of age or under is really what we'd recommend as a limit. I think the real limits should be that parents should be in charge and aware of how much kids are on their electronic devices just in general.
For children five and over I think the main message now is to individualize that plan realizing that these electronic devices and media and the information we can get from those devices can be valuable for learning and social experience and exploration of the world. However, there is also a lot of bad in content out there, both bad content and content that is not true or accurate or fact-checked. We have to be careful of where we look even as adults to get our information, because anyone could post anything they want on internet and it may not be necessarily true.
