You probably can’t, by the clock, and since January you are not being asked to. The American Academy of Pediatrics withdrew its two-hour limit and replaced it with no number at all. What works instead is changing what the time is made of, and what that time is taking the place of.
What actually changed. The 2016 guidance set two hours or less a day. The guidance that replaced it in January 2026 sets no numerical limit. That is not a loosening of the rules. It is an admission that the clock was measuring the wrong thing.
Why the clock was the wrong instrument. Thirty minutes of a feed that decides what comes next is not the same experience as thirty minutes of a programme your child chose and will finish. Counting both as thirty minutes tells you almost nothing about either. The design of what is on the screen does more work than the duration, and the duration is the only part most households have been tracking.
What the guidance recommends instead. A written family media plan rather than rules improvised at the point of conflict, so the argument happens once rather than nightly; device-free meals, shared devices rather than one each. Alternative activities deliberately provided, because taking time away only works if something fills the time left. And looking at why a child is reaching for a screen, whether that is boredom, isolation, or something that warrants a conversation with your GP, rather than only at how long they stay there.
So what this means for you right now
Swap the unit. Instead of “one hour of screen time”, try “an hour of YouTube but not Shorts”. Instead of “two hours of gaming”, try “gaming until dinner, with chat switched off”. You are limiting the design rather than the minutes, and the design is the part that makes stopping hard. A child who has watched one chosen programme has had a different evening from a child who has been handed forty short videos they did not choose, even where the clock says the same thing.
Then ask what it is displacing. Not whether two hours is too many, but whether those two hours are coming out of sleep, movement, or time with people. If they are not coming out of any of the three, the number matters much less than it feels like it should.
And write it down. The one thing that makes it work it writing it down. There are times when our own children’s screentime has been out of control and it’s because we haven’t stuck to the boundaries.
The full detail of what changed in the guidance, and what the Academy replaced the two hours with, is in our breakdown of the January change.
Checked 23 September 2026.
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