Screen Time Calculator

Pick the child's age group, then enter how many hours they sleep, how many they spend at school or nursery, how long they take over meals, and how many hours they spend on other named activities (sports, homework, reading, other). The tool calculates the total awake hours (24 minus sleep), subtracts the committed time (school, meals, activities), and shows you the discretionary hours - the genuine 'what do they do with this' time of the day. Then it shows the recommended screen time for that age band as a percentage of those discretionary hours.

A typical 7-year-old example: 10 hours sleep, 6 hours school, 2 hours meals, 1 hour sports, 1.5 hours homework, 0.5 hours reading, 1 hour other. That is 12 hours committed plus 10 hours sleep, leaving 2 hours discretionary. AAP guidance for ages 6-12 caps screen time at around 2 hours of recreational screen use. So 100 percent of the discretionary time becomes screen time if you allow the maximum, which is the surface-level shocker most parents need to see written down. Most paediatricians recommend filling at least half that discretionary time with non-screen activities (outdoor play, free play, family time) and saving the maximum-screen days for genuinely tired or unwell evenings.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), and World Health Organization broadly agree on five age bands. Under 18 months: avoid screens entirely except for video calls with family. 18 months to 2 years: only high-quality educational content, co-watched with a parent, no more than 1 hour total. 2-5 years: maximum 1 hour per day of high-quality programming, balanced with free play and outdoor time. 6-12 years: consistent limits, balanced with school work, sleep, exercise and family time; loose 2-hour ceiling for recreational use. 13-18 years: focus on responsible use rather than hard caps, with bedroom-screen-free policies during school nights.

These are guidelines, not commandments. The RCPCH explicitly says there is no scientifically established 'safe' limit; the focus should be on whether screens are interfering with sleep, exercise, family interaction, and school. A 9-year-old doing 90 minutes of educational coding plus a bedtime audiobook is fundamentally different from a 9-year-old doing 90 minutes of TikTok in bed. The calculator helps you see the budget; the harder parenting question is what fills it.

Five rules that consistently produce better outcomes than rigid hour caps. First, no screens at the dinner table; this protects family conversation. Second, no screens in the bedroom from age 5 onwards; this protects sleep, the single highest-impact health metric for children. Third, content matters more than duration; 30 minutes of TikTok is more cognitively expensive than 60 minutes of a slow Studio Ghibli film. Fourth, weekends are different from school nights; a longer Saturday-morning film does not need to come out of the weekday budget. Fifth, model what you want; children of parents who scroll on phones constantly use roughly twice as much screen time as children of parents who do not.

Pair this calculator with the [Sleep Calculator](/sleep-calculator) to see how screen time interacts with the recommended sleep window for the same age. The [Chore Chart Generator](/chore-chart-generator) is useful for the alternative-activity question - what to fill the discretionary hours with that is not screen-based - and the [Rainy Day Schedule Generator](/rainy-day-schedule-generator) covers school-holiday days when the structure of school is missing.