New American Academy Of Pediatrics Screen Time Recommendations Still Don’t Make a Passing Grade

In October, 2016, the American Academy of Pediatrics released new screen time recommendations for children, both toddlers and older kids. In many respects, the new policies are an improvement over the old. Gone is the nonsensical 2-hour a day screen time maximum for older kids that had been widely quoted for years. And the AAP appears to have acknowledged that screens are often integrated in our lives in ways that are productive rather than harmful. However, the new screen time recommendations also reveal just how fraught the entire enterprise of giving these recommendations is. The AAP continues to provide biased and one-sided coverage of many issues related to media effects, and continues to rely on authors with potential conflicts of interest to write their policy statements.

Further, implicit in these new recommendations is the fact that the AAP had simply been wrong for many years in what they had been telling parents, but this goes unacknowledged. As such, recommendations by the AAP appear to constitute little more than an attempt by a professional guild to remain politically and socially relevant on an issue for which they increasingly appear to be functioning as society’s nervous nanny rather than a neutral and objective scientific body.