Sweden set age-banded screen limits for children

The short answer

Sweden's Public Health Agency has set out age-banded recommended limits on recreational screen time, including advice that children under two should not use screens at all, but these are public health recommendations rather than a law, and the agency frames them around balance with sleep, activity and other needs rather than as a fixed rule for every family.

What the evidence says

The Public Health Agency of Sweden, working with the Swedish Media Council, issued recommendations on children's and young people's screen use in September 2024. As the agency's easy-read guidance for children aged 0 to 2 states, children in this age band should not use screens at all, with limited exceptions such as video calls with relatives and looking at photos alongside an adult, on the grounds that very young children's eyes and brains are not developed to process screen content and that no research shows screens benefit this age group. The recommendations then set maximum daily limits by age band: the agency's account of the research behind them, with its guidance for 13 to 18 year olds, set a maximum of one hour a day for ages 2 to 5, one to two hours for ages 6 to 12, two to three hours for ages 13 to 18, and advice to wait until 13 for a smartphone. For teenagers, schoolwork or disability-aid use is not counted against the limit, and the agency recommends avoiding screens thirty to sixty minutes before bedtime.

For context

These are recommendations from a health agency, not legislation, so there is no penalty for exceeding them, and the agency frames the limits as part of a broader daily balance including sleep, activity, schoolwork and time with others, not a target for its own sake. They draw on a wider evidence synthesis produced jointly with the Swedish Media Council, and as with any national guideline, the numeric thresholds reflect a judgement about where to draw a line in a continuous, individually variable relationship, not a bright line from one experiment.

A practical next step

Rather than aiming for an exact hourly count, you could use the age-band figures as a rough check on a typical day and pay closer attention to what screen time is displacing, such as sleep or outdoor activity, than to the total on its own.

• On an average day, is screen time in our household displacing sleep, physical activity or unstructured time with others?
• Does our child's school-related screen use get folded into a family limit that was really meant for recreational use?
• Is a device routinely present in the hour before bedtime, regardless of the hours used earlier in the day?

The Swedish recommendations are a clear, age-banded reference point rather than a mandate, and treating them as one input into a family's own routine, alongside sleep and activity needs, fits how the issuing agency itself frames them.