Young Children and Video Games: What the Evidence Says

A Dirt Dog research note · Mind Right Media, LLC · Version 1.0, September 2026

What this is. A plain-language summary, with sources, of what major pediatric and public-health bodies advise about young children and screens, what published research has found about video games and children, and how we thought about that evidence when we designed Dirt Dog. We wrote it because parents asked us, and because we would rather point to the research than make claims of our own.

What this is not. It is not medical, psychological, educational or parenting advice, and it is not evidence about Dirt Dog. Dirt Dog has not been studied by anyone, including us. Nothing here means that Dirt Dog teaches anything, improves anything, or is safer or healthier than another game, another activity, or no screens at all. We are parents and software makers, not researchers or clinicians. Where studies disagree we say so. Please talk to your pediatrician about your own child. Sources are numbered and listed at the end; we have tried to describe them accurately and welcome corrections at [email protected].

1. The starting point: young children already play

Whatever one thinks screens should look like in early childhood, they are already there. Common Sense Media's 2025 census of media use by American children aged 0 to 8 reports screen use holding steady at roughly two and a half hours a day on average, rising to about three and a half hours among 5- to 8-year-olds. Forty percent of children have their own tablet by age 2, and time spent gaming in this age group rose by about 65 percent over four years, while traditional television declined and short-form video grew. Three in four parents surveyed said they worry about their children's device use.¹

That is the context for the rest of this note: the practical question for most families is not whether a young child will ever touch a screen but what is on it, for how long, and with whom.

2. What pediatric and public-health bodies advise

American Academy of Pediatrics

The AAP's 2016 policy statement Media and Young Minds is still the most-cited guidance for the under-fives. For children aged 2 to 5 it recommends limiting screen use to about one hour a day of high-quality programming, watched or played together with a parent so the adult can help the child understand and apply what they see. For 18- to 24-month-olds it suggests only high-quality content with a parent, and for younger infants it advises avoiding screens other than video chat.² The companion statement for 5- to 18-year-olds moves away from a single number and asks families to set consistent limits that protect sleep, physical activity, meals, school and friends, to keep devices out of bedrooms, and to write a Family Media Plan.³

The AAP's current family-facing guidance, the "5 Cs" (child, content, calm, crowding out, communication), goes further in the same direction: it emphasises the individual child, the quality of the content, whether media is being used to soothe rather than as one activity among many, what it is displacing, and whether parents and children talk about it. The AAP notes that rules focused on balance, content, co-viewing and communication are associated with better outcomes than rules focused only on time.⁴

World Health Organization

The WHO's 2019 guidelines on physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep for children under 5 recommend no sedentary screen time at all for children under 2 and no more than one hour a day for ages 2 to 4, adding that less is better. The same guidelines call for at least 180 minutes of physical activity spread across the day and for adequate sleep, and they treat screen time primarily as a sedentary-behaviour issue.⁵

What we take from this. Both bodies frame the question as one of balance, content and adult involvement rather than screens being good or bad in themselves. Neither endorses any product, and neither would consider a game a substitute for play in the physical world, sleep, or time with people.

3. What research says about video games and children's well-being

The popular picture of games as uniformly harmful, or uniformly beneficial, is not what the larger and more careful studies find.

Time and well-being. A 2017 study of 120,115 English 15-year-olds tested the "Goldilocks hypothesis": moderate digital use was associated with slightly higher well-being than none, and only high levels were associated with lower well-being. Across all activities studied, screen time explained less than one percent of the variation in well-being.⁶ A 2022 study that linked six weeks of actual play records from 38,935 players, supplied by seven game publishers, to well-being surveys found little evidence that time spent playing caused changes in well-being in either direction.⁷ Both studies concern teenagers and adults, not preschoolers; we cite them because they are among the largest and because they use measured rather than self-reported play. Evidence of this quality does not yet exist for 3- to 7-year-olds.
Cognition. A 2022 analysis of 9- and 10-year-olds in the large American ABCD cohort reported that children who played video games regularly performed better on tests of response inhibition and working memory than non-players. Readers should know that the article was later retracted and replaced in 2023 to correct how the design was described (cross-sectional rather than case-control) and to acknowledge that the groups differed in sex, race and ethnicity, family income and some mental-health scores. The corrected paper reports similar associations, but an association in a single snapshot cannot show that gaming caused the difference.⁸
Creativity. An experiment with 352 undergraduates found that a short session of free play in the sandbox game Minecraft led to higher scores on a creativity task than watching television or playing a driving game, but that giving players creative instructions removed the benefit. The authors title the paper "with caveats" for a reason: the effect was found in adults, immediately after play, on a laboratory task.⁹

What we take from this. For older children and adults, the amount of play seems to matter far less than public debate suggests, and what people play and why may matter more. For young children the honest answer is that high-quality evidence is thin. That is the main reason we do not make claims about what Dirt Dog does to a child.

4. Interactivity, play and learning

A separate body of work looks not at games specifically but at what makes any screen experience worthwhile for a young child.

The "four pillars". A 2015 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest examined the science of learning against the flood of apps labelled "educational" and proposed four features that distinguish experiences more likely to support learning: the child is actively involved (minds-on, not just tapping), engaged without distraction, the content is meaningful to the child's life, and there is social interaction, ideally with a real person. The authors are blunt that most "educational" apps have no evidence behind the label.¹⁰
Learning through play. The LEGO Foundation's 2017 evidence review describes playful learning as experiences that are actively engaging, meaningful, iterative, joyful and social, and summarises research linking such play to a broad range of skills in early childhood. It concerns play in general, not screens.¹¹
Interactive versus passive. In a 2016 experiment with 116 two-year-olds, the youngest toddlers learned a new word from a touch-screen video only when the screen required them to touch the specific place where the object appeared; passive watching did not work for them, while slightly older toddlers learned either way. Contingency (the screen responding to the child) seems to help the youngest learners, though the effect depends on age and design.¹²

What we take from this. The features that researchers associate with worthwhile screen time are about design: open-ended action, few distractions, content that connects to a child's world, and a grown-up nearby. Those were our design goals. Having those goals is not the same as having evidence that we met them, or that meeting them produces any particular result.

5. Risks worth designing against

Sleep

A 2015 systematic review of 67 studies of school-aged children and adolescents found that screen time was associated with worse sleep outcomes, mainly shorter sleep and later bedtimes, in about 90 percent of them.¹³ A 2024 consensus statement from the National Sleep Foundation concludes that screen use in the hour before bed, and devices in the bedroom, are linked to poorer sleep across ages and recommends keeping screens out of the bedtime routine.¹⁴ Dirt Dog's night is calm on purpose, but a calm game at bedtime is still a screen at bedtime.

Eyes

A 2021 systematic review and meta-analysis in The Lancet Digital Health found that most studies report an association between digital screen exposure, including longer time and earlier first exposure, and a higher risk of myopia (short-sightedness) in children and young adults, while noting that findings were inconsistent across studies.¹⁵ Time outdoors is the best-supported protective factor in this literature, which is one more argument for balance.

Photosensitive seizures

About 3 percent of people with epilepsy are photosensitive, meaning flashing lights or certain patterns can trigger seizures; the sensitivity is more common in children and adolescents and can exist in people with no previous seizure.¹⁶ The video-game industry has carried a standard warning for decades (Nintendo's materials estimate about 1 in 4,000 people may be affected) together with precautions: play in a well-lit room, at a distance, on a smaller screen, not when tired, with a 10- to 15-minute break every hour.¹⁷ We repeat that warning on our health and safety page and avoided rapid flashing in the game's design.

Manipulative design, money and data

Much of the public concern about children's games is not about play itself but about business models built around it. In 2022 the US Federal Trade Commission announced settlements totalling 520 million dollars with the maker of Fortnite over alleged violations of children's privacy law and the use of "dark patterns" that led players, including children, into unwanted purchases.¹⁸ The FTC's amended COPPA rule, finalised in January 2025, tightens the rules on collecting children's data and on using persistent identifiers.¹⁹ The Children's Advertising Review Unit's 2021 guidelines set self-regulatory standards for advertising and in-game purchase prompts aimed at children under 13.²⁰ The FTC's earlier surveys of children's apps found that most gave parents little or no information about what data was collected or whether ads and purchases were present.²¹ These are the practices we chose not to build: Dirt Dog has no advertising, no in-game purchases, no chat, and collects no data from children (see our privacy policy).

Unsubstantiated claims

The FTC has also acted against companies that sold learning or brain-training benefits without evidence. In 2016 the maker of Lumosity paid 2 million dollars to settle charges that it claimed its games would improve performance at school and work and delay cognitive decline without competent and reliable scientific evidence.²² In 2014 the creators of "Your Baby Can Read" agreed to judgments of more than 185 million dollars over claims that infants could learn to read with their products.²³ The standard the FTC applies to health-related claims, restated in its 2022 compliance guidance, is competent and reliable scientific evidence, typically controlled human studies, before a claim is made.²⁴ We do not have that evidence for Dirt Dog, and so we do not make those claims. We would rather describe what is in the game and let parents decide.

6. Designing for well-being: a shared vocabulary

In 2022 UNICEF and the LEGO Group, with the LEGO Foundation, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Games for Change, published the first report of the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) project: a framework of eight child-centred well-being outcomes (including autonomy, competence, creativity, emotional regulation, safety and security, social connection, and self-actualisation) intended to give designers and policymakers a common way to talk about how digital play affects children, followed by a design toolbox.²⁵ We found it a useful checklist for asking better questions of our own design. Using a framework is not evidence of outcomes; it is a way of being deliberate.

7. How Dirt Dog's design relates to the evidence

The table below is a statement of intent. The left column is what the literature above suggests matters; the middle is what we built; the right is what it does not mean.

What the evidence points to	What Dirt Dog does	What that does not mean
Balance and limits, decided by families (AAP, WHO)	A parent-mode play-time limit and a break timer that pauses the game and suggests a stretch; sessions default to short.	The timer is a convenience a child or device can defeat; it is not supervision, and we make no promise about how long a child will play.
Co-play and communication (AAP 5 Cs)	Every message is spoken aloud with a picture; numbers and prices are visible; a "photo" button and a read-aloud helper give grown-ups something to talk about.	The game does not know whether a grown-up is present and cannot replace one.
Active, engaged, meaningful, social (four pillars)	Open-ended building with no score, no timers inside play, no pop-ups; themes from a child's world: home, neighbours, animals, weather, fixing what breaks.	We have not measured whether children experience it that way, and the "social" pillar depends on who is in the room.
Avoid manipulative monetisation and data collection (FTC, CARU, COPPA)	One purchase by a grown-up on our website; nothing to buy inside the game; no ads, no chat, no accounts, no analytics.	This describes the product's business model, not its effect on a child.
Protect sleep and eyes; standard health precautions	A calm palette, slow day-night cycle, no rapid flashing; health warnings and precautions published and shown in the game.	Any screen at bedtime is still a screen at bedtime; outdoor play and rest are up to the family.
Gentle content for young children	No violence, weapons, death, scary imagery or strangers; setbacks are small and fixable (a sad house, a polite crew, an ask-first prompt).	"Gentle" describes content. It is not a claim about behaviour, mood, or development, and the game is not rated by any board.

8. Practical suggestions from the guidance above

These come from the AAP and WHO materials cited, not from us, and they apply to any screen:

Decide on limits that fit your child and your day, and keep them consistent; for 2- to 4-year-olds the WHO's figure is an hour or less, and the AAP's is about an hour of high-quality content for 2- to 5-year-olds.
Play together when you can, and talk about it: what did you build, who lives there, what happened to the sad house.
Keep screens out of the hour before bed and out of bedrooms.
Balance screens with active play, outdoor time and sleep; if a game is crowding those out, that is the signal that matters.
Use the device's own child controls (for example Guided Access or Screen Time on iPad) for young children, whatever the game.
Follow the standard health precautions: a well-lit room, a comfortable distance, breaks every hour, stop if anything feels wrong, and read the seizure warning.

References

Common Sense Media. The 2025 Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight. February 2025. commonsensemedia.org
American Academy of Pediatrics, Council on Communications and Media. Media and Young Minds. Pediatrics 138(5): e20162591, 2016. publications.aap.org
American Academy of Pediatrics, Council on Communications and Media. Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents. Pediatrics 138(5): e20162592, 2016. publications.aap.org
American Academy of Pediatrics, Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. The 5 Cs of Media Use; and HealthyChildren.org, Kids & Screen Time: How to Use the 5 C's of Media Guidance. aap.org · healthychildren.org
World Health Organization. Guidelines on physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep for children under 5 years of age. Geneva, 2019. who.int
Przybylski AK, Weinstein N. A Large-Scale Test of the Goldilocks Hypothesis: Quantifying the Relations Between Digital-Screen Use and the Mental Well-Being of Adolescents. Psychological Science 28(2): 204–215, 2017. journals.sagepub.com
Vuorre M, Johannes N, Magnusson K, Przybylski AK. Time spent playing video games is unlikely to impact well-being. Royal Society Open Science 9(7): 220411, 2022. royalsocietypublishing.org
Chaarani B, et al. Association of Video Gaming With Cognitive Performance Among Children. JAMA Network Open 5(10): e2235721, 2022; and Notice of Retraction and Replacement, JAMA Network Open, 2023. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · jamanetwork.com (notice)
Blanco-Herrera JA, Gentile DA, Rokkum JN. Video Games can Increase Creativity, but with Caveats. Creativity Research Journal 31(2): 119–131, 2019. tandfonline.com
Hirsh-Pasek K, Zosh JM, Golinkoff RM, Gray JH, Robb MB, Kaufman J. Putting Education in "Educational" Apps: Lessons From the Science of Learning. Psychological Science in the Public Interest 16(1): 3–34, 2015. journals.sagepub.com
Zosh JM, Hopkins EJ, Jensen H, Liu C, Neale D, Hirsh-Pasek K, Solis SL, Whitebread D. Learning through play: a review of the evidence. The LEGO Foundation, 2017. learningthroughplay.com (PDF)
Kirkorian HL, Choi K, Pempek TA. Toddlers' Word Learning From Contingent and Noncontingent Video on Touch Screens. Child Development 87(2): 405–413, 2016. srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Hale L, Guan S. Screen time and sleep among school-aged children and adolescents: A systematic literature review. Sleep Medicine Reviews 21: 50–58, 2015. sciencedirect.com
National Sleep Foundation. The impact of screen use on sleep health across the lifespan: A National Sleep Foundation consensus statement. Sleep Health, 2024. sleephealthjournal.org
Foreman J, et al. Association between digital smart device use and myopia: a systematic review and meta-analysis. The Lancet Digital Health 3(12): e806–e818, 2021. thelancet.com
Epilepsy Foundation. Photosensitivity and Seizures. epilepsy.com
Nintendo of America. Information About Photosensitivity and Health & Safety Precautions. nintendo.com support
US Federal Trade Commission. Fortnite Video Game Maker Epic Games to Pay More Than Half a Billion Dollars over FTC Allegations of Privacy Violations and Unwanted Charges. Press release, December 19, 2022. ftc.gov
US Federal Trade Commission. FTC Finalizes Changes to Children's Privacy Rule Limiting Companies' Ability to Monetize Kids' Data. Press release, January 16, 2025. ftc.gov
BBB National Programs, Children's Advertising Review Unit. Self-Regulatory Guidelines for Children's Advertising, revised 2021 (effective January 1, 2022). bbbprograms.org
US Federal Trade Commission staff. Mobile Apps for Kids: Disclosures Still Not Making the Grade. December 2012. ftc.gov
US Federal Trade Commission. Lumosity to Pay $2 Million to Settle FTC Deceptive Advertising Charges for Its "Brain Training" Program. Press release, January 5, 2016. ftc.gov
US Federal Trade Commission. Defendants Settle FTC Charges Related to "Your Baby Can Read" Program. Press release, August 2014. ftc.gov
US Federal Trade Commission. Health Products Compliance Guidance. December 2022. ftc.gov (PDF)
UNICEF and partners. Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children: Digital technology, play and child well-being. UNICEF Innocenti, 2022. unicef.org (PDF)

© 2026 Mind Right Media, LLC. This note may be shared freely with attribution and without alteration. It summarises third-party sources that are not affiliated with or endorsing Dirt Dog. It is informational only and is not advice or a claim about Dirt Dog's effects. See our Terms.