As a mum to a two-year-old in 2026 there is no shortage of things to make me feel bad about my capabilities as a parent. His snacks aren’t always organic or made from scratch. Some of his toys are plastic and noisy, not wooden and Montessori-inspired. And – most heinous of all – he is sometimes allowed screen time.
Like any good, middle-class millennial mother, I try to approach it “consciously”. There are specific TV conditions in our house – he can watch post-nap to ward off an afternoon meltdown, we always watch together, and we have a strict time-limit of 20 minutes. But more important than how he is watching is what he is watching. OG Thomas the Tank Engine (complete with Ringo Starr’s iconic voiceover), Pingu, Sesame Street, early Wallace and Gromit. I have joined a growing number of parents who almost exclusively choose 90s TV for their children, the very same shows we watched as kids.
So the news that Play School is returning to CBeebies for a new generation – with the BBC promising to retain its mix of stories, movement, poetry and imaginative play – is so welcome. There is something deliciously warm and fuzzy about curling up on the sofa with your toddler to rerun the TV of your childhood. But the appeal of retro screen time is deeper than nostalgia. These shows feel different – slower, less frantic.
The problem with some modern programmes isn’t the content, it’s the pacing. Just flick on popular shows such as Cocomelon, PAW Patrol or Blippi: choppy editing, vivid colours and dizzyingly repetitive soundtracks. I don’t know if this is the norm in all episodes of these shows or if it was just the few episodes I happened to briefly see. If that is overstimulating to a tired woman in her 30s, what does it do to a small person who is still in the process of becoming fully formed? Studies have found that fast-paced cartoons can directly impact a young child’s attention and “executive function” – things like self-regulation and memory.
Earlier this year, the government issued its first screen time guidance for under-fives. Much of the focus was on the clock: how long children should spend in front of screens. But what if we’re counting the wrong thing? Two children can watch 20 minutes of TV and have completely different experiences and reactions based on the quality of that content. As Natalia Kucirkova, a professor of early childhood education, identified in a Guardian article this month: “Good children’s media gives a child time to complete an act of attention. Bad media keeps interrupting that act.”
Choosing older, slower shows has become a simple form of parental quality control. But, like all decisions in modern parenting, this is already becoming yet another shame stick with which to beat parents (especially mothers). I care deeply about the media my child consumes, and worry about a future full of screens that I will have less and less control over. But what I resent is “slow TV” as another badge of the virtuous mother – when the reality is that parents are being asked to make increasingly complex judgments about media, while the media itself is only getting better at capturing attention.
Rather than turn this into another tool for judging parents, we should ask why they have been made solely responsible for fixing a children’s media ecosystem that appears to prioritise engagement retention over development. This can’t be entirely our burden to bear. The government is now planning to restrict social media access for under-16s, but the battle over children’s digital lives must start much earlier.
Screen time has become necessary for many modern parents precisely because we are stretched so thin – juggling work, extortionate childcare costs and dwindling social and community support. Yet we expect those same frazzled, time-poor parents to make conscious, complicated choices every time they turn on the TV, while commercial platforms pour resources into capturing children’s attention from the youngest possible age.
We have seen the impact of rapid-fire digital content on adult brains. We are living it, all of us grappling with our own screen addictions, mourning our own loss of attention span, our disinclination to read and connect with the real world. We cannot allow media companies to apply those same addictive principles to the content they create for society’s most vulnerable, and most porous, brains.
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My son learned a new phrase recently – “Mama, stop phone!” – which sent a monumental pang of guilt and shame through me. Before my little boy is plunged into the dopamine loop of infinite scrolling that I – as an adult – find so hard to escape, I would like to trust that the majority of children’s media he is exposed to is much gentler on his mind. Until that day comes, I’ll be finding refuge in old-school Postman Pat.
