Watch any family at a restaurant table, and you can usually find the youngest child by the glow. A phone propped against a water bottle, or held out by a parent between bites. Nobody planned it.
Because the alternative, a restless three-year-old in a public room, is harder, it happened.
The Indian Academy of Paediatrics takes a firmer line than most households manage. Under two, no screens at all, apart from the occasional video call to a grandparent. Between two and five, anything past an hour a day is excessive. Set that against reality. The more revealing finding is the mechanism. Children handed a device during feeding had substantially higher odds of excessive use. The screen is not winning a fight. It is filling a vacuum, with the reluctant consent of tired adults never given a clear reason to think otherwise. Framing this as a screen problem is slightly misleading. A screen is a container. The useful question is what it displaced.
Because they were unsure limits were needed, so did children whose parents doubted that screens affected speech development, and children whose parents had set no limits at all — not out of indifference, but. Studies of Indian preschoolers put average daily screen time at around 2.7 hours, several times the ceiling, in the years when a child’s brain does more foundational work than it ever will again. A 2024 survey of more than 3,600 parents of two-to-five-year-olds across five northern states found the strongest predictors of heavy use had little to do with technology.
It is worth registering how unusual that is. A head of government, on Teachers’ Day, making the case for play. What distinguishes Bachpan Manao is register: an invitation to every caring adult rather than a warning issued to failing parents. That choice is strategically sound. The research survey evidence stated above points to a belief gap, not a willpower gap, and campaigns that shame parents produce guilt rather than a changed afternoon. The NDTV partnership extended Bachpan Manao’s reach. Parallel gatherings to celebrate childhood (Bachpan Manao) in Mumbai and Bengaluru drew families, teachers and Anganwadi workers. Bachpan Manao campaign’s first-year pledge put it in four words: Less Screen, More Play. Not a ban, not a threshold, not a lecture about neural pruning…a direction of travel, asking adults to trade screen time for the outdoors and the real world. The modesty is the point. Most parents are not defending screen use; they are unsure what to put in its place. A pledge asking for less rather than none is one they can keep on a Wednesday evening when the child is fractious and dinner is late. The second year widens the frame. Under the banner Bachpan is Gr8, it asks adults to see childhood differently and to embrace eight wonders of childhood, among them play, creativity, nature, stories and quiet time. The last and most important one – quiet time. A merely anti-screen campaign would never have included quiet time. Boredom, stillness, the unfilled hour: these are not gaps waiting to be plugged with something more productive. They are where a child learns to be alone with themselves, a skill no device has ever taught anyone. A pledge is easy to sign and easy to forget. Its value lies in whether it converts into a different Wednesday. So the questions are small and domestic. Can a household get through one meal a day without a device on the table, the practice most strongly linked to heavy use? Can an adult sit through twenty minutes of a bored child without reaching for a remedy? Can a neighbourhood decide that children playing noisily outside after six is a sound worth protecting? None of that requires policy. It requires a large number of adults deciding, more or less at once, that the hour the screen occupies belongs to something else. Are we prepared for sacrifice to get that hour back? (About the Author: Deepika Mogilishetty is the Chief, Policy & Partnerships for EkStep Foundation. She leads the foundation’s work on early years leveraging the power of networks and narratives to bring focus and attention to the growth and development of children in the early years.)
Bachpan Manao campaign launched by EkStep Foundation in September 2023 is an initiative to address this need for Play. It began with more than 77 partner organisations; that number has since crossed a 100. The subject is the first 8 years of a child’s life, or the first 400 weeks, to make the point that the window is small and does not reopen. At Ahmedabad’s International Kite Festival in January 2025, children between four and eight spent a day making kites from sustainable materials — imagination, paper and string, which is roughly the whole argument in miniature. During the course of 9 months, the pledge crossed 75k.
For a four-year-old, the answer is almost always play. Not the organised, equipment-heavy, adult-supervised kind. The kind that involves other children, no instructions, a long boring middle, and an argument about the rules. This is where a child learns to negotiate, to wait, to lose, to build something out of nothing and defend it when someone knocks it over. It is not a break from development. It is the machinery of it. The trouble is that play has no advocate in the room. A worksheet produces a visible output. A screen produces visible calm. Play produces noise, mess, scraped knees and nothing to show for the afternoon. The remedy was not confiscation but substitution — sports, physical play, creative work. He asked teachers to speak to parents about late-night device use. And keep the child alive inside each student, which he suggested was only possible if they (teachers) kept the child alive in themselves.
He said, it had hardened into a form of addiction.
It is pertinent to note that earlier this month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi met the winners of the National Teachers’ Awards and spent much of the conversation on screen time.
