18/02/2026
This is soooo important - please share.
Switch off Youtube and put on traditional type shows with a start and a finish
This is an edited piece from Professor Sam Wass who is submitting evidence for the Dept for Education recommendations on screen time use in early years – including this figure.
20 years ago:
Nearly 1/2 of UK preschool children watched CBeebies each week
Today, only around one in three do.
During the same period, there has been a rapid increase in short-form video content.
Today, 91% of 3-5-year-olds use video-sharing platforms such as YouTube
❌The analysis compares one single 25-minute episode from CBeebies In The Night Garden in 2006 – a popular show at the time and compared it with a 25-minute excerpt of a typical 4-year-old’s viewing content on YouTube Kids, recorded in a recent US study.
Instead of one storyline with one cast of eight characters, the child watching YouTube saw 10 different clips during the same period, featuring 37 different speaking characters in total. 🤯
There were also :
🤯large increases in light information (fast-paced light and colour changes)
🤯sound information (fast-paced volume and pitch changes
🤯Editing speed changed markedly – from one cut every 16.7 seconds on CBeebies to one cut every 1.5 seconds in the YouTube clips.
❗️The makers of screen content are increasingly using fast-paced movement and sound to capture children’s attention
♨️targeting brain mechanisms that automatically attract our attention to things that are moving in our environment-These mechanisms have developed, we think, because as early humans, movement used to signal threat (e.g. predators) or opportunities (e.g. food), so we have evolved to pay instant attention to movement.
Movement-based attention capture is immediate, involuntary, and does not require understanding of the content being viewed
❗️⚠️But there is also good evidence that this shift to fast-paced and unpredictable content may explain the well-replicated correlations between screen use and behavioural dysregulation❗️⭕️
Young brains are more slow-paced than adult brains.
In situations that are too fast-paced and unpredictable, our brains shift into ‘high alert’ mode, to mobilise rapid target detection – an automatic, evolutionary reaction to being in situations that are unpredictable, and so might be dangerous
Changes in the brainstem trigger overall increases in arousal and wakefulness and the sympathetic (‘fight or flight’) nervous system
❌Which is probably why, in the short term at least, children are ratty after they come off screens.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/sam-wass-987513202_today-i-am-submitting-evidence-for-the-forthcoming-activity-7429107771125424128-0ACD?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAADyRRo4BbBItnyvwxb3jZapnL9koFVRa5Tk
