TRUE OR FALSE. Do children spend almost as much time in front of screens as they do at school, as Gabriel Attal claims?

The Minister of National Education Gabriel Attal recommends alternatives to screens so that children spend less time in front of television, the internet or video games.

A child under six years old “spends almost as much time during the year in front of a screen as at school”. This is an observation that the Minister of Education repeats from interview to interview. Gabriel Attal said it to the magazine Madame Figaro on November 30. He said it again to franceinfo on December 6, when he was a guest on 8:30 a.m.

Touting alternatives to screens, such as small radio sets for children or audio players, Gabriel Attal said on franceinfo that he was struck by “a recent study which showed that a child under six spends an average of 830 hours in front of a screen over the year. Do you know how much time they spend at school over the year? 860 hours”. So it would be good “nearly” that much time, according to these figures. Are they true or false?

What Gabriel Attal says is rather true, children under six years old spend “almost” as much time in front of screens as at school if we base ourselves on a survey, but this can be qualified with a another study.

850 hours per year in front of a screen compared to 864 at school, according to a survey

In reality, no study gives a precise figure of 830 hours spent in front of a screen each year for a child under six years old. This duration is the result of a calculation carried out from an Ipsos survey with Bayard/Milan and Unique Heritage Media published in March 2022. The Junior Connect’ survey questioned 4,000 children aged one to 19 or their parents on their screen habits, in spring and fall 2021. It concludes that a child aged one to six spends on average 6h07 in front of television per week, as well as 4h06 playing video games and 6:08 a.m. on the internet, or 16:21 p.m. in front of a screen per week, as reported by the daily The echoes .

Gabriel Attal’s team multiplied the number of hours – 16 – by the number of weeks in a year – 52 – and found that a young child spent 832 hours per year in front of a screen. Except that she forgot to count the minutes and that has consequences on the annual duration. The 21 minutes of screen time per week which were not taken into account, however, amount to 18 hours more after a year, reproducing the same calculation as the minister. Children aged one to six therefore spend not 830 hours but 850 hours in front of a screen per year on average.

850 hours is even closer to the number of hours spent in class at nursery and primary school, set at 864 hours as shown by this decree taken by the former Minister of Education Najat Vallaud -Belkacem in 2015 to set teaching times and which is still in force.

571 hours per year maximum, according to a study by Public Health France

However, these figures are taken from a single survey and can be qualified with a larger study from Public Health France published in April 2023. It questioned the families of more than 18,000 children, representative of births in 2011, to carry out a French longitudinal study since childhood, or Elfe study. Between May 2013 and April 2014, she asked them about screen time per day when the children were two years old, then the same thing when they were three and a half years old between September 2014 and August 2015, and the same again thing when they were five and a half years old between January and September 2017.

According to this study, a two-year-old child spends 56 minutes in front of a screen per day on average, or 340 hours per year. A three and a half year old child spends 80 minutes per day in front of a screen on average, or 486 hours per year. And a five and a half year old child spends 94 minutes a day in front of a screen, or 571 hours a year. For comparison, adults spend on average 32 hours per week in front of a screen, or 1,664 hours per year, according to the 2022 digital barometer from Arcom, the audiovisual and digital regulator, and Arcep, the regulator of electronic communications.

The finding is therefore a little less alarming than what the Minister of Education states, even if children’s screen time remains high and higher than the recommendations of Arcom, which recommends not exposing children at all to under three years old to screens and to limit viewing time to 30 or 40 minutes per day for a child between three and eight years old.

Social and regional disparities regarding screens

The Public Health France study also shows strong disparities, particularly social. Thus, the less education the child’s mother has, the more time children spend in front of screens. (The study says nothing about fathers.) The two-year-old child of a woman who studied at least five years after the baccalaureate thus spends more than half as much time in front of a screen as the two-year-old child of a woman who stopped at college.

Children whose mothers were born in sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb or Asia also spend more time in front of screens than those whose mothers were born in Europe. There are also regional disparities in France, with children living in the Hauts-de-France region spending much more time than others in front of a screen.