A few weeks ago I was talking with a friend of mine about a new wrinkle in her work schedule. Normally, she worked from home on Tuesdays and was able to crank through most of her emails while her two young children took their afternoon naps. Recently, though, the older child had dropped her nap altogether, and my friend found herself—a woman who hadn’t even owned a TV most of her adult life—turning on Peppa Pig for her daughter every afternoon for an hour and a half. (For the uninitiated, Peppa Pig is a British cartoon about a pig and her animal friends.) “It’s not ideal,” she said. “But what else can I do?”

As it turns out, my friend is violating a recommendation from the venerable World Health Organization (WHO), an agency of the United Nations focused on public health. According to a recent report from the WHO, children between the ages of one and four should spend no more than 60 minutes per day on screens. (“Less is better,” the report cautions.) For children under 12 months, “screen time is not recommended.” A New York Times article about the WHO report acknowledges that “there is limited data on the short- and long-term effects” that exposure to screens even has on children, but cites David Hill, M.D., a pediatrician and the author of a 2018 study from the American Academy of Pediatrics that urges no screen time other than video chatting for kids under 18 months. Hill tells the Times that the WHO appears to be “applying the precautionary principle, and saying: ‘If we don’t know that it’s good, and there’s any reason to believe it’s bad, why do it?’”

Well, I’ll tell you why: To get dinner ready without screaming kids hanging on to your legs. To work, like my friend is doing, so that she can be present with her family for the rest of the day. To tend to a sick relative who lives with you. To take a shower, make coffee, schedule a doctor’s appointment, take a work call, text your best friend, or do absolutely anything that can give you a break from the omnipresent need fulfillment that is parenting young children.

There are hundreds of reasons that can explain why a parent may give their child more than 60 minutes of screen time on a given day, but the bogeyman of the prematurely obese, TV-addicted toddler, who also has the attention span of a small rodent, has developed so fast that few have paused to consider what the people who peddle it are really afraid of. Like the fear of the trumped-up “welfare queen” before it, this new “abundance of caution” has its roots in classism and racism rather than facts.

Of course no reasonable person believes that all constraints on screen time are bad, especially for children. It’s good for kids to get exercise! It’s good for kids to learn to play with others, use their imaginations, and even get bored. When I was a kid, we were limited to an hour per day of daily screen use—and this was back when modems took, like, 10 minutes to connect to the Internet! I’m glad I had to make up activities to fill my time, or I’d have spent it all reading Hanson fan fiction and talking to my crushes on AIM. But now, as a parent myself, I can see why the WHO’s recommendations seem draconian and out of touch with reality. My son is only one, but already his attention is easily captured by screens, which we rarely have on in our home. According to the WHO, he shouldn’t even know what a screen is at his tender young age. Should I be questioning all the episodes of Parenthood I watched while nursing? Or the Golden State Warriors games we occasionally have on in the background?

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