The world is restricting children’s screen time. Bangladesh must follow suit

Illustration: TBS

The icddr,b data released this week is not surprising. Rather, it is damning. 

Some 83% of Dhaka's school-going children exceed the internationally recommended two hours of recreational screen time daily, averaging 4.6 hours instead. Around two in five children show mental health concerns — anxiety, hyperactivity, behavioural difficulties and emotional distress. 

Furthermore, 14% are overweight or obese. Children sleep 7.3 hours against the needed 8-10. The cascades are predictable, such as sleep deprivation damages memory, concentration, learning ability, and emotional regulation. 

Late-night use overstimulates the brain. Extended screen time reduces physical activity and outdoor play. This is not ambiguous data. This is a generation being systematically harmed by the adults responsible for protecting them.

In every discussion of this crisis, there is an implicit scapegoating — the devices are addictive, the algorithms are designed for engagement, and the manufacturers knew the harms. 

All true. But this framing lets parents off the hook entirely. The devices did not put themselves in children's hands. Parents did. 

The algorithm did not decide that 4.6 hours was acceptable for a seven-year-old. Parents did, through inaction and convenience masquerading as necessity. A parent in Dhaka buys a smartphone for a child and tells themselves the standard justifications: "for school," "for safety," "everyone else has one." 

What actually happens is the device becomes a tool of parental abdication. Occupy the child during commutes so there is no need to engage. Keep them quiet during meals so conversation becomes unnecessary. Manage them while working from home so the cost of childcare disappears.

It is cheaper than actual parenting, easier than saying no, and more convenient than taking a child to a park or sitting down to read together. The screen time is not a tragedy that befell these children.

What is increasingly emerging is a culture of "easeparenting" — a parenting style where screens are used primarily to reduce the emotional, physical, and attentional demands of raising children. The device has become the solution to the inconvenience of childhood itself.

Tahmeed Ahmed, executive director of icddr,b, stated the non-negotiable requirement, "Digital devices are now part of modern life and education, but children need healthy boundaries." 

He recommends outdoor play, physical activity, proper sleep, device-free family time, and extracurricular activities like debates, reading groups, and library visits. None of these requires special infrastructure. They require parents to make a different choice.

Instead, parents claim helplessness — trapped by work obligations, by the system, by schools that assign homework on apps. But this is a choice dressed up as constraint. 

Md Azharul Islam, associate professor and chairman of the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology at the University of Dhaka, cut through the excuse, "The responsibility for resolving this device usage crisis lies primarily with parents. If you want to reduce screen time, you must provide the child with 'off-screen' time in return." 

The real problem, he identified, is that "parents are so preoccupied with their own work that they cannot provide their children with physical or quality time." Parents have chosen their own convenience over their children's development.

What makes this choice catastrophic is what it costs the child. The damage to social development is severe. Azharul Islam explained that children are losing "the natural social ability to interact with people, build relationships, and maintain them." 

They may be communicating online, but they are losing the understanding of the importance of face-to-face interaction. This deterioration in real-world social relationships will follow them into adulthood.

More urgently, Islam identified the collapse of attention itself. "Children are no longer able to maintain focus on a specific task for an extended period. Mentally, they are becoming restless, which acts as a major barrier to their education and overall development." 

This is not a minor problem. While physical issues like eye strain exist, he emphasised that "from a psychological perspective, this lack of social skills and focus is the most concerning." A child spending 4.6 hours daily on a screen is not learning how to concentrate, to sit with a book, or to have a conversation that lasts longer than an exchange of messages. The capacity to learn itself is being dismantled.

When asked what would actually solve this, Islam's answer was revealing. 

"Awareness is actually needed more by adults than by children. If we can carve out some time from our own schedules to discuss their interests, tell stories, or play with them, only then is a solution possible." 

He is not asking for policy intervention or technology bans. He is asking parents to be present. To choose their children over their phones. The fact that this sounds revolutionary says everything about how far parental failure has advanced.

The question then becomes, why hasn't Bangladesh learned what developed nations already know? Countries that pioneered digital education — that bet everything on tablets and apps and online learning — have now reversed course entirely because they saw what happened to their children. France passed a nationwide phone ban in schools. Italy followed. South Korea enacted a law banning phones during class hours, starting in 2026. These are not luddite nations rejecting technology. 

These nations created the technology, invested in digital infrastructure, and trained teachers to use it. Then they watched as their children's attention spans collapsed, their social skills deteriorated, and their sleep disappeared. They saw the data. They did the math. And they said no. 

Unesco now explicitly recommends allowing smartphones in schools only when they clearly support specific learning outcomes, not by default. Sweden's public health agency recommended zero screen time for children under two. These are positions reached by looking at evidence and choosing children over convenience.

While Sweden is protecting infants from screens, Bangladesh is handing tablets to six-year-olds. The developed world has already learned this lesson. They tried digital-first education and it failed. 

Md Ramjan Ali, Programme Officer for Education at Unesco Dhaka, put the stakes plainly, "Technology is one of the greatest blessings of our time, but when used without thoughtful regulation, it can become a significant barrier to children's holistic development. Excessive screen time undermines attention, memory, sleep, language acquisition, and social-emotional growth, while increasing the risk of behavioural challenges, obesity, and poor academic outcomes."

The evidence from Bangladeshi classrooms confirms his concern. Children are rapidly switching between content, preventing concentration on core subject matter and causing restlessness. This scattered engagement is devastating educational outcomes. 

Ali continued, "When digital devices replace active play, reading, and meaningful face-to-face interaction, children are deprived of the movement, relationships, and real-world experiences that are fundamental to healthy development and lifelong learning." 

Shahria Hafiz Kakon, researcher at icddr,b, acknowledged a critical gap in the current approach, "Screen time for children is currently excessive in both supervised and unsupervised cases. We realised that simply supervising without a proper framework isn't effective, primarily because parents are not fully aware of how to supervise a child correctly. Truthfully, no such effective guidelines exist in our country." The problem is not that parents do not know they should limit screen time. The problem is they do not know how to do it, and the state has provided no framework to help them.

She emphasised that individual effort won't solve the problem. "In this regard, it is vital to have changes at the policy level." 

Shahria is planning intervention studies from icddr,b to identify which guidelines work best and how to ensure compliance.