If you have ever searched for a screen time rule in French, you have met the 3-6-9-12 rule. No screens before 3, no personal games console before 6, no accompanied internet before 9, no solo internet before 12. It is short, it fits on a fridge magnet, and it has been quoted in French parenting circles for close to two decades.
What almost nobody mentions is that France has since moved past it. The age markers now printed in every child's health record are not the ones in the 3-6-9-12 rule, and the American Academy of Pediatrics has gone in the opposite direction entirely. Here is what the rule actually says, what replaced it, and what a parent can reasonably do with all of it. If you want the wider picture first, we have a longer piece on screen-free play by age.
What is the 3-6-9-12 rule?
The 3-6-9-12 rule is a four-step guide to introducing digital technology, built around four milestones in a child's schooling rather than around hours of use. No television before 3. No personal games console before 6. Supervised internet from 9. Unsupervised internet from 12, with caution.
Each threshold matches a moment when a child gains a new capacity: entering preschool, starting primary school, mastering reading and writing, moving up to secondary school. The rule is not a claim about how much harm a screen does at age 5. It is a claim about what a child can handle at each stage, which is why it aged reasonably well.
The French Association of Ambulatory Paediatrics publishes the rule in its screens dossier, alongside the daily caps its author suggested: no more than an hour and a half a day for ages 3 to 5, and no more than two hours from 6.
Who created the 3-6-9-12 rule, and when?
The psychiatrist Serge Tisseron proposed the rule in 2008, and the French Association of Ambulatory Paediatrics backed it in 2011. That endorsement is what turned a personal framework into something close to a national standard, repeated by teachers, childminders and paediatricians across France.
The dates matter more than they look. In 2008 the iPhone was a year old and the iPad did not exist. A rule that says nothing about tablets, short-form video, algorithmic feeds or connected toys was not being careless. Those things had not arrived yet.
Has France changed its screen time advice since 2008?
Yes, substantially. In April 2024 an expert commission delivered a report to the President of the Republic titled Enfants et ecrans, a la recherche du temps perdu, with 29 recommendations. Since January 2025, a revised set of age markers is printed in the child health record given to every family at birth.
The new markers are stricter at the bottom and stretch further at the top. Before 3, no screens at all, including screens running in the background. Between 3 and 6, screen use should stay exceptional, limited to genuinely educational content and always with an adult present. From 6 to 11, gradual use with reinforced parental supervision. From 11, a phone without internet access. Before 13, no internet-connected smartphone. Before 15, no social media.
You can read the full commission report on vie-publique.fr and the current markers on the French government's Je protege mon enfant portal. Two shifts stand out. The 9-year internet threshold has effectively disappeared, replaced by a smartphone threshold at 13 and a social media threshold at 15. And the concept of background exposure, which the 2008 rule did not name, is now explicit: a television nobody is watching still counts, because it interrupts the back-and-forth between adult and child that language is built on. French public health communication calls that interruption technoference.
Why did American pediatricians drop age-based screen limits?
They concluded that a single number cannot describe what a child is actually doing. In a policy statement published in the February 2026 issue of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Pediatrics replaced its previous media guidance with a framework built around context rather than clock time.
The statement, Digital Ecosystems, Children, and Adolescents, was led by Tiffany Munzer, MD, FAAP, of the AAP Council on Communications and Media. It groups children into early childhood (0 to 5), school age (6 to 12) and adolescence (13 to 18), and asks families to weigh five things instead of one: the child, the content, whether the child stays calm, what the screen is crowding out, and how the family communicates about it. The AAP calls this the 5 Cs, and summarises the reasoning in its own announcement of the new recommendations.
So France tightened its age thresholds while the AAP largely abandoned them. That is not as contradictory as it sounds. French policy is written for population-level public health messaging, where a memorable number does real work. AAP policy is written for a clinical conversation between one paediatrician and one family, where a number is often the least useful thing on the table. We looked at the practical consequences of the American shift in a separate piece on what changed for families. The AAP also explains the framework for parents on its Helping Kids Thrive in a Digital World page.
How much screen time is too much at each age?
There is no threshold at which a screen becomes harmful. What there is, and what is far more useful, is an estimate of how long a child of a given age can sustain attention at all. Past that point a screen is not teaching anything; it is simply holding the child in place.
The AFPA publishes the following average attention spans, which make a more honest planning tool than a daily allowance.
| Age | Average sustained attention | What that implies in practice |
|---|---|---|
| 3 to 6 | about 20 minutes | One short episode, watched with an adult, then something else |
| 6 to 8 | about 30 minutes | Enough for one programme, not for a series |
| 8 to 10 | about 45 minutes | A film needs a planned break |
| 10 and over | about 1 hour | Content choice starts to matter more than duration |
Set against that, the scale of ordinary use is striking. According to figures cited by the French government, children and teenagers aged 6 to 17 average more than four hours of screen time a day. The gap between what attention can sustain and what actually happens is the real problem, and no rule expressed in years of age closes it on its own.
Is there a simpler rule than 3-6-9-12?
Yes, and many French paediatricians now prefer it. The psychologist Sabine Duflo's four NOs rule sets four moments rather than four ages, which means it applies identically to a child of 4 and a child of 11.
The four NOs: no screens in the morning, so attention is intact at school. No screens during meals, so conversation happens. No screens in the child's bedroom, so they learn to be alone without anxiety. No screens before bed, so falling asleep is not delayed.
The bedroom rule and the bedtime rule carry most of the weight. We went through the sleep evidence in detail in our piece on what actually keeps children awake. The four NOs also has a practical advantage that the 3-6-9-12 rule does not: a child cannot argue their way into an exception on a birthday, because the rule is about places and moments, not about how old they are.
It is worth adding an honest limit here. None of these frameworks rests on a body of evidence strong enough to predict outcomes for an individual child. They are structured expert opinion, revised as devices change. Francois-Marie Caron, of the AFPA, puts the balance well in the association's own dossier: understand the implications without demonising.
What can a child do during those hours instead?
This is the question the rules never answer, and the one that decides whether any of them survive a wet Wednesday afternoon. Removing a screen from a bored child without offering a replacement is not a policy; it is a negotiation you will lose.
The replacement needs to hold attention on its own, without an adult sitting alongside for the full twenty or forty minutes. Open-ended play, audio, drawing, building, and being read to all qualify. We listed fourteen options that work in practice in our guide to alternatives to a tablet.
Audio-led play deserves a specific mention, because it is the category that most directly substitutes for a tablet without introducing a new screen. This is the reasoning behind Ted, our interactive plush toy for ages 3 to 12. It has no camera and no display. It talks, invents stories and answers questions out loud, and parents set the language, the topics and the limits from the app. It is designed as one option among the many above, not as a substitute for a parent's attention, and not as a tablet that happens to be soft.
Frequently asked questions
Is the 3-6-9-12 rule still valid in 2026?
Its structure is still useful, but two of its four thresholds no longer match official French guidance. The internet-at-9 marker has been replaced by a connected smartphone marker at 13 and a social media marker at 15. The no-screens-before-3 marker has held, and has in fact been reinforced.
Do screens really need to be avoided before the age of 3?
That is the current French position, including for screens playing in the background. Since an order of 2 July 2025, screen use is prohibited for children under 3 in French early years settings. The stated reason is developmental rather than moral: at that age, language is built through direct exchange with an adult, and a running screen interrupts it.
Does an audio-only toy count as screen time?
No official framework classifies audio devices as screens, since the concerns behind screen guidance are visual attention capture, blue light before sleep, and displacement of interaction. Audio play does not raise the first two. The third still applies, so the same principle holds: it should not replace conversation with a parent.
Which should I follow, the French markers or the AAP?
They are complementary rather than competing. The French markers give you a clear default for what to introduce and when. The AAP 5 Cs give you a way to judge a specific piece of content on a specific evening. Using the markers as the frame and the 5 Cs as the case-by-case test is coherent.
My child is 7 and already has a tablet. Have I done damage?
These frameworks are guidance, not a diagnosis of past choices, and none of them supports that conclusion. What the evidence does support is that changing the conditions of use, chiefly no device in the bedroom and none in the hour before sleep, improves sleep quality relatively quickly. Speak to your paediatrician if you are worried about a specific effect.
Situation as of 8 September 2026. The French age markers cited here are those published by the government portal Je protege mon enfant and printed in the child health record since January 2025.
