This bill directs the Surgeon General to develop and publish evidence-informed, age-specific screen time limit recommendations for children and teens within one year of enactment.
Chris Deluzio
Representative
PA-17
The Screen-time Management And Recommendations for Teens and Kids Act (SMART Kids Act) directs the Surgeon General to develop evidence-informed, age-specific recommendations for daily screen time limits for children and teens. These guidelines must be created in collaboration with an independent, unbiased expert entity. The final recommendations must be published within one year of the bill's enactment.
Surgeon General to Establish Age-Specific Screen Time Limits for Kids and Teens Within One Year
The SMART Kids Act directs the Surgeon General to develop evidence-informed recommendations for daily screen time limits to promote healthy development in children. Under Section 2, the government must produce specific guidelines for six distinct age brackets, ranging from newborns to 18-year-olds. This isn't just a general 'screens are bad' statement; it requires the Surgeon General to define the maximum number of hours per day a child should spend on electronic devices, based on their specific developmental stage. To ensure the advice is objective, the bill mandates that the Surgeon General collaborate with an independent entity that has no financial ties to the tech industry or other biased interests.
Tailored Advice for Growing Minds
Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, the bill breaks down recommendations into granular groups: 0-2, 2-5, 5-8, 8-13, 13-16, and 16-18 years. This means a high school junior will have a different set of guidelines than a toddler. For a parent of a middle-schooler, this could provide a concrete benchmark to use when negotiating device usage for homework versus gaming. Section 2 also gives the Surgeon General the option to issue 'qualitative' recommendations. This is a fancy way of saying they can distinguish between 'good' screen time—like a video call with grandma or an educational app—and 'bad' screen time, such as mindless scrolling through algorithmic feeds.
Transparency and the Clock
Once the bill is enacted, the clock starts ticking. The Surgeon General has exactly one year to publish these findings on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website and deliver a full report to Congress. For a busy office worker or a trade professional trying to manage a household, this means a centralized, expert-backed resource will be available to cut through the noise of conflicting parenting blogs. By defining 'screen time limit' specifically as the maximum daily use of any device with a display screen, the bill ensures there is no confusion about what is being measured—if it has a screen and your kid is looking at it, it counts toward the limit.