Today's episode is in partnership with the BBC.

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Happy Mum,

Happy Baby, the podcast. Today's episode is in partnership with the BBC

and they currently have a campaign called Screens. It's what's on them that counts.

Now for me, screens are something that really does dominate my mind when it comes to my

children and what they should be doing, what they shouldn't be doing.

It's so layered with different feelings of guilt of trying to get it right and

are doing it wrong. So I absolutely love the idea of actually let's just not focus on that

so much, but actually focus on what's on them and what they're doing on those screens

and with their screen time. Today we have a returning guest, I'm very excited.

It's Dr Amanda Gummert, child development expert.

Now last time we were together we were talking about play and the importance of play

and I think it's really interesting, this is actually it's an extended version of play,

it is still play. Yeah absolutely and I think screens have a really important role to play in

a balanced play diet, you know, you want to make sure that your kids are getting a mixture of

learning opportunities, development opportunities, play opportunities and screens are becoming

increasingly playful and some of it's really good as well. Well BBC Children's they did a lot of

research and they found that 79% of parents feel that children use screens more since the pandemic.

Now that's certainly true in my life, like before the pandemic I used to say to my kids

that the screens only worked when we're in the car on flights, that's the only time they worked.

Outside of those areas they didn't work, you know, and I know that we include sort of TV in that as

well, but in terms of like screens in their hands it was very very different and then the pandemic

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