MOH Set Screen Time Guidelines for Primary School Kids.
Here's How to Make the Most of It.
Earlier this year, MOH released guidelines on screen time for primary school children. For kids aged 7 to 12, the recommendation is under two hours of recreational screen time a day. A lot of parents saw the news, nodded, and felt vaguely unsure about what to actually do with it.
Here’s what most parents missed. The two-hour limit is for recreational use — videos, games, scrolling. Screen time that supports your child’s schoolwork doesn’t count toward the cap at all. Which means the guidelines aren’t really about cutting screens. They’re about being thoughtful about what’s on them.
Most parents haven’t thought about it that way yet.
The Screen Time That Teaches and the Screen Time That Doesn't
A P1 to P3 child on YouTube for two hours and a P1 to P3 child doing Maths practice for 20 minutes are both on screens. One is recreational. One is curriculum-based learning. MOH treats them completely differently — and so should parents.
Enter KooBits: Screen Time That Counts for Something
Some primary school parents quietly found their answer in KooBits. It’s a learning platform used in 7 in 10 MOE schools, built around Singapore Math and the MOE syllabus from P1 to P6. Because it’s curriculum-based, it sits outside the recreational screen limit. It is exactly the kind of screen time MOH was making room for.
It doesn’t look like a textbook or assessment book. But it does exactly what they do, but better.
It wraps up in 20 minutes
KooBits has daily missions that take around 20 minutes to complete. Kids log in, work through their tasks, and close the app. The platform shuts its servers at 10pm — no late nights, no autoplay, no ads pulling them somewhere else. Twenty minutes of the right thing, then done.
“I used to feel guilty every time my son picked up the tablet. Then I realised he was working through his Maths and explaining concepts back to me after. I stopped worrying about the screen altogether.” — Parent of a P2 boy
They choose to open it
Getting a P2 child to sit with an assessment book takes convincing. KooBits uses coins, badges, and peer challenges — things kids are already drawn to — but built on top of real syllabus content. They log in because it feels like a game. They learn because it’s structured around what their school is actually teaching.
You can see what they did
The parent app shows what your child attempted, where they struggled, and how much time they spent. You’re not guessing whether the 20 minutes was real. You can see it.
MOH drew a clear line between screen time that helps and screen time that doesn’t. Most of what’s on your child’s device right now sits on one side of it. KooBits sits on the other. At around $18 a month — less than one tuition session — it’s worth finding out which side makes a difference. The free trial is a good place to start.
