Six Things This Site Cannot Tell You

Most sites tell you what they know. The list below is the other half, and it is shorter to read than to discover on your own.

1. Screen time for most of the world

42 of 194 countries have a published figure. 152 do not.

The 42 skew heavily towards high-income, English-speaking countries with funded media-use surveys. Every global claim about children's screen time — including the ones on this site — is a claim about roughly a fifth of the world's countries.

The missing 152 are shown as "Not reported" rather than estimated. The full argument for that is here, and the short version is that a modelled figure becomes indistinguishable from a measured one the moment it is published.

2. What a childhood costs, in most countries

61 of 194 countries have a cost figure. 133 do not.

The published range runs from about $7,000 in DR Congo to about $310,000 in the United States — a factor of more than forty — which is exactly why the gaps cannot be filled by interpolation. A regional average across that spread would be wrong by six figures.

3. Anything clinically reviewed

No page on this site carries a named clinical reviewer.

The reviewer field in our schema is deliberately empty rather than filled with a plausible name, and the authors page states that out loud. Several tools touch attention, sleep and wellbeing; every one of them organises what an adult has already observed and none produces a score about a child.

If you are worried about a specific child, that is a conversation with a GP, paediatrician or school counsellor. Nothing here substitutes for it, and no amount of data on this site changes that.

4. Anything after 2025, as a measurement

Every figure dated 2026 or later is a projection, mostly the UN medium variant, and the site labels them.

The near half of a projection is firm — the children who will be in reception in 2031 are already born. The far half is a fertility assumption, and recent revisions have repeatedly come in below previous projections rather than above. Treat the direction as reliable and the exact figure as less so.

The tell is smoothness: where a series falls by exactly the same amount every year, you are looking at a model, not at years.

5. Why anything happens

This site publishes measurements and arithmetic. It does not publish causes.

Why the birth rate is falling sets out what the evidence supports and, more importantly, what it does not — the decline is consistent across very different countries in ways no single explanation covers. The same restraint applies to school outcomes, screen effects and everything about generational personality.

And the correlations between our own indicators are cross-sectional country averages, which describe which numbers move together and never which one moves the other.

6. Anything about your child

Every figure here is a national average, a cohort estimate or a global rate. All of them describe populations, and none of them describes a person.

A country's median screen time says nothing about one household. A cohort's size says nothing about one child's prospects. Applying a population statistic to an individual is a specific and well-named error, and it is the one this site is most likely to be misused for.

---

Why publish this

Because the alternative is that a reader finds out later, and finds it out from a figure that was wrong for them.

Every one of the six above is a decision rather than an oversight. The blanks could be filled, the reviewer field could be populated with a name, the projections could be presented as forecasts, and the site would look more complete and be less true.

See how the numbers are built at methodology, what they come from at sources, or the editorial rules at editorial policy.