One in four parents allow kids to watch three or more hours of TV

About 25 percent of parents who have children aged two to five say their children get three or more hours of entertainment screen time a day, well beyond recommended limits, according to a new poll.

In the latest University of Michigan Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health, a little more than 50 per cent of those parents do try to set some limits by location: banning media devices from places like the bedroom or at mealtime.

The poll found that 53 percent of parents are following recommendations that children's entertainment screen time be limited by location. Twenty-eight percent said they use a combination of location and time limits.

But 13 percent said they do not limit entertainment screen time or locations for their young children.

The poll was administered in March 2014 and reflects the responses of 560 parents of children 1- to 5-years-old.

April Khadijah Inniss, M.D., pediatrician at the University of Michigan Health System and research fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program, said that in their poll, they found that one-quarter of parents of kids two to five years old are allowing more than three hours of entertainment screen time each day.

Parents' views about reasonable screen time differ by the age of their children and do not necessarily match the AAP recommendations, the poll found.

Among parents of children younger than two years old, only 12 percent think that no entertainment screen time is reasonable. In contrast, among parents of children 2-5 years old, 88 percent say that two hours or less of entertainment screen time is reasonable each day.