Are smartphones detrimental to kids? When this question comes up, I always remember the same image. My daughter was a toddler and we were sheltering from the rain in the Botanic Gardens building when a tour group of teenagers came in, aged about 14. They crammed onto a long bench, jostling each other as they settled like starlings on a wire, and then a weird torpor descended.

This was a group of adolescents away from parents and home, boys and girls together, but it was unlike any group of teenagers I’d ever seen. Was there banter? Flirting? Goofing around? Eye contact? None of the above: there was silence as every single child – 15 or 20 of them – got out their mobile phone and sat motionless staring at it.

The occasional outbreak of two or three simultaneous smiles indicated that some were exchanging messages with each other – children sitting with their legs touching communicating via a satellite 22,000 miles above their heads – but chat was there none. None.

I was fascinated. New to parenthood, this was quite a revelation. Clearly things had changed dramatically since I was at school. It suggested that the old dull habit of face-to-face interaction had fallen out of favour like vinyl wallpaper. Mobile phones for some teenagers had replaced speech; emojis had replaced body language. I felt old – and uneasy.

READ MORE REBECCA McQUILLAN

In the last few years, anxiety about the impact of smartphones on children has increased exponentially, to the extent that a grassroots resistance movement has sprung up. Smartphone Free Childhood was started by a couple of mums in England as a WhatsApp group to offer mutual support in........

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