Iread the news that a fifth of parents regret giving their child a smartphone when they did with a sigh of despond. As the mother of a 15-year-old son who, like 20 per cent of the children of parents surveyed by the charity Parentkind, was given a smartphone at the age of 11, this is painfully resonant.

Although it was only four years ago, it feels like it was a different era. Social psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt had yet to identify the link between smartphones and The Anxious Generation. And even though revelations from about the deliberately addictive nature of social media apps were filtering into the news, that knowledge was not yet mainstream. Most parents we knew were giving their kids smartphones for secondary school , with no understanding of the implications – an

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