Iam not sure about the protocol for arguing with a royal essay, but at the possible cost of my head I will respectfully disagree with the Princess of Wales’s call for parents to ban smartphones from family mealtimes, written with Professor Robert Waldinger of Harvard Medical School.

‘Our smartphones, tablets and computers have become sources of constant distraction,’ she writes, ‘fragmenting our focus and preventing us from giving others the undivided attention that relationships require.’ She instead appeals to us to ‘look the people you care about in the eye and be fully there’.

I know what she means. She is thinking of surly teenagers scrolling through social media over dinner while their parents try to engage them in conversation. Actually, in some households it is worse than that –

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