ListenPicture the dinner table on a given Tuesday evening. One parent is answering one last text from a long workday. Another is thinking about the grocery bill and rehearsing tomorrow’s schedule. Their 6-year-old, getting restless, slips on headphones and is soon engrossed in the familiar glow of an iPad. The table goes quiet, except for the sound of forks against plates. For many parents, the quiet is a moment of undeniable relief.
This is understandable. Parents are under serious strain right now, and most already know the familiar concerns about too much screen time: interference with sleep, learning, and attention. Yet there’s another cost that we, as a society, haven’t fully reckoned with. At a time when loneliness, social isolation, polarization, and a fraying sense of common life are mounting concerns, we need to think about how we raise the next generation in the habits and skills of connection—as well as the desire to connect with others.
That work often starts at the family dinner table.
Right now, we’re in a moment of increasing clarity about the problem of social disconnection. From the World Health Organization and the OECD to governments in the US, UK, and Japan, prominent public health and scientific authorities are now treating loneliness and social isolation as a serious societal crisis. The WHO says about one in six people worldwide experiences loneliness, with consequences for mental and physical health, social trust, and civic life. Chatbots are suddenly offering the feeling of friendship without the reciprocal demands and discomforts of a real relationship.
Still, today’s discourse on addressing social isolation focuses primarily on teens, adults, and older adults. We should also be asking the longer-term question of whether we’re raising children in habits of connection. In the long run, this may be the biggest determinant of our social future. To me, the question isn’t just about training kids to spend time with other people. The experience of belonging is bigger than social contact alone. It’s about how we make meaning together, how we make sense of the world, how we form a shared sense of place, and how we learn to express our needs and feelings in ways others can hear and relate to. Simple practices like giving one another undivided attention at meals can help ground children in the simple foundations of shared life.
What screens replace
The problem isn’t just what screens are doing to child development. It’s what screens are displacing.
Research in developmental psychology, neuroscience, pediatrics, and child language development points in the same direction: children build brain architecture, language, and social capacity through responsive back-and-forth interaction. Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child calls this serve and return. A child points, makes a face, asks a question, or tells a story, and an adult then responds with words, expression, interest, attention, and affection. This positive loop helps to wire the brain for communication, trust, self-regulation, and learning.
When such exchanges happen less often, children lose practice in ordinary arts of connection. A recent Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics study of children ages 12 to 36 months found that as screen time increased, adult words, child vocalizations, and conversational turns decreased. Another JAMA Pediatrics review found that greater screen use was associated with weaker language skills, while co-viewing and higher-quality content were associated with better outcomes.
Meals matter so much because they bring together several important ingredients at once: routine, face-to-face attention, language, emotional check-ins, and repeated practice in being heard and hearing others. We all learn by doing. Children hone the art of connection by practicing it. That can mean eye contact, turn-taking, reading tone, listening through boredom, asking follow-up questions, tolerating pauses, telling stories, and discovering that another person is interested in what they think.
Friction is how we grow
So much of modern technology promises a world with no waiting, no awkward pauses, no need to read the room, no need to repair a misunderstanding, and no need to stay with boredom for long. Yet that kind of “friction” is precisely how we grow. Through play, conversation, and ordinary family life, children learn to share, negotiate, resolve conflicts, and advocate for themselves.
I feel this personally as a grandmother. I have enormous respect for parents who are navigating the stress and uncertainty of modern times, and I have no wish to interfere from the sidelines. Still, I see how quickly digital technology can displace the small windows, where very young children once learned how to be with other people. Repeated compromises can become a pattern, and patterns, over time, become culture.
To me, the key is to lower the barriers to real presence. Make it simple, easy, and even automatic. Schedule one device-free meal a day, or three each week if daily is unrealistic. Have a jar of prompts or a few simple questions to ask over a meal: What made you laugh today? What felt hard? Who helped you? Who did you help? What is something beautiful you noticed? Be comfortable with some silence—children often need a beat longer than adults can bear.
If possible, see if you can build connection with rituals beyond dinner as well: a weekly phone-free walk with one child, cooking together, reading aloud, unstructured outdoor play, a family habit of greeting neighbours, calling grandparents, and drawing the shy child into the game. Put out a basket where you store all the phones and devices for at least an hour in the evening.
The goal isn’t just to teach children how to be with others. It’s to cultivate a sense of delight in focused presence and conversation. If we are serious about loneliness, polarization, and the wider crisis of belonging, we have to nurture the desire for connection.
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