Are smartphones making us care less about humanity?

Generation Z were the first to grow up attached to smartphones. They spent their adolescence bathed in screen-light and now they’re depressed and anxious. Should we have seen it coming? Until very recently my parent friends were in determined denial. Z is the best generation that has ever lived, they said, free from prejudice and determined to recycle. I remember a piece by Caitlin Moran in which she insisted that her children were far more noble and caring than her contemporaries.

Well, those optimistic days are over. The stats are now too stark. We daren’t take the kids’ phones away – we fear their rage – but we mothers huddle in the pub and brood. What’s gone wrong? Is it Instagram? TikTok? Is it the influencers and their unattainable lives? Are the kids being groomed, are they wilting from lack of outdoor play? I haven’t yet dared air to my fellow mums my additional fear: that social media is stealing their souls. It came to me as I wasted my weekend on Instagram scrolling sideways through the various stories: an Israeli child hostage; the perfect pumpkin spice latte; bodies in the rubble in Gaza; try this simple cure for neck pain; corpses; old school reunions; severed limbs; cake.

It’s not just the young who get their news through social media. And news on social media, in a time of war, means a drip-feed of horror on every platform, mixed in with friends and ads and selfies. But what does it do to a developing brain to feed it a non-stop ticker-tape of ultraviolence cut with kittens? How does it effect a child’s emerging empathy? I don’t expect anyone has any idea.