Parenting in the screen age: I want my kids to feel loneliness and boredom

We were those parents. The anti-screen parents. Our eldest child, now nine, wasn’t parked in front of a screen until she was three, despite various older rellies shoving iPhones in her face at every opportunity. When we did switch the TV on – I remember the occasion with the same clarity my parents remembered the moon landing – it was to watch The Snowman, a gentle, near-silent half hour of seasonal animation from 1984. Further viewing was carefully curated towards the old and the slow and away from the hypercolour frenetics of modern kids telly.