For Gisela, a mother of two in Argentina, the sobremesa—that unhurried after-meal conversation—was once the highlight of her day. “In my family, we’d linger at the table playing board games, and it was my favourite part of the day,” she recalled. Now, she watches the ritual fade among friends and neighbours, replaced by silent scrolling. Her observation is not merely nostalgic; it is echoed by a study published in JAMA Pediatrics, which found that eight out of ten parents use a device during family meals, and nearly 70 per cent of children follow suit.

The intrusion of screens into the most intimate domestic spaces is just one thread in a global re-examination of childhood in the digital age. In Brazil, the latest TIC Educação survey, released by the research centre Cetic.br, reveals that schools are scrambling to respond. The 2025 edition found that 86 per cent of school managers held meetings with teachers about technology use in the past year, and 75 per cent convened parents—a marked increase from previous years. The most discussed topics were rules for mobile phones, the impact on mental health, and how to handle cyberbullying. Yet the same survey exposed a persistent gap: the main challenge cited by schools, whether they ran digital education programmes or not, was low family participation.

The conversation is growing more nuanced. A study published in JAMA Network Open, drawing on data from nearly 3,800 children in Scotland, found no clear link between overall screen time and psychosocial difficulties at ages five and ten. At fifteen, only intensive gaming was associated with higher difficulties; teenagers who used social media for more than an hour a day were, counterintuitively, less likely to score above average for problems. Researchers from the University of Edinburgh and Imperial College London cautioned that correlation is not causation, and that guidelines fixated on hours alone may miss the point. “The associations between screen use and negative outcomes become weaker or disappear when other factors are taken into account,” noted psychologist Pete Etchells, because technology use does not happen in isolation from a child’s social and family environment.

Meanwhile, the physical toll is becoming harder to ignore. Doctors in Malaysia report seeing “text neck”—stiffness and pain from prolonged forward-head posture—in primary-school children. Orthopaedic surgeon Dr S Jaya Thilak notes that many young users simply lose track of time, remaining motionless far longer than parents realise. The advice is practical rather than alarmist: bring devices to eye level, take a break every 30 minutes, and ensure children do not spend hours curled up on sofas without back support. As digital learning becomes ubiquitous, the goal is not to banish screens but to teach children how to inhabit their bodies while using them.

In Salta, Argentina, psychologist Rodolfo Ceballos recently told an audience that the adolescent symptoms of the moment—anxiety, depression, panic attacks—cannot be understood apart from a culture of immediate gratification and intensive screen use. He pointed to cyberbullying, family fragmentation, and technological addictions as contemporary risks, and insisted that the family, the school, and the community remain the essential pillars of containment. Viewed from Brasília, Mexico City, or Glasgow, the emerging picture is not one of simple harm or benefit, but of a childhood being renegotiated in real time. The sobremesa may be vanishing, but the hunger for connection it represented is not.