Melanie McDonagh - We have allowed mobile phones into our children's lives far too early

TAKE a look around you when you’re on the bus. Eventually, you’ll find yourself in the company of a small child in a pushchair.

Chances are, the child will be unusually quiet for its age and that for one simple reason: a smartphone in its little fist. It’s a blessing for the infant’s fellow passengers, obviously: my son’s party trick on a bus was gently and rhythmically to kick other people in the back of the legs from his pushchair ... most toddlers can be a pain. But there’s something creepy about this remedy, the universal pacifier of the smartphone. It’s buying a child’s silence at the expense of its normal development.

The Government’s new social mobility tsar, Katharine Birbalsingh, is onto this. She rejoices in the description of the toughest headteacher in Britain — actually, make that the toughest teacher — and as she herself says, it was brave of Liz Truss, equalities minister, to have appointed her. But from the off, she has identified premature mobile phone use as a problem. At her pre-appointment hearing by MPs she said: “I would like some campaigns, national campaigns on things like phones and not giving them to your toddler... I would love it if things like ‘don’t give your child a smartphone’ were to become part of the national consciousness.”