Is social media ruining childhood?

It's tempting to think that our digital lives on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat are at fault, but there might be something altogether more analogue going on

- PETE ETCHELLS

What do we really know about the relationship between social media and teenage mental health? I ask because the other day, my daughter asked me if she could have her own phone. She's only three years old, so the request caught a little off guard. This wasn't a conversation I was expecting to have until she becomes a teenager.

"You're too little to have a phone yet," I said to her. "Why do you want one?" No clear reason was forthcoming, save for a beautiful stream of consciousness that one of her friends at nursery had a friend at school who was four and had a phone, and daughter, have because three is nearly four, could she, my one. I gently explained to her that this is something we could talk about when she was older, and although not quite content with an answer that was essentially 'no', she wandered off to start her next adventure of the day. That conversation left me with two feelings. One was a slight air of confusion - what sort of phone had we been talking about? I had assumed it was a smartphone and I was racking my brains to come up with a reason why a four-year-old might need one. But maybe we'd just been talking about a toy, in which case, my daughter already had a phone many, in fact, if you include things like bananas, pens and the shower attachment on our bath.