MIT professor Dr. Sherry Turkle has spent four decades studying what technology does to the way we talk to each other, and her conclusion matters enormously for anyone raising a small child: conversation is where empathy is built, and devices thin it out, even when they are switched off.
Dr. Sherry Turkle is Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT, and the author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together. She has been studying the relationship between people and their technology for four decades, which makes her one of the few voices in this debate who was asking these questions long before smartphones existed. She is not a campaigner who arrived at the topic with a conclusion already written. She is a researcher who watched, over forty years, as machines moved from the desk to the pocket to the dinner table, and recorded what changed in how people spoke to one another along the way.
That long view is what makes her worth listening to. Plenty of commentators have opinions about screens and families. Turkle has decades of observation behind hers, and the pattern she describes is consistent: as devices have become more present in our shared spaces, the quality of our face-to-face conversation has quietly declined.
Turkle's central claim is deceptively simple. Conversation, the open-ended, face-to-face kind with pauses and eye contact and the freedom to wander, is the bedrock of two things we care about deeply for our children: empathy and self-knowledge. It is in conversation that we learn to read another person's face, to tolerate silence, to repair a misunderstanding, to discover what we actually think by saying it out loud. And device presence thins that conversation out.
The most striking part of her argument is that the device does not need to be in use to do this. Her work describes a finding many parents will recognise the moment they hear it: even a silent phone, face down on the table, measurably changes what people talk about. With a phone in view, conversation stays lighter and shallower. People steer away from the topics that matter, because some part of everyone at the table knows the conversation could be interrupted at any moment. The phone does not have to ring. Its presence alone signals that attention is provisional, and people adjust what they are willing to say accordingly.
For children, the stakes are higher still. Turkle's position, set out across her research and writing at MIT, is that children learn conversation from being in it. They cannot learn it from devices, and they cannot learn it around devices either. A child develops the machinery of empathy by talking with people who are fully there: watching faces respond in real time, waiting for a turn, noticing when a joke lands or falls flat. Every hour of that apprenticeship that is thinned out by a glowing rectangle, hers or ours, is an hour of practice the child does not get.
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It is worth being honest about what kind of evidence this is. Turkle's work is built on decades of interviews and observation rather than randomised trials, so it tells us about patterns and mechanisms rather than precise effect sizes. But the mechanism she describes fits comfortably with what developmental science already tells us: young children build language and social understanding through live, responsive, back-and-forth exchange with the people who love them.
For a parent of a child under five, the practical reading is reassuringly small. You do not need to ban anything or overhaul your home. Turkle's insight points at something more modest: the moments when you and your child are talking, playing, or just pottering about together are doing serious developmental work, and they do that work best when no device is in the frame. Not in use. Not in hand. Not on the table. A toddler narrating her tower of blocks to a parent whose face is turned towards her is in a conversation lesson. The same toddler narrating to the top of a parent's head, while the parent half-listens over a screen, is in a much thinner version of the same lesson.
There is comfort here too, and it deserves saying plainly: no parent attends perfectly, and no parent needs to. Conversation is learned across thousands of ordinary exchanges. What matters is that a child gets a steady diet of moments where the adult is genuinely present. Guilt about the gaps helps nobody. Protecting some of the moments does.
If a silent phone on the table thins conversation, the obvious question is what thickens it. One answer has been sitting in British homes for centuries: the games table. A board game is, in Turkle's terms, a conversation with structure. Eye contact is built in, because you are facing each other across the board. Turn-taking is built in, because the game will not move until you do. Pauses are built in, and they are comfortable ones, filled with the small click of a counter moving or the rattle of dice in a cup, rather than the itch to reach for something glowing.
Picture it on an ordinary wet Sunday afternoon. A four-year-old kneels up on a kitchen chair, chin almost on the table, watching her grandfather's hand hover over a wooden draughts piece. She is reading his face for clues. He is making a show of deliberating, eyebrows up, because he knows she is watching. When she finally hops her piece over two of his, the whole table erupts, and she retells the move twice before the next turn starts. Nobody planned a conversation. The board carried it. That is the quiet genius of a proper board game: it gives a small child a scaffold for exactly the skills Turkle says screens erode, attention to faces, waiting, losing gracefully, talking it all through.
Jaques London has been making these conversation machines since 1795, longer than any other games company in the world. The firm invented croquet in 1851 and created the Staunton chess set in 1849, and the reason those designs endure is the same reason they answer Turkle so well: they are built for two or more faces around one shared object. The heft of a boxwood chess piece in a child's palm, the soft thud as it lands on a new square, the satisfying snap of dominoes laid end to end: these are sensory anchors that hold a wandering young attention inside the shared moment. A shelf with two or three family games within a child's reach is not a nostalgia purchase. It is standing infrastructure for the daily conversation practice her growing brain is asking for.
Turkle's own writing is the best place to start: her work at MIT, including Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together, sets out the full argument with the patience it deserves. On this site, our guide to first board games turns the games-table idea into age-by-age suggestions, reducing toddler screen time offers gentle, guilt-free swaps, and the science of real play places Turkle's findings alongside the wider evidence.
According to Turkle's research, yes. The mere visible presence of a phone changes what people are willing to talk about, keeping conversation lighter and less personal, because everyone senses the exchange could be interrupted. The simplest fix costs nothing: phones out of sight during meals and play, not just out of hand.
Turkle's position is that children learn conversation from being inside real ones, and that devices cannot substitute for that apprenticeship. Video calls with grandparents have real value for connection, but the everyday training ground for empathy is live, face-to-face exchange: at the table, on the floor, over a game.
No. Conversation skills are built across thousands of ordinary moments, not destroyed by any single lapse, and every parent checks a phone sometimes. The useful move is forward-looking: pick one or two daily anchors, perhaps dinner and a bedtime game, and make them reliably device-free. Consistency in a few protected moments beats perfection everywhere.
Most children can manage simple turn-taking games from around age three, long before they can follow complex rules. At that age the rules barely matter; what counts is the rhythm of waiting, watching and chatting that the game creates. Start with short, simple games and let the conversation around the board be the real point.
Britain's oldest toy maker. Every toy open-ended, wooden, and built for exactly the kind of play the research recommends.