From EverQuest 20 years ago to Fortnite, the latest blockbuster, these games have a compelling attraction - for men and boys in particular. Young children are primed for addiction by being given phones or tablets to amuse them too often, as well as being exposed to television. “Today’s preschoolers spend more than four hours a day facing a screen,” writes early childhood educator Erika Christakis in The Atlantic. Yet it is adults’ use of screens she is concerned with in her article, “The Dangers of Distracted Parenting”.

Despite the fact that parents, especially mothers, have more “face time” with their children than at almost any time in history, she argues, “the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz.” Parents are physically more present but less emotionally attuned, and the chief suspect is phones. In other words, parents who are otherwise on the job suffer their own kind of technology induced mental disorder – what one expert has called “continuous partial attention” – that is bad not only for them but for their children.

“What’s going on today … is the rise of unpredictable care, governed by the beeps and enticements of smartphones. We seem to have stumbled into the worst model of parenting imaginable – always present physically, thereby blocking children’s autonomy, yet only fitfully present emotionally.”