Sapna recommends making your house into the place where your children and their friends want to hang out in real life. She says: “Enable them to do fun stuff. I think it’s important to make sure that they have access to places where they can socialise in real life.
“It could be as simple as every Friday all the kids come round to yours, and you make pizzas and play board games. It’s making sure that your kid can feel that she’s still the centre of the social universe, but in a real-life sort of way.”
What if other kids bring their smartphones along to the play date? Sapna suggests getting them to leave them in a box by the front door.
She says: “Some parents don’t like the fact that other kids come to the house, and the kids are all watching something on their phones. You can’t easily see what they’re watching, and it could be anything.
“Know that you can set house rules – if kids come through the door with a smartphone, the smartphone goes in the box.
“Some parents can feel a bit conscious about doing that sort of thing, as if they’re telling other parents how to parent, but when you reframe it as house rules, you realise it’s just saying, ‘This is what happens in our house’.”