On a spring afternoon in the hills above Parma, Catherine, Princess of Wales, stood at a wooden worktop dusted with flour, learning to fold tortelli d’erbette alongside the women of an agriturismo. The scene, recorded by Italian media during her two-day visit to Emilia-Romagna in May, was a long way from the curated frames of royal tours. There was no protocol, just the rhythmic press of dough and the murmured instruction of a rezdora, the Emilian home cook who guards the region’s pasta traditions. It was, by all accounts, a moment of unhurried, tactile attention — the kind of encounter the princess would later hold up as an antidote to a world mediated by screens.

That visit was built around a different kind of expertise. Reggio Emilia, the city where she spent most of her time, has since the Second World War treated children not as future citizens but as equal members of society, possessed of what the local educational philosophy calls “100 languages” — the verbal and non-verbal means by which they express ideas. The princess toured the Anna Frank school, bowed to children in Piazza Grande, embraced a disabled girl and listened to teachers in their nineties recount the origins of an approach that has drawn educators from across the globe. In an essay published weeks later on the website of her Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, she wrote that the people of Reggio Emilia had shown “happy childhoods are the foundation of happy communities, and that genuine connection begins with listening and understanding.”

The essay landed in a political moment shaped by deepening anxiety about childhood and screens. The same week, the British government announced a social media ban for under-16s, expected to be in force by next spring. In the United Arab Emirates, the cabinet moved to restrict access for children under 15, a decision welcomed by the National Academy for Childhood Development as a step toward a safer digital environment. Medical voices from the Emirates have been unusually direct: paediatricians and clinical psychologists describe a rising caseload of back and neck pain, disrupted sleep, and dopamine-driven behavioural loops in adolescents. One specialist at RAK Hospital noted that the prefrontal cortex, which governs impulse control, is still under construction in the under-15s, leaving them “highly vulnerable to digital stimulation.” Another clinician drew a parallel with alcohol prohibition for minors, arguing that a developing brain warrants similar caution.

These warnings echo a growing body of research that reaches even earlier into childhood. A book cited by Indian digital media notes that by age two, 90 per cent of children in one University of Iowa study had moderate ability to use a tablet, and that some Los Angeles therapists already see three- and four-year-olds as addicted. The same text details the neurobiological rewiring that accompanies frequent device use: immediate reward triggers dopamine, eroding patience and impulse control, while blue light suppresses the sleep hormone melatonin. The princess’s essay, though couched in the language of personal reflection, touched the same nerve. “In an increasingly digitalised world, where so much of life is mediated through screens, the need for genuine human connection has never been greater,” she wrote, adding that skills such as empathy, humility and love “cannot be digitised.”

Her words have found an unlikely echo among adults who are themselves trying to unplug. A growing number of millennials and Gen Z users, according to media research firms, are adopting a two-phone lifestyle: one stripped-down device for calls from family and the GP, another — often switched off overnight — for social media and the wider world. Some 18 per cent of consumers now own two smartphones, up from 15 per cent a year earlier, and flip-phone makers have begun marketing old Nokia and Motorola Razr models as “perfect for a digital detox.” The princess closed her essay with a question a fellow parent had asked at the school gate: if we could all do just one thing, what would it be? Her answer was “to prioritise love.” In Reggio Emilia, that answer already has a shape: it looks like a child who is listened to, a kitchen table dusted with flour, and a city that decided, eighty years ago, to build its future around the full citizenship of the very young.