PSYCHOLOGY TODAY | Picture the dinner table on any given Tuesday. One parent is answering one last text from a long day. Another is thinking about tomorrow’s schedule. Their six-year-old slips on headphones, turns on an iPad, and the table goes quiet. For many families, that quiet is a moment of undeniable relief.

But there’s hidden cost to screen time that we haven’t fully reckoned with. At a time when social isolation is reaching crisis proportions in our society, we should be asking how children are learning the habits of—and the desire for—connection. And that work often starts at the family dinner table.

In her latest for Psychology Today, founder and Chief Architect Kim Samuel argues that dinner is about more than nutrition—it’s an unappreciated classroom for attention, connection, and belonging. When screens displace dinnertime conversations, kids lose practice in the ordinary arts of shared life: turn-taking, reading tone, listening through boredom, asking follow-up questions, and discovering that another person is interested in what they think.

If a daily device-free dinner is unrealistic, try three meals a week. Try making a jar of simple prompts: What made you laugh today? What felt hard? Who helped you? Who did you help? What is something beautiful you noticed? Even one small ritual—a phone basket for an hour in the evening, a weekly walk with one child, reading aloud—can start to shift the pattern.

If we are serious about the wider crisis of belonging, we have to nurture the habits of connection.