At first glance, the latest figures about children’s speech development might seem like a quirky footnote in a busy news cycle. A few more children are starting school with limited language and a higher number are not speaking at all. Yet for anyone who understands childhood development, this is a warning sign. A non-verbal child is not simply behind on vocabulary. It can signal developmental delay, autism, neurological issues, trauma, neglect or severe lack of stimulation.

On Monday, the Times reported that the share of young children meeting speech and language milestones has fallen from 90% in 2018 to 86.6% today. Councils are seeing more children with more complex needs. Health visitors are noting a surge in two-year-olds with significant speech delays. This trend began long before Covid, but lockdowns no doubt made it worse. The deeper causes include rising poverty, lack of free time, family stress and increasing rates of neurodivergence.

One school, for example, has logged a fourfold rise in children with special educational needs in the early years. Nationally, support plans have doubled to 600,000 since 2016, with the most common ages now four and five. Almost four in 10 children will need extra help with learning at some point, and a quarter will require a social worker. Providers are overwhelmed, cutting hours for children who need help and turning others away.

For speech and language therapists and those of us working with families, none of this is surprising. The warning signs have been visible for years. More children now spend their early lives on screens rather than engaging with people. We see it everywhere — in cafés, on public transport and on holidays. Parents hand over a device to keep a child quiet and the child becomes oddly compliant. We have drifted from instinctively knowing screens are harmful for infants to quietly accepting them as inevitable, and toddlers glued to screens have become part of everyday life.

Infants develop through human interaction. They learn language through eye contact, gesture, facial expression, tone, touch and turn-taking. When a baby coos and an adult coos back, that is the foundation of speech and the beginning of empathy. If a child does not receive enough communication, they do not learn reciprocity. They do not learn to wait their turn or to read a face or mirror an expression. These early exchanges build the neural circuits that make language possible. Without those skills, communication falters and the ability to connect weakens, and the result is loneliness.

This slow collapse of early childhood conditions erodes the relational learning most of us once took for granted. The cooing baby who once absorbed the family chitchat now looks up to find everyone gazing at screens, and the lessons never happen.

Teachers are already describing children who cannot look others in the eye, who miss physical cues, who struggle to play because they lack the basic micro-skills of interaction. They hit each other too hard or too softly because they have not learned how bodies communicate. They do not read facial expressions and miss chances for warmth and affection. They drift into solitude because social interactions feel baffling.

Unless we act soon, we will raise a generation for whom loneliness is the default. Children who grow up outside the social world often become adults without the emotional scaffolding needed for healthy relationships. They need to learn collaboration, conflict negotiation and emotional understanding in the shallow waters of childhood so they can cope with the deeper waters of adulthood.

Studies of Romanian orphanages, for example, have revealed that children who were deprived of warm, back-and-forth communication experienced enduring damage to language, social development and brain growth. Without touch, eye contact and emotional reciprocity, their development collapses, they become nervous, aggressive and more prone to emotional outbursts.  Although a good deal less extreme, the underlying truth applies; when children are not spoken to, they lose the ability to communicate.

We are already seeing the effects. In my work as a psychotherapist I meet growing numbers of teenagers who feel anxious, lonely and disconnected. Their friendships are fragile, they ghost each other at the first sign of conflict and many parents feel their children live alongside the family rather than within it.

There is a temptation to answer all this with more programmes, more specialists and more policies but they do not solve the central issue. This problem is relational and families need the time and space to meet it. Babies and toddlers need the back-and-forth of ordinary family life, the chat at the table, the shared jokes, the bedtime story, the parent who listens rather than scrolls.

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Stella O’Malley is a psychotherapist and bestselling author. She is Founder-Director of Genspect, an international organisation that advocates for a healthy approach to sex and gender.

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