Din flock: the smallest conversation that counts

I watched the second episode of Din flock on SVT Play this weekend. Anders Hansen travels to Washington to meet Vivek Murthy, the former US Surgeon General, and to the Netherlands, where a foundation runs restaurants that bring neighbours together for a cheap dinner so that nobody eats alone. The episode is about what happens in the body and the brain when we become lonely, and the answer is not pretty. Hansen calls involuntary loneliness an established risk factor for illness, in the same class as smoking.

The research behind that is old and stable. A meta-analysis of 148 studies with more than 300,000 participants found a 50 percent higher likelihood of survival for people with stronger social relationships. Vivek Murthy's 2023 advisory was titled Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, and the WHO's commission found in 2025 that about one in six people worldwide is affected, most often among teenagers.

The programme is about adults. But the figure about teenagers stayed with me, because the gap starts earlier than that.

One schoolchild in six

The Public Health Agency of Sweden's survey Skolbarns hälsovanor asks eleven-, thirteen- and fifteen-year-olds whether they feel lonely. In the latest round, 10 percent of boys and 19 percent of girls said they often or always do. Loneliness is lowest at eleven and highest at fifteen. Roughly one schoolchild in six, in a country where nearly everyone has broadband.

Those are the same years in which parents, backed by the Public Health Agency, are trying to wait with the smartphone. I think they are right to. But saying no to the mobile also removes the only way the child had to reach a friend on their own. Planning play, the question "do you want to come out?", the evening call to grandma, all of it goes through a parent's phone. The child is not just waiting for a mobile. It is waiting to have a social life of its own.

What a call does that a text does not

Hansen's point in the series is that modern life lets us avoid contact. We work from home, have food delivered, meet nobody out of necessity. The same applies to children, in reverse: they are not allowed contact, while waiting to be old enough for the device that provides it.

Here is a result I think more people should know. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin had girls aged seven to twelve take a stressful test, then measured the stress hormone cortisol and the bonding hormone oxytocin. Those who got to talk to their mother on the phone afterwards got as much relief as those who got a hug. Those who got text messages from their mother got no relief at all, neither less cortisol nor more oxytocin. The voice did the work. The text did nothing.

And for friendship something similar holds. The classic study of how children become friends, from 1983, found that it happens through conversation: finding common ground, exchanging information, resolving conflict, telling something about yourself. Not by being in the same room, but by talking.

The smallest conversation that counts

That is why I think the answer to loneliness for a child is smaller than we think. Not a platform, not a feed, not a watch that reports where the child is. A conversation. A child who can lift the handset and call their best friend, and a friend who can call back. Two voices, no middleman, nothing clamouring for attention when the call is over.

We build Barnluren for exactly that, so read this with that in mind. The child gets a landline at home that reaches their friends and family, handset to handset, and nobody else. We do not yet know whether it is enough, and we have no figures on what it does to loneliness. What we know is what the research says about the voice, and what Hansen's series says about the price of being without.

The restaurant in the Netherlands works because it makes it easy to sit down at a table with others. The phone does the same thing for a child: it makes it easy to call. The children handle the rest themselves.

Sources: Din flock, episode 2, SVT, 22 September 2026. Holt-Lunstad, Smith & Layton, PLoS Medicine 2010. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation, US Surgeon General 2023. WHO Commission on Social Connection, 2025. Så vanligt är ensamhet, Public Health Agency of Sweden, Skolbarns hälsovanor 2021/22. Seltzer, Ziegler & Pollak, Proc. Royal Society B 2010 and Seltzer et al., Evolution and Human Behavior 2012. Gottman, How Children Become Friends, 1983.