I Used to Call You on My Landline

I have my phone with me nearly all the time. Even when I’m sleeping, it’s on the nightstand next to me, acting as both an alarm clock and a distraction if I wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back to sleep. And when I misplace it, I feel a little lost. I know that I’m often modeling poor behavior in front of my kids, and I want to change that. But I just can’t seem to let my phone go.

I know I’m not alone. We’ve all heard about the negative impacts of screen time, the dangers of social media and the rising rates of smartphone addiction for adults and children alike. Governments around the world are banning social media for kids and prohibiting cell phone use in schools. Our phones have made us simultaneously more connected and disconnected than ever before.

It’s funny, actually, that we even still refer to them as phones when calling people is the thing we’re least likely to do on them. We text, we email, we scroll. We might video chat. But how often are we actually using our “phones” as phones?

In the ’90s, most of us had phones that hung on the kitchen wall, and we’d have conversations right out in the open, twirling our fingers around the long, curly cord while we chatted. Remember when you had to jockey the rest of your family for the phone, especially if you also had a dial-up internet connection to contend with? Or when you’d be out with your friends and the only way to call home was to dig out a quarter from your backpack and use a pay phone? As a parent, that last bit sounds pretty terrifying, but I honestly don’t think it was. After all, what other choice was there?

I distinctly remember passing a badge in Embers (known as Brownies back then) about phone etiquette. To get the badge, I had to call my grandparents — on a rotary phone, no less! — and engage them in polite conversation.

I then spent the better part of my childhood talking on the phone with friends, usually the same ones I had literally just spent the entire day with at school. My bestie and I sounded a lot alike, so we’d sometimes prank other kids in our class by pretending to be one another or switching the phone mid-conversation to mess with the person on the other end of the line.

Learning to talk on the phone helped me develop important social and communication skills and build meaningful relationships with friends and family. Without the home phone, how will our kids do the same?

Today, parents are turning to low-tech alternatives like Tin Can, traditional landlines or “dumb phones” that only allow talking and texting with no internet access. Others are signing the Wait Until 8th pledge and vowing not to give their kids cell phones until they’re a certain age. Smart watches seem to be the happy medium for many parents looking to stay connected while avoiding phones.

It’s not an easy conversation, and there is no one right answer — although it is nice to know we have some options beyond a sticky pay phone (do those even exist anymore?).

My twins are only seven, and they’re already asking when they’ll get a phone. I tell them when they’re old enough to pay for it themselves, and they’re satisfied with that answer for now because their concept of time is still pretty skewed.

But maybe before that, we’ll get a landline.

Because really, what’s childhood if it doesn’t include some long, meaningless gabs with your friends and a few prank calls?