Why more kids are getting landlines instead of smartphones

This story originally appeared in Children todayVOX 'newsletter about children, for everyone. Register here for future expenses.

A few days ago I spoke to AVA, a fifth grader from Indiana, on the phone.

I mean that phone Telephone – Ava's father recently installed a landline for her, and she talked to me with the handset and was sitting in the hallway of her family on the upper floor. “I hold it in my hand until my ear and it is connected to a base,” she told me, an explanation that would have been unnecessary a few decades ago, but that is now needed.

Unlike a FaceTime call: “I only hear audio instead of a person I can see,” said Ava. The audio quality was noticeably good.

Ava's father, newspaper publisher Chris Hardie, decided to receive the phone as an alternative to a mobile device this spring. “Access to social media and the kind of social experiences that bring it will be hard and complicated in every respect,” said Hardie. “We will try to wait as long as possible.”

Hardie belongs to a growing number of parents across the country Contact the landline for your children. Tin Can, a company that was launched last year and offers telephones on the landline, now has customers in all 50 states and Canada, said co -founder Chet Kittleson.

I understand why parents choose landline: the phones are often a way to speak their children with friends and family without talking Social and mental health concerns some that combine with smartphones. “I really wanted to give myself and other parents something that they can always say,” said Kittleson.

But what is in there for children? When I heard about the potential revival of the landline, I made curious whether these older phones were only a worse version of something that children want or whether the landline itself has its own biological attraction. After all, branding telephones belong to a handful of older technologies that have kept a place in children's culture long after most adults have stopped using them. The game phone, complete with a handset and buttons (or sometimes Rotary switch) remains an integral part of times of the day and presules. Do children know something that we don't take over the joys of a retro device?

An introduction with low pressure into the world of phones

The concerns about the effects of smartphones on children have increased in recent years, especially after the publication of Jonathan Haidt from 2024 in recent years The anxious generationWhat argues that the devices are Disability of the social and psychological development of children. The researchers still have to clearly show connections between Use of social media and psychological health problems In children, but 45 percent of teenagers themselves Now say that you spend too much time in social media apps, and there is a growing wish among parents and educators to give children more time of their phone.

This wish has efforts as produced how Wait until 8th placeIn the family, oblige to bring their children a smartphone only at the end of the eighth grade (the idea is that the smartphone-free children do not feel excluded when families stay together). Some parents also get their children Smartwatches or Flip telephones To help you without communicating all functions (and presumably distractions) of advanced devices.

The landline may be the natural next step in this progress – the Atlantic recently called it.The stupidest phone. “” “There are no apps, there is no advertising, there are no games,” said Kittleson.

The tin can that looks like an ordinary landline from the past decades costs $ 75 and is in a router or an Ethernet connection (a WLI-capable model will take place shortly). But some parents went an even easier way. For example, Hardie bought “The cheapest push button phone I could find” at Amazon-Er believed that it was $ 14.

He was looking for a version of the transparent phone He had had as a child, but noticed that they are now commanding high prices On Etsy and Ebay, perhaps because of the widespread telephone nostalgia.

The phone was a “fun experiment for AVA,” said Hardie. “When the phone rings, she can hear it from anywhere in the house,” he said. “She will drop everything she does and run to pick it up.”

If you receive a call to a landline, it is definitely a different feeling to see a name on your smartphone. When she hears the phone ring, she becomes “excited and nervous because I don't know who calls most of the time,” said Ava.

Hardie has set up the phone so that only known numbers can call, which means that AVA must write down the numbers of her friends at school and bring them home on paper scraps.

“I'm curious that you can call me, but it's also a kind of terrifying,” Ava told me about this process. If I were to ask for such a number of a person, I wouldn't do anything if I had a cell phone. “

The advantages of a landline graner of the old school

Parents and experts praise landline workers for their potential effects on children's communication skills. “The landline has the enormous advantage of really concentrating the child on the conversation and their imagination and what they want to say,” said Sudha Swaminathan, director of the Center for Early Center at the Eastern Connecticut State University.

“It is exactly what I wanted to get out of the experiment,” Hardie said about Ava. “This is a good life competence.”

The actual influence of smartphones on children remains an area of ​​active debate – My colleague Adam Clark EstesFor example, it wrote about the case that they give children at the age of 3 (with limited functionality and many guardrails). It is anything but clear whether the landlord, promise or other efforts to keep children away from mobile devices lead to better social skills or mental health.

However, part of the fun of a landline can be more original for children. The moment the Kittleson set up a landline in his house, even before it worked, his children “only played with it all the time,” he told me. The attractiveness of the device is “very tactile,” he said: “The buttons as they press, how they click.”

It is also known that my children play with the old landline on the wall of our apartment, although it is not connected to anything. When I grew up, my brother loved the phone cable so much that my parents bought one – just the cord.

“I can't tell you how many cables I had sent to me during the tin's development process, Kittleson told me.” I played with color and texture and how Boingy were. “

Many things do smartphones, but they are definitely not boingy, and the landlords can satisfy the desire for more practical experience Adult had been Experience for Years Now. They are also part of a larger trend towards retro technology for younger Americans – BlackberriesPresent Photo albumsAnd Tapes have all resumed in recent years because the consumers of Gen Z want to reproduce an analogous past. On the cut, Cat Zhang recently wrote About the joys of installing a vintage phone in your first solo apartment.

It makes sense that children would also be interested in technological nostalgia, experts say because they have long been interested in toys and games that imitate the past. They may not be there when the landline was the order of the day, but that does not stop children from playing with playing, for example “kitchen sets that simulate cooking over a wood fire” – a common toy in preschools, said Swaminathan.

These sets are usually very attractive to children who are naturally curious and want to examine something that appears to them new, said Swaminathan – even if the technology is actually old.

Ava on her part says that her friends “think it's really cool that I have a landline” because “they think it is a kind of age”.

She wished her phone could write an SMS because her friends talk about starting a group chat. But she says that although she definitely wants a smartphone in the future, she agrees that she does not have one for the time being.

However, there is a device that she wants. “There is a kind of phone that has a rotating dial thing,” she told me. “I just think that would be somehow cool.”

This is more “what I write”, but I am also a writer and my next book. Moor queenappears on October 14th. It is a literary thriller in which the victim is a 2,000 -year -old moor size. It is not strictly child -related, although there is a teenager who plays a crucial role! You can Pre -order here.

PBS Classic Read rainbow Comes back on YouTube as a digital series, with librarian and popular Tikok personality Mychal turns as a host.

Schools are Cutting nutrition and health programs Thanks to President Donald Trump's “large, beautiful bill”, which eliminates a stream of SNAP Finance Center for Education. A non -profit guide called it “a catastrophic situation for the diet of public health”.

My older child is ready recently Curiosity forestA graphic novel about a young girl looking for her father in a world of spirits, monsters, werewolves and much more. (We are also big fans of the previous book by author Kay Davault, MISFIT -VILLA.))

A few weeks ago I wrote about them Obvious decline of teenager babysitting. A reader wrote down to share that babysitting helped her to discover her skills, and even pointed out a career. “As a child of the 1960s, my learning difficulties were never recognized or addressed,” she wrote. “But babysitting allowed me a voice to read loudly and tell happy stories.” She studied language pathology and behavioral disorders and worked with children in public schools and a private practice: “If I hadn't banned from that time 13-16 years, I may not have recognized my appointment!”

Many thanks to everyone who is enrolled and you can always reach me at anna.north@vox.com.