Landline use rises as families fight smartphone addiction

Teenagers are generally obsessed with their smartphones. So much so that Kristin Hatling’s family recently encountered a gaggle of them who had brought their screens into a resort’s hot tub. “My daughter Wren Hatling, who’s 11, was like, ‘Mom, all they’re doing is looking at their phones and, like, making kissy faces into them. They’re not even talking to each other.”

While a majority of American 11-and-12-year-olds have their own smartphones, the Minneapolis mother of three is among a growing cohort of parents looking back to their own childhoods for a lower-tech alternative. They’re ringing up the landline most households have now abandoned, whose old-school handsets are so rare parents have to coach kids how to use them. These modern “landlines,” which are actually Wi-Fi-enabled home phones, have proved popular. One kid-friendly version, the Tin Can, is on a several-month backorder.

Millennial and Gen X parents who spent their teenage years stretching spiral phone cords into their bedrooms and talking until their receiver-ears burned, are reviving the home phone to improve their kids’ communication skills without the risks a pocketful of internet can bring. Hatling and other Minnesota parents say the landline has introduced their kids to the lost art of conversation, given them more independence and helped them take responsibility for their relationships. But first, Gen Alpha had to learn Landline 101: How to put your mouth near the receiver.

Initially, Hatling’s kids held their new cordless handset out in front of them, as they did using FaceTime. “I was like: ‘That doesn’t work. You have to put it up to your ear,’” she recalled. “And then when someone picked up, they didn’t say anything. And I was like, ‘OK, what you want to say is, Hi, this is Harper. Is so-and-so there?’”

Early adopters hope to boost their landlines’ impact by encouraging their peers to stave off the smartphone and answer the home-phone’s call. “We’re trying to get a cohort of younger families that will buy into this, so by the time they’re in middle school and high school, it’s kind of the flavor, and there isn’t as much pressure to be throwing your kids into technology,” Hatling said.

The landline appealed to Hatling because she was concerned by research in“The Anxious Generation” connecting smartphones’ arrival to rising rates of anxiety and depression among teens. Her own observations worried her, too. As a high school teacher, Hatling says she’s seen smartphones negatively impact students’ well-being, classroom performance and relationships. Even in schools with phone bans, she saw kids sneaking peeks at the addictive devices.

“It’s like having a handful of candy in your pocket,” she said. “The tech gurus don’t allow their children to use it — that’s saying something.” Hatling acknowledges there are good reasons school-age kids already have smartphones. They can be useful tools. But the more kids are surrounded by peers with smartphones, the more pressure there is to want one — and for parents to feel bad about their kid being left out. To Hatling, society bought into the technology a little too quickly. “We didn’t really think through how that was going to play out in everyday life for younger kids.” With the home phone, Hatling says her daughters’ ability to cultivate relationships without a parental intermediary has given them more independence and agency, along with a greater sense of competence. (To communicate away from home, some landline adopters also give their kids GPS-enabled watches or an internet-free “dumb” phone.) And there have been benefits for Hatling, including not having to share her smartphone with her kids and lightening the mental load of plan-making logistics.

These days, Hatling no longer has to text her friend Elizabeth Temples to connect their daughters; the two girls call one another directly. Temples, who grew up memorising friends’ phone numbers and being annoyed by other family members tying up the line, says it was fun to overhear the girls compare their first days of sixth grade, now that they attend different middle schools. “Because there are parts of their day that your kid might not share, you get a little glimpse into their world,” Temples said. Temples’ says her 11-year-old daughter recently called her out-of-state grandparents to initiate a birthday visit. But she’s been reluctant to use the landline to call her peers who have their own cellphones, because the norm among cellphone users is to text. “She’s like, ‘If I give them this number, it could be really embarrassing, like, you might answer it!’” (Temples clarifies that she doesn’t answer the landline. “People are not calling for me.”)

Even kids too young to punch 10-digits are loving their speed dial-enabled home phone. Zindzi McCormick of St. Paul, whose greatest teenage aspiration was to have a second line and a phone in her room, has been teaching her daughters, ages 3 and 5, the conversation norms and scripts of her childhood. (“She’s not available right now. Can I take a message?”) Her daughters mostly use the phone to call their grandparents to report their most banal activities. “They are very factual, like, ‘I just woke up. I’m still wearing my pajamas. Dad is making breakfast.’ It’s so sweet to hear what is on their minds.”