The Dumbest Phone Is Parenting Genius

When Caron Morse’s 9-year-old daughter asked for a smartphone last year, her reaction, she told me, was unambiguous: “A hard hell no.” Morse is a mental-health provider in the Portland, Maine, public-school system, and she was firmly against smartphones, having seen how social media and abundant screen time could shorten students’ attention spans and give them new anxieties. But she wanted her children to have some independence—to be able to call friends, arrange playdates, and reach out to their grandparents on their own. She also needed a break. “I was so sick,” she said, “of being the middle person in any correspondence.”  

So when her daughter turned 10, Morse did get her a phone: a landline.

For that gift to provide all the benefits she wanted, Morse had to lay some groundwork. It would be annoying if her daughters—she also has an 8-year-old—were to start calling their friends’ parents’ smartphones all the time, so she told her neighbors about her plan and suggested that they consider getting landlines too. Several bought in immediately, excited for the opportunity to placate their own smartphone-eager kids. And over the next couple of months, Morse kept nudging people. She appealed to their sense of nostalgia by sharing photos of her older daughter sitting on the floor and twirling the landline’s cord around her fingers. She wrote messages: “Guys, this is adorable and working and important.”

The peer pressure paid off. Now about 15 to 20 families in their South Portland neighborhood have installed a landline. They’ve created a retro bubble in which their children can easily call their friends without bugging a parent to borrow their phone—and in which the parents, for now, can live blissfully free of anxieties about the downsides of smartphones.

In the past few years, interest in old-school technology has been rising, driven partly by desperate adults seeking smartphone alternatives for their kids. Fairs peddle “dumb phones” to parents of tweens. On Reddit, one parent shared that they’d gone “full ’90s,” with a desktop computer installed in the living room, a Nintendo 64, and a landline. In March, after a Millennial mom posted on Instagram about getting a home phone for her kids, she received scores of comments from parents saying they’d done the same—or planned to soon.

[Read: End the phone-based childhood now]

But these are isolated examples. As Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Anxious Generation (which helped inspire Morse’s landline purchase), told me, smartphones are so dominant in part because families are beset by a “collective-action problem.” Many parents are concerned about how their children might use smartphones, and particularly social media. They’re familiar with the research suggesting a correlation between social-media use and high rates of anxiety and depression among teens and especially teen girls. Still, parents can struggle to say no to a child asking for a phone when everyone at their school already has one. “If your child is the only one who is kept away from phones or social media,” Haidt said, “then you are isolating them.” That’s why he encourages parents to band together to reset common norms: “If you do it with a group, then you’re actually fostering more real-world interaction.”

When the South Portland landline pod formed, that’s exactly what the parents started to see. The phone Morse got her daughter is light pink with a curly cord and sits atop a buffet table outside the family’s kitchen. Morse wanted the phone to be in a “centralized” part of the house, with a cord, so that her daughters couldn’t whisk it off to their bedrooms for private conversations or take it with them while they played. “Very rarely do we ask kids to be still and communicate,” she explained. “I didn’t want my kids to go play with slime when they’re on the phone. Communication should be something you’re actually focusing on.”

Not all of the parents in her pod got corded phones. But everyone I spoke with told me that the devices, corded or not, had helped their children become better listeners and more empathetic communicators. At first, the kids took some time to adjust. Erin Masterson, whose children attend school with Morse’s, recalled a time when her 10-year-old son shouted into the phone to a friend, “ARE YOU HOME?!” And all of the children have had to practice greeting callers, identifying themselves when they place a call, and sometimes asking to speak to someone else.

But after a few months, they grew more comfortable. Because audio-only calls tend to come with fewer distractions—no faces to look at, no enticing filters or emoji—Masterson sees her sons “really tune in to what people are saying.” Mindy Hull, another parent in the neighborhood, has noticed a similar pattern with her 8-year-old daughter. “The progression from January until now” in the way her daughter “can engage people in conversation is mind-blowing,” Hull told me. “She’s practicing listening,” and better understands the meaning in subtle verbal cues.  

Since the landline pod started, the kids have been arranging their own playdates (although they still have to ask their parents for permission). And when an in-person hang isn’t possible, they’ve still been able to connect. Parents told me their children had called friends to ask questions about Dungeons & Dragons, to check on a friend after they were out sick from school, or just to chat on rainy days—all without their parents having to worry about what else the kids might be doing on the phone. The landlines have also given these parents a glimpse into their kids’ social lives that they might not otherwise have enjoyed. Recently, Hull listened as her daughter, who uses their phone at least once a day, talked with a friend for an hour and a half. “They were giggling and laughing and telling stories,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it.”

[Read: How the loss of the landline is changing family life]

Crucially, parents in the landline pod aren’t just banning smartphones; they’re giving their children an alternative—a method that’s much more likely to make kids happy, Jacqueline Nesi, a psychologist who studies the effects of technology and social media on adolescents, told me. She recommends that parents simply ask their children why they want a smartphone: “Do they want to be able to communicate with friends? Do they want to play a certain game? Think about what the goals are and then work from there.”

The landline solution isn’t perfect. Morse told me that when the house phone rings while they’re watching a movie, it can be annoying; you can’t silence a landline as easily as you can a smartphone. Occasionally, the phone makes a buzzing sound; her daughters have learned to smack it against the table—once, hard—to make it stop. And most of the parents I spoke with acknowledged that, eventually, they would probably get their children a smartphone; they were just trying to postpone that development as long as possible. (Hull is the one holdout I spoke with who thinks her daughter might never need a smartphone while under her roof.) For now, Morse and Masterson are considering limited-function smartwatches as their eldest children head to middle school and begin venturing out more on their own. Masterson wants to get her son a device with only call and text capabilities, so he can arrange rides and activities after school. Morse likes the idea of getting a watch that also has GPS, so she can track her daughter’s location.

When the time does come for a smartphone—if it comes—the parents hope their children will be better prepared to handle one responsibly. They’ll be older and more emotionally mature, and will have passed the age at which experts say a child’s brain is particularly vulnerable to the addictive qualities of smartphones. They’ll also have communication skills, honed by landline, that could come in handy. After years of practice, they might be quicker to call someone instead of sending a text or leaving a social-media comment, leading to a potentially stronger connection with that person. After all, a smartphone’s most basic feature—and, I would argue, its best—is one it shares with a landline: the ability to call a friend and talk.

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