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.
Now about 15 to 20 families in their South Portland neighborhood have installed a landline.
This is awesome.
Also, let kids walk to their friend’s home to see if they want to play or hang out. It will build independence, get them exercise, and it gives them an opportunity to physically connect with their neighbourhood.
Walking to a friend’s house is nice as long as there’s not a big multilane highway with no pedestrian infrastructure dividing the town in between. Car dependency is a big problem in most of the US. Portland is probably a bit better than other places in that regard, but I’m sure they have still have some issues with it.
I would think this would be a good use for VOIP landlines since lots of places are probably doing away with dedicated phone wires.
You mean those wide, spotless manicured, tree lined roads, devoid of cars, that we see on American TV shows aren’t real?
I’m shocked I tell you. Shocked!
Car dependency is a big problem in most of the US.
I agree, and that often ends up being the excuse why kids aren’t allowed to walk or bike to school, and it’s fucking terrible.
But when you look at stats from countries in Europe, you have some countries that have kids being fully independent (in regard to walking or biking or taking public transportation) by their time they’re 10 or 11 and able to do considerably more than North American teenagers, even at younger ages. It’s kind of disgraceful for us North Americans.
