My wife and I live in the kind of neighborhood where we can just hop on our bikes and go for a ride, straight from the driveway. The streets are quiet and flat, giving us time for conversation and reflection. A bike was such a focal part of my childhood that it’s easy to go back to those long-ago days in my mind. But I was too young to remember the year (or years) my bike had training wheels. Whoever invented training wheels made a lot of money getting kids comfortable with “big bikes”. Come to think of it, you could say the same about landlines and smartphones.
Smartphones are a blessing as well as a curse, aren’t they? On the one hand they’re always “on” and always eager to provide the instant information we crave. On the other hand they seduce and consume us, to where our social life is more often with an electronic device than it is with other humans. I’m sure I could find plenty of studies explaining why the “ding” of a text creates a hankering to read the message immediately (no matter how unimportant).
There are a dozen reasons why my smartphone is my “go-to” but a dozen more where I should be saying, “go away”. I’ll never forget the time we saw Lady A in concert. A family of five sat in front of us, with three pre-teen girls giddy to get the live performance started. But when the concert finally began, they popped up their phones and recorded the entire show start to finish. Someone forgot to tell them to enjoy the moment.
Here’s another example. You’re at a restaurant enjoying dinner with your significant other, when another couple across the room catches your eye. They’re facing each other, their dinner plates untouched in front of them. Their heads are bent low as if in quiet conversation. But in fact, both are on their phones and not saying a word to each other. Someone forgot to tell them to enjoy the moment.
I’m grateful I was raised in a generation without smartphones. The memories I have of landlines are not only nostalgic but includ plenty of teaching moments for a child. In my early years (the ones with a single digit) I was never allowed to answer the phone. In fact, the only time I was allowed to even speak on the phone was when my mother would hand over the receiver and say “Here, talk to Grandma while I finish making dinner”.
When my parents deemed me old enough to answer the phone, I learned to answer formally (as in “Hello? Wilson Residence.”) because there was no such thing as Caller ID. I also learned how to engage in conversation, instead of just listening to the person on the other end of the line. Finally, I learned that everything comes at a cost, because eventually my father installed a separate landline for his five sons, and charged them for those hours-long calls to girlfriends and such.
Landlines may be few and far between these days but they’re making something of a comeback, at least for parents who see them as “training wheels”. Call me old-fashioned but a landline requires a person to a) Drop what they’re doing to answer the call, b) Have one-on-one conversation with no texts or emojis, c) Give the call their full attention (speakerphones aside), and most importantly d) Develop the communication skills a person needs in the “real world”.
I’m told there’s a resurgence of cell phones out there that do nothing more than allow for voice calls. They’re like a landline in your hand, without the temptations of texting, emailing, social media, and everything else that puts a voice call in last place. And they still give a child the option to dial Mom, Dad, or even 9-1-1 in an emergency. For those taking this approach to teach their kids how to get comfortable engaging in conversation (let alone speaking like an adult) I say “smart phone”. And “smart parents”.
Some content sourced from the CNN Health article, “Landline are ringing in homes again…”.
Life In A Word 
As nice as a smart phone can be, sometimes they are just to distracting.
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Such sad anecdotes, which I understand well. We were at Legoland and this family got into the boat to go on a ride. They were staring at their phones. So unbelievable. Or when I saw a family pushing a stroller with the child inside looking at a phone! Didn’t they bring the kid to Legoland to look at, oh, say, Legoland? It makes me so upset.
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It really is an addiction. How did we get to a place where we can’t take a moment to simply enjoy what surrounds us? Yesterday I heard a person refer to it as “nature deficit disorder” – lack of a connection with the outdoors. I’m hoping this is a cyclical thing where the next generation figures out what they’ve been missing.
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Yes, I hope so too. I wonder if it’s going to be more like a wave, where every few generations are in then out of that NDD. I’ve seen articles about the havoc it’s caused on people’s ability to date, too. What a mess.
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In the old days, people had to read newspapers at the breakfast table and eat from TV trays so they could watch television at dinnertime!
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I really miss the first part of that sentence.
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Sometimes I wish we could get rid of all that technology and go back to life in the 80’s!
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Hindsight is 20-20, right? Not sure I’d want whatever else we’d get back from the 80s tho’ (i.e. what if we could go back to college and not have to do any homework? 🙂
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That would be fun! I’d definitely party more than I did the first time knowing I would pass! I saw a news segment about the recent 6 million Meta lawsuit settlement. They were interviewing kids and one girl spent 10 hours on screen time/phone daily….that can’t possibly be healthy.
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Dave, I would not mind reverting to an earlier era, long before the digital age, although I would not have met everyone here in the “blogosphere” nor would I have been able to work remotely the last 13 years before retirement. I still have a landline and had planned to give it up after I retired in March 2024, but, despite having to pay $85.77 per month for something I rarely use, I like the security of having it. I have caller ID but no voicemail, so I just screen calls – if it’s important I call the person back. I get a ton of junk calls, especially those with fake-em-out names. AT&T plans to phase out their landlines by 2029 due to a scarcity of copper – so I may have to resort to porting my landline phone number to a smartphone. I also had no phone privileges when my age was in single digits. I was allowed to answer the phone if mom was busy getting dinner ready or doing dishes, etc. I also was coached what to say/do. 🙂 Since I had no siblings and our one rotary-dial phone hung on the wall in the kitchen, it didn’t afford any privacy at all!
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Whoa, didn’t know that about AT&T. I guess the end of landlines is inevitable, esp. with so much less demand. I’m hoping there’s a clever person out there already working on some sort of technology where less distractions become the norm; that is, like previous generations we enjoy what’s around us while we can, and save the screen time for later. We need to get back to that kind of social norm again.
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Dave, from what I’ve read, AT&T was ready to pull the plug on landlines a long time before 2029, but the problem is a lot of rural areas do not have good cellphone service so they are obligated to keep the landlines going to accommodate everyone. Yes, people need to step away from their screentime, be it a phone or a computer. As to people blaming/suing social media giants for addiction to social media, I feel parents need to monitor their kids’ use, heck … even their own use. People have to be accountable for their behavior sometimes and stop with the blame game!
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I’m very glad I grew up without smart phones. I did see on TikTok there was a resurgence of kids getting landlines for Christmas to talk to their friends. Violet will get a nice flip phone that can only call me ha.
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My compliments to your parenting, Lyssy 🙂
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Back in the days before cell phones and call display, my daughter developed a fun and unique way to deal with telemarketers. When they called she would hand the phone to her son, who was a very inquisitive and talkative pre-schooler…
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I can remember people running for a ringing phone with the same vigor we now see with attention to new text messages. And calling my friend’s house, asking “Is Dan there?”, then waiting in silence after his father would say “yes”, as he waited for me to ask the next question. 😁
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Yes, I sure remember the days of running to ringing phones. We didn’t have any form of answering machine back then to catch the call. And your friend’s father’s approach to phone etiquette is awesome. Forces another question instead of the easy-out assumption you wanted to talk to Dan. Nice!
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Smartphones are such a blessing and a curse. I guess moderation is the keyword.
I am glad as well to have grown up without them. And still how I wonder how we survived without GPS and Google.
Blessings!
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