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A few days ago I talked to Ava, a fifth grade student of Indiana, on the phone.
I mean Phone Telephone: Ava’s father recently installed a landline for her, and talked with the use of the headset, sitting in the hall of her family on the top floor. “I am holding it in my hand to my ear and is connected to a base,” he told me, an explanation that would have seemed unnecessary a few decades ago, but that is necessary now.
Unlike a facetime call, “I’m just listening to audio instead of a person I can look at,” said Audio. The audio quality was remarkable.
Ava’s father, the Chris Hardie newspaper editor decided to get the phone this spring as an alternative to a mobile device. “Access to social networks and the son of the social experiences they bring will be difficult and will complicate the lives of all kinds of ways,” Hardie told me. “We are going to try to expect everything we can.”
Hardie is a growing number of parents throughout the country by resorting to fixed phones for their children. Tin Can, a company launched last year that sacrifices fixed -style phones aimed at children, now has customers in the 50 states, as well as in Canada, the co -founder Chet Kittleson told me.
I understand why parents choose fixed phones: phones are often a way to let their children talk to friends and family without social and mental health concerns that some associate with smartphones. “I really wanted to give me other parents something they can always say yes,” Kittlesson said.
What for children, thought? Listening about the possible resurgence of fixed phones gave me curiosity if the oldest phones were only a used version of something that the children want, or if the landline has their own organic attraction. After all, fixed phones are one of the most old or oldest technologies that have preserved a place in the cultivation lung for children after most adults stopped using them; The reproduction phone, complete with telephone and buttons (or, sometimes, rotating dialy) remains an accessory in nurseries and preschoolers. Do children know that we don’t do the pleasures of a retro device?
An introduction of low pressure to the world of phones
Concerns about the impact of smartphones on children have increased in recent years, especially after the 2024 publication of Jonathan Hidst’s The anxious generationwhich argues that devices are hindering the social and psychological development of children. Researchers have not yet clearly shown the links between the use of social networks and mental health problems in children, but 45 percent of adolescents now say they spend too much time in social networks applications, and there is a growing desire between parents and educators.
That desire for disaster efforts such as waiting until eighth, in which families presented themselves not to get their children a smartphone until the end of the eighth grade (the idea is that if families join, children without smartphones feel excluded). Some parents are also obtaining smart watches or flip phones for their children to help them communicate without all features (and, presumable, distractions) or more advanced devices.
The landline is, perhaps, the next natural step in this progression: the Atlantic recently called it “the dumbder phone.” “There are no applications, there are no ads, there are no games,” Kittlesson said. “There is nothing to do apart from connecting with another human.”
The can, which looks like an ordinary landline of decades, is sold for $ 75 and connects to an Ethernet router (a model will soon arrive for Wi -Fi). But some parents have gone an equally simpler route. Hardie, for example, bought “the cheapest button phone I could find” on Amazon, he thinks $ 14.
He looked for a transparent phone version he had had as a child, but pointed out that the thesis now has high prices in Etsy and Ebay, perhaps because either the nostalgia of the extended phone.
The phone has been “a fun experiment” for Ava, Hardie said. “When the phone rings, she can listen to him from anywhere in the house,” he said. “She will drop what she is doing and run to pick it up.”
Receiving a call call definitely has a different sensation of seeing a name appeared on your smartphone. When he listens to the phone, he gets “excited and also a girl or nervous because I don’t know who calls,” said Av.
Hardie established the phone so that only known numbers can call, which means that Ava has to write the numbers of her friends at school and bring them home in pieces of paper.
“I am excited that they can call me, but he is also a child or shocking,” said Ava or this process. Asking someone like that is “not something that I would do if I had a cell phone.”
The advantages of a landline of the old school
Parents and experts praise fixed phones due to their potential impact on children’s communication skills. “The landline has the great advantage of really focusing the child only in the conversation and its imagination and what they mean,” Sudha Swaminathan, director of the Eastern Connecticut State Eastern University Center.
“Listening to developing the skills to maintain telephone conversation is exactly what I wanted to get out of the experiment,” Hardie said about Ava. “This is a good ability for life.”
The real impact of smartphones on children remains an area of active debate: my colleague Adam Clark Estes, for example, has written about the case to give phones to children up to 3 years (with limited functionality and many railings). However, it is far from being clear if fixed lines, promises or other efforts to keep children away from mobile devices will result in better social skills or mental health in the future.
For children, however, part of the fun of a landline can be more primary. The moment Kittleson established a landline at his home, even before he worked, his children “were simply playing with him,” he told me. The attractiveness of the device “is very tactile,” he said: “The buttons, the way they press, the way they click.”
It is also known that my children play with the old landline on the wall of our apartment, just although it is not connected to anything. Growing up, my brother loved the telephone cables so much that my parents bought one, just the cord, that is.
“I can’t tell you the amount of cables I had sent me.” “I was playing with color and texture and how Boingy were.”
Smartphones do many things, but they are definitely not Boingy, and fixed phones can satisfy the desire of more practical experiences that adults have bone experience for years. They are also part of a greater trend towards retro technology among younger Americans: blackberries, photo albums and cassette tapes have had a resurgence in recent years, since gene consumers consider that gene consumers recreate a more analogous. In The Cut, Cat Zhang recently wrote about the pleasures of installing a vintage phone in his first solo apartment.
It makes children also be interested in technological nostalgia, experts say, since they have very interested in toys and games that mimic the past. They may not have legs around when the field lines were common, but that is not a stop that they play with, for example, “kitchen sets that simulate cooking on a trunks fire”, a common toy in preschoolers, Swaminathan said.
These sets are common very attractive to children, who are naturally curious and because to investigate something that seems new, Swaminathan said, even if the technology is ancient actular.
Ava, on the other hand, says that his friends “think it is great that he has a landline” because “they think he is a child of yesteryear.”
You want your phone to send a text message, because your friends are talking about starting a group chat. But she says that, although she will definitely do it because she is a smartphone in the future, she agrees with not having one for now.
However, there is a device that does want. “There is a type of phone that has a rotating dial,” he scared me. “I only think it would be a great child.”
This is more “what I am writing”, but I am also a novelist and my next book, Queen of the swampIt leaves on October 14. It is a mystery of literary murder in which the victim is a 2,000 -year -old swamp body. It is not strictly relaxed in the child, although there is a teenager who plays a fundamental role! You can book here.
PBS CLASSIC Reading Rainbow He returns as a digital series on YouTube, with the librarian and the popular personality of Tiktok Mychal Threets as host.
Schools are reducing nutrition and health programs thanks to the “great and beautiful bill” of President Donald Trump, which eliminates a current of education of education. A non -profit leader described him as “a catastrophic situation for the nutrition of public health.”
My eldest son ended recently Rare forestA graphic novel about a girl who is looking for her father in a world of ghosts, monsters, Wewolves and more. (We are also great fans or the previous book Kay Davault, Impapthed mansion.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the decline of the equipment or the care of the feet. A reader wrote to share that children care helped her discover her skills and also pointed to a race. “As daughter of the 1960s, my learning disabilities were never recognized or addressed,” he wrote. “But the care of children allowed me a voice to read aloud and tell happy stories.” Then he studied speech pathology and behavioral disorders, and to work with children in public schools and a private practice: “If I was careful when I was 13-16 years old. It is possible that I have not recognized my vocation!”
Thanks to all those who are written, and you can always contact me at anna.north@vox.com.