In Praise of Land Lines

And pen pals, and some other things I'm into right now

Friends,

I recently got a message from a friend who had noticed that her 5th grade daughter was becoming increasingly fixated on her appearance — as she put it, “I feel like all she wants to talk about these days is skin care and clothes.” She also noticed that all the zoom and video calls her daughter was doing with friends (via an iPad) were “only reinforcing the appearance preoccupation.” She and her husband didn’t want to limit their daughter’s ability to talk with her friends, but they also didn’t want her to spend hours staring at her own appearance on a computer. So they did something both simple and revolutionary:

THEY GOT A LANDLINE TELEPHONE.

Bonus points if you go THIS retro.

She then wrote a message to a bunch of fellow moms “If any of you are thinking of getting a landline, please go for it. The network effect here will help: the more people our daughter can call, the more she’ll like the telephone over the iPad.”

Apparently her message struck a nerve, because guess what? Eight moms bought landlines that day. She reports that her daughter “has all her friends’ phone numbers, and they just chat like we did in middle school. It’s amazing!” And there are added benefits, too. Says my friend:

“She’s chatting and having fun and NOT LOOKING AT HERSELF while doing it. I didn’t anticipate this benefit to the landline, but it’s real. Also, she has exercised her muscles of talking to adults when the parents answered. Getting this landline is the one parenting act I’ve taken that I feel genuinely proud of.”

I find this to be a wonderful example of how something that can seem incredibly daunting — how can our children possibly communicate with their friends unless they have smartphones? —is actually not that daunting at all, provided you get a bit creative and invite other people to join you. (And they will join you; everyone is struggling with the same things.)

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The Secret to an Affordable Landline: VoIP

You might be thinking, “Oh, a landline might be nice, but it’d be so expensive.”

That may have been true when the only option for a landline was as an add-on service to a pre-existing cable plan.

My husband and I have actually had a “landline” telephone for years. It’s a VoIP telephone (short for “voice over internet protocol”) and it doesn’t require a plan from a traditional service provider like Verizon or AT&T; instead, it makes calls over the internet. We use Ooma: you pay a one-time fee for the hardware, and then choose between their free plan and one with a few additional features (like call forwarding) that cost something like $10 a month—quite a low price for all the benefits that come from having a household smartphone alternative.

And it’s useful for adults, too. For example, many people tell me that they don’t feel like they can keep their smartphones out of their bedrooms while they sleep because they’re too worried they’ll miss an emergency call. Well, if you have a landline — and keep a handset in the bedroom, and give the number to emergency contacts — then you don’t have to worry!

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It turns out that my friend is not alone in getting a landline for her kid. The Atlantic recently ran an article about the trend (title: “The Dumbest Phone is Parenting Genius”), and then Good Morning America did a video piece based on the article. (The image of the kid on the left makes me particularly happy.)

It’s all part of a heartening “nostalgia tech” trend in which parents and young people long for the days when phones were connected to the wall, and the Blackberry reigned supreme. (I’m serious: there is a call to bring back the Blackberry—which readers of a certain age might find particularly interesting given that at the peak of their popularity, Blackberries were known as “crack berries” because non-Blackberry users could not understand why anyone would want to be tethered to their work email while out of the house.)

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In Praise of Pen Pals

Speaking of retro forms of communication, I also would like to make a summer push for the most retro form of correspondence of all: the pen pal.

I was personally a huge letter-writer as a child (a fact that will surprise approximately no one who knows me) and I still keep my old letters in a box in my basement — which will either be a fun set of artifacts to look through with my daughter someday, or mortifying; I’m not sure which.

Anyway, I started thinking about pen pals again recently when a friend of mine’s daughter asked if she could get Facebook Messenger to correspond with a camp friend. My friend responded with a kid-friendly version of “Hell, no,” and instead suggested that her daughter start writing letters to my daughter, a child she had never met.

And so began an adorable epistolary correspondence between two then-9-year-olds, whose “letters” were less Jane Austen, and more like text messages: one- to two-sentence missves that spared all details and focused mostly on greetings and celebrations. (“Dear [redacted], Happy birthday! Love, [redacted].”)

But they’ve now kept it up for more than a year, and when they met for the first time in person on a trip to Washington DC last October, they were both absolutely delighted. (In an added delightful twist, I bought my daughter a quill and ink set, which added a certain Revolutionary War-era touch to their correspondence.)

So if you’ve got a kid of your own who has gone to a summer camp (or is at a summer camp) and wants to stay in touch with friends or relatives (or with you, while at camp!), I encourage you to go seriously old-school and consider the pen pal. After all, no one has a box in their basement full of old texts.

To scrolling less, living more, talking on the phone and writing with a pen instead of tapping with your thumbs,

Catherine Price

ps: did you have pen pals when you were a kid or teenager? Tell us about it in the comments!

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