“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I asked my six-year-old as part of our back-to-school ritual. Every year on the first day of school, I ask my daughters a series of questions and, of course, record their answers.
Her response knocked the wind out of me.
“A horseback rider and also a – wait, are you going to post this?”
My daughter, barely in Grade 1, of course doesn’t have social media. But she sees me on my smartphone often, apparently knows the vocabulary of posting and sharing, and has learned that the things she says and does can become content for other people to consume. She has inherently come to understand the power of the little rectangle I’m always pointing at her.
Smartphones have already infiltrated her everyday life – guilty as charged – and she’s asked for her own more than once. Not long ago, a smartphone seemed like an obvious answer to a reasonable parenting need: a way for parents to track and communicate with their increasingly independent kids, in a world that felt increasingly threatening. Today, a whopping 77 per cent of Canadian youth have their own smartphone, with most getting their first between the ages of 11 and 13 so parents could keep in touch with them.
This despite research that gives parents reason for caution: heavier digital-media use has been associated with poorer mental-health outcomes, although much of the evidence is correlational.
But whether or not smartphones deserve all of the moral panic surrounding them, Millennial parents are beginning to separate two things we somehow conflated: a child’s need to communicate with family and friends, and a child’s access to the entire internet.
The untangling, fittingly, comes with a tangled cord: The landline is making a comeback.
“There’s this whole movement that’s happening in Canada to help give kids the privilege of having a smartphone-free childhood,” said Karlina Bear, a Toronto mom of an eight-year-old.
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Bear is a “parent champion” at her school for Unplugged Canada, a national organization that encourages parents to delay giving smartphones to kids until they’re at least 14. Wanting to start before the smartphone temptation became too intense, Bear got her daughter a landline instead.
“She loves to sit down and actually talk to her grandparents, without the distraction of a screen or filters,” Bear said. “And it’s actually a really important and fleeting skill, I think, to sit and talk to someone and have a real conversation.” Crucially, several of her daughter’s friends have landlines too, so she doesn’t feel left out.
That wasn’t the case just a few years ago for the daughter of Sachin Maharaj, assistant professor of education at the University of Ottawa who researches student smartphone use in schools. His daughter had a landline while her friends were communicating by text, Snapchat and Discord. Maharaj describes it as a collective action problem. Once enough kids get smartphones, the cost of holding out can fall on the kid who doesn’t have one.
He says smartphones are different from the technological bogeymen of our own childhoods – television, video games, even the early internet – because those were largely “place bound and time bound.”
“I think that’s what makes this different – it’s the portable, on-you-all-the-time nature of the devices that makes it much more of an issue,” he said.
Maharaj’s attempt to hook his daughter on a landline ultimately failed; she recently got a smartphone as she entered high school. But other parents with slightly younger kids are trying hard to make talking on the phone cool again.
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For Toronto mom Katie Ellsworth, she and the parents of her kids’ friends “all just decided to take it old school.” Her son uses the family landline – “all I hear is ‘hey bro want to come over bro? I’ll meet you outside bro,’” Ellsworth laughed. Her daughter has embraced the retro and colourful Tin Can, a Wi-Fi-connected landline phone with an old-school cord that has become so popular they are consistently backordered for months. The founders say their creation has been a viral success, with hundreds of thousands of the phones sold to the U.S. and Canada.
Now 11, Ellsworth’s son wants to walk places alone, which makes her feel it’s increasingly necessary to find a way to stay in touch, she said. “Honestly, I think we’ll get him a flip phone,” Ellsworth added as we reminisced about the painstaking process of early-days texting and paying for novelty ringtones.
The millennial urge to bring back old tech isn’t really about recreating our own childhoods. The nineties, despite what parenting influencers might have you believe, were hardly a golden age of child-rearing. (I spent my afternoons curiously watching adult soap operas before flipping through magazines that offered tips to fix my allegedly problematic body – and nobody knew where I was half the time.)
But there is one thing our childhoods got right: Phone communication had a clear beginning and a definitive end.
I don’t want my daughters to grow up afraid of technology, nor do I think screens are inherently bad. My six-year-old has a tablet, and technology will be woven through virtually every part of her life.
And someday, she will almost certainly have a smartphone, and be posting videos of herself instead of asking whether I’m going to. But before I give her the whole world in her pocket, when she reaches the age when she wants to call a friend or make her own plans with Grandma, I’ll give her something simpler – and something I long for for myself: A phone she can walk away from.