"E.T. phone home."
- lifelessonsfrommem
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
I am a Generation X. Growing up, we loved our phones almost as much as people love their phones today. We even have a movie that the most popular line was “ET, phone home”. However, when I was growing up, we only had landline phones. For those of you that don’t know what a landline is, it is a phone that is connected by a line to a phone jack in the wall.
Phones have evolved a lot in just my lifetime. Yes, when I was young, we had a rotary phone. You literally had to stick your finger in the hole and bring it down to mark that one number of your seven digit phone number.
Really, at that time, we didn’t even have to dial all digits. I lived in a small town and everybody’s phone number started with 76. We didn’t bother with the area code. If you called a different area code, it was long distance and you had to pay by the minute for that long distance call. Anyway, if you were calling somebody from our small town to somebody in in the same small town, you didn’t have to dial the first two numbers of seven and six. You would just dial the last five numbers.
I even remember when I was real young, my Memaw had what was called a party line. Because there wasn’t enough phone lines yet, you "shared" a line with somebody else—hence the word party line. What that meant was sometimes you would pick up the phone and they would already be somebody talking. That was the other person that also used your line and they were talking to somebody else. Yes, you could listen to their conversation if you wanted to. If you have any older people in your life and ever see them use a phone, you will see that they will pick up the receiver first, listen for a dial tone, then punch in the number. That was because of the party lines. If you picked up the receiver and you heard a dial tone that meant you could dial out.
It is estimated that 98% of US people have a phone. 91% have a smart phone. We still love our phones but now especially because they do so much more than just call. As a parent, it is always a dilemma of when to get your child their first phone. Even for my children, who are millennials and Gen Z, we had to figure out when to give them their first phone. The phones that were available to us were not as smart as the ones we have now, but it was still a cell phone. Because both Joe and I worked, we did not take the kids to school. But we did live close enough that they could walk when they got older. We were concerned about safety and we thought a cell phone would be helpful in that area. Our concern was different back then it is now. For my daughters , in the early 2000's, cell phones did not have texting or Internet, so we weren't worried about that like parents are today. We were more worried about would they be responsible enough to not lose their phone, not break their phone, and not have their phone on during school hours.
Today, parents have to worry about so much more. With the Internet, children are exposed to a lot of things that maybe they are not mature enough to handle. There is also social media and that exposure. Finally, there is the biggest issue of cyber bullying. Studies are showing now that children are affected by all of this, their self-esteem is low, their confidence is low, and they’re engaging in activities that maybe they would not normally engage in if they weren’t exposed to it. It is tough to be a parent.
We had some of the same issues when I was growing up and also my children. My generation and the millennials were influenced by advertisement. It wasn’t really social media, which I think is advertisement on steroids and more personable, but we were still influenced by what to wear, our make up, our hair, how thin we had to be, how perfect our teeth had to be, etc with TV and magazine ads. Children are so immature and lack the coping skills to deal with all those things that are thrown at them.
I just read an article about how some parents are handling the dilemma about when to get their child a phone. Children are begging their parents for a phone because they say they want to talk to their friends. Parents know it’s a lot more than that. Yes, it’s talking to their friends, but it’s also the social media and the pressure to have a phone like everyone else. So some parents have decided to go back to landline. What does this mean? The parents are installing a landline into their home that is specifically for the children. If the children want to call their friends, they call them on the landline. If their friends wanna call them, they call them on the landline. The landline is specifically for the children and is not used by the parents.
As you can imagine, the children were not initially happy about it at all. They couldn’t get social media, they couldn’t text their friends, they couldn’t take the phone to school. And landlines are a relic from the past. But because the children had no choice, they started using the landlines. Parents started noticing a development. Children were actually socializing more on the landline. Their communication skills increased and got better. There was no texting. They actually had to call their friend and engage in a conversation. At first parents said it was painful and difficult to watch their child trying to have a conversation with another child. The silence on the call was frustrating. The kids didn't know what to say. Sometimes the parents would help their child after the conversation by giving them some advice, some pointers, some things they could’ve done instead. But they did this in a nice loving way, not criticizing, because they knew it’s just that the child didn’t have the skills yet. So the parents took it upon themselves to teach the skills to the child, but in a non-threatening way. Parents also wanted to child to learn on their own and try to figure out how to solve the problem.
Other problems included how to hold a receiver on the phone. Children were used to the phone being in front of them and being able to hear on speaker. With the landline, they had to figure out how to actually put the receiver to their ear and talk into the other end. They also had to learn about phone etiquette. Friends would call 17 times a day. Some moms had to explain that calling a couple times a day was sufficient.
Landlines are expensive, though, because of installation, cost of the phone, and the cost of using the line. Along came a company called The Tin Can (can you guess why for the name? If you need a hint, watch the movie “The Grownups” and see what the kids use). For The Tin Can, you pay $100 for the phone and $10 a month to call anyone. It works using your WiFi, so no landline installation is needed. If you are calling other people who have The Tin Cup, then the call is free. Some parents have gotten their children together and bought them the phones so they could talk to each other.
Will children never want a smartphone now? Of course they will. As adults, we love our smartphones. I’m even writing this blog on mine. But if there is something that will help us bridge that gap between when our children want a phone and when we think they are able to handle a smart phone, then I think this landline idea is excellent.
Just another tool in our toolbox to make sure our children are safe.
Blog Website: https://www.lifelessonsfrommemaw.com/