What Children Learned From the Shared Family Phone

What Children Learned From the Shared Family Phone

by Sue Shellenbarger 

Children raised with a shared family phone learned several grown-up skills, including proper telephone manners. WSJ's Sue Shellenbarger joins Tanya Rivero to discuss how smartphones could be getting in the way of learning how to speak on the phone to strangers and other etiquette. 

 “My dad can’t come to the phone right now. May I take a message?” It is an expression we hear less and less as the shared family phone disappears.

Nearly half of U.S. households no longer have landlines and instead rely on their cellphones, up from about 27% five years ago, the National Center for Health Statistics says. Among young adults ages 25 through 34, fewer than one-third have landlines. Even at homes with landlines, the phone rings mainly with telemarketers and poll-takers.

Few miss being tethered by a cord to a 3-pound telephone. But family landlines had their pluses. Small children had an opportunity to learn telephone manners, siblings had to share, and parents had to set boundaries governing its use. Now, the shared hub of family communication has given way to solo pursuits on mobile devices.

Eric J. Parker was taught as a child to answer the phone: “Parker residence. How can I help you?” His father was an anesthesiologist who sometimes got calls at home from hospitals or physicians, says the Weston, Mass., attorney. Greeting all callers in a polite, formal way “was something my mother baked into us. We had a front-end role. We represented the family to the outside world.”

Mr. Parker’s 13-year-old daughter Myranda never uses the family landline; she texts her friends. She enjoys teasing her dad about a vintage black desktop telephone installed in his basement workshop, calling it “his phone from the 1900s.”

Bryna Klevan got her first summer job during college, as a receptionist for a law firm, partly because of skills learned answering the family landline. “I had a polite telephone voice, and I knew how to answer and get the caller to the right person,” says Ms. Klevan.

One of Ms. Klevan’s three sons, 13-year-old Andrew, picks up the landline in the family’s Newton, Mass., home when a neighbor calls to ask the Klevans to feed his dog. Most of the time, though, Andrew avoids the phone in favor of texting and exchanging Snapchat photos with his friends. Ms. Klevan’s other two sons, ages 15 and 17, avoid the landline. Most calls are from telemarketers, and “they’ve learned to ignore it,” she says.

Tracy Kurschner learned as a toddler to spell her name by listening to her mother spell it for others on the phone. “She’d say, ‘Hello, this is Mrs. Zajackowski, Z-A-J-A-C-K-O-W-S-K-I,’” says Ms. Kurschner,a Minneapolis communications consultant. “People were just shocked that I knew how to spell my name by age 3.”

She also listened to her mother’s nightly phone conversations with her grandmother, asking how doctor appointments had gone and whether her grandmother was feeling well and getting her daily naps and vitamins. Ms. Kurschner continued the tradition, making nightly calls to her own parents and inviting her three children, now 23, 20 and 14, to listen and participate.

Overhearing adults’ phone conversations taught children “the nurturing work of adulthood,” such as setting up doctor appointments or planning activities for loved ones, says Sherry Turkle, author of “Reclaiming Conversation” and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Now all that work is done silently, by tapping on a keyboard.”

Sharing the landline often required parents to set boundaries around its use. “Parents said, ‘When we’re at dinner and the landline rings, we don’t answer it,’ ” Dr. Turklesays.

It also caused family conflict, says Laura Markham, a New York clinical psychologist and author of “Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids.” Siblings fought over who got to use the landline, and for how long. Parental wrath rained down on any child whose long conversations blocked incoming calls. 

Ms. Klevan was embarrassed as a teen when her parents and younger sister knew a boy was calling. She pulled the phone to the end of its 20-foot cord, stretching it through the kitchen and dining room and into a corner of the living room. But even then, “you’d be timed and teased about how long you were on the phone,” she says.

The landline put children in situations where they had to talk with adults, Dr. Markham says. Calling a friend at home often meant talking with a parent who answered—a conversation that was “a little bit uncomfortable, but manageable,” and that helped children learn conversation skills, she says.

Now, children’s and teens’ cellphone communications are “more private, for better or worse, and a little less connected to the larger community,” Dr. Markham says.

Many parents miss having “some sense of who was calling your child, or trying to reach your child,” Dr. Turkle says.

Some children reach late adolescence without knowing how to make a doctor’s appointment, Dr. Turkle says. She recommends that parents start using the speaker function on their cellphones when children are small, so they can learn by listening.

Some families coach their children on phone skills. Jeff Levy often uses the landline in his Providence, R.I., home, to talk with relatives on birthdays and holidays. “There’s something about having a communal phone that still ties us together,” says Mr. Levy, an attorney.

When his 11-year-old son Jonah got a call at home recently from his Little League coach, inviting Jonah to join his team, Jonah was polite but shy. Standing nearby, Mr. Levy says he realized Jonah “isn’t really comfortable having a conversation with an adult on the phone who isn’t a relative.” He coached him gently, whispering, “Say thank you.”

Elana Drell Szyfer uses the family landline during business trips to call her three daughters, 14, 12 and 9, at home when they’re having breakfast, says Ms. Szyfer, chief executive officer of a New York cosmetics company, Laura Geller Beauty.

Her daughter Paloma, 9, doesn’t have a cellphone yet. She has learned to talk with her friends’ parents when she calls them at home, and to leave a voice message if no one answers. Paloma says she’s looking forward to the privacy of having her own cellphone in a couple of years, however.

Jennifer Meyers is teaching her daughters, Emily, 11, and Katie, 13, to take phone messages, after recently missing a message from her mother that they failed to deliver. When her daughters talk with their grandparents on the phone, Mrs. Meyers coaches them to focus on the conversation and participate. “It drives me bananas when I hear them on the phone saying, ‘Yup, yup, yup,’” she says. She urges her daughters to “tell them about school today, tell them about the soccer game.”

Landlines have practical benefits, of course. Mrs. Meyers and her husband Tim keep theirs partly because it is listed at their home address in North Easton, Mass., enabling rescue workers to find them easily if they call 9-1-1. They teach their daughters to manage the risks of a listed number, Ms. Meyers says: “Never tell a stranger that you’re home alone.”

Terry Abdoo King and her husband keep a landline in their Arlington, Va., home, because it provides continuing phone service during power outages, she says. Her children, 18 and 20, use only their cellphones, however, giving them plenty of privacy when communicating with friends. For her, “the biggest issue is that I don’t know who they’re talking to or texting.”