UNIVERSITY CITY — At first, the Merida children were baffled by their new phone.
They had to punch in numbers to call someone. There was no screen to see the person they were talking to. It had two pieces, attached to each other by a coily cord. And it was always in the same place, tethered to the wall near their stairs.
When it rang for the first time, 11-year-old Cecilia picked up the pink handset and waited silently.
“She didn’t know what to say,” says Cecilia’s mom, Liz Hatfield of University City. “We made a little script.”
Many members of Generation Alpha have never used — or even seen — a landline telephone. Fewer than 1 in 3 American households still have one. But their slide toward obsolescence may be slowing.
Today’s millennial parents hold fond memories of landlines as their primary means of connecting to friends before text threads and social media apps took over. Their nostalgia coincides with growing concerns about young people’s mental health, which professionals link, in part, to unfettered access to pocket-sized screens.
“The Anxious Generation,” a bestseller by psychologist Jonathan Haidt, points to isolation, shortened attention spans and disrupted sleep as consequences of a “phone-based childhood” replacing a play-based one. Online movements such as “Wait Until 8th” — a pledge to delay smartphones until eighth grade — and “bell-to-bell” school bans have bolstered the resolve of many parents to find alternatives.
So far, the experiment has been successful, they say.
The return to 1990s technology is “a happy medium” between too much autonomy and not enough, says Megan Gadallah, a mother of three from Crestwood. For Victoria Feldman of Town and Country, a house phone relieved her of the “part-time job” of setting up her 10-year-old’s playdates; now her daughter can do it herself. Megan Heithaus decided last December to hook up an antique wall phone that she had inherited when she bought her house in Bridgeton. Santa Claus sold her kids on it when he called to let them know it worked.
Old-school phones have given their youngsters practice in conversational skills, the parents say. And in some cases, they have inspired a little creativity.
“They played ‘ordering pizzas,’” Alice Foster of University City says of her two children, who attend Flynn Park Elementary School.
Several Flynn Park families adopted landlines for their tweens this summer. Similar “pods” have popped up in other communities in the St. Louis area and across the country. Many of the University City parents credited Johnny Brookheart as the first to implement the new-old idea.
“I just decided there was no need for a cellphone yet,” says Brookheart, who has a 10-year-old daughter and a 12-year-old son. He put in an extension from his business line more than a year ago.
The novelty hasn’t worn off yet.
“They get so excited when the phone rings,” he says.
‘Let’s pare it down’
Parents have been grappling with when to get their children a smartphone since the devices became ubiquitous more than a decade ago. In 2015, less than a quarter of 8- to 12-year-olds had their own smartphone, according to a report from the nonprofit Common Sense Media. Six years later, that percentage had almost doubled.
Evangeline Baker, a therapist and founder of Come Play STL, saw an uptick in parents buying cellphones for their kids during the pandemic, when limits on screen time went out the window and everyone in the household needed a device for school and work.
“We were forced into using technology a lot,” says Baker. “Now we’re like, ‘Let’s pare it down.’”
Many of her clients’ families opt for a “kitchen phone,” an extra cellphone that stays parked in a common area of the house. Others decide on watches that can only send texts and make calls, or flip phones that aren’t connected to the internet.
In the strictest sense, landlines — which use copper-based cables to transmit messages — are not part of the home-phone revival. Telecommunications providers such as AT&T and Verizon are looking to retire those traditional services within the next few years, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
VoIP technology, which runs through the internet, is cheaper and easier to set up. On the user’s end, VoIP-enabled home phones operate in the same way as a landline.
Jenny Blasius of Lake Saint Louis bought a desk phone years ago when her kids started staying home alone, so they could reach her or call for help in an emergency. But she still gave in early on getting her daughter, now 17, a cellphone.
That turned out to be a mistake, she says. She found parental controls stressful to manage: Her daughter was always two steps ahead despite her best efforts. Blasius worried about who the girl was texting and how much time she spent scrolling.
“She was never fully in the moment,” Blasius says. “That’s the reason my son doesn’t have a cellphone.”
Not that her 14-year-old doesn’t want one. The eighth-grader asks — begs — all the time.
Blasius plans to stand firm until he can drive.
“It’s really hard not to give in, but I’ve stuck it out, and it is the best decision I ever made,” she says.
New traditions
Deanna Dopplick, a Webster Groves-based therapist who works with teenagers, has been in practice for more than 15 years. Recently, she has witnessed a mindset shift — among her colleagues, her friends and neighbors, and even with her young clients themselves.
“Some of the kids are able to say, ‘This has been really bad for me,’” she says. “We’re seeing a little bit of a turn.”
Her own children, a set of 7-year-old twin girls, don’t stay home alone yet. But when they get to that point, Dopplick expects she will get them a Tin Can, an old-fashioned-looking corded phone that only receives calls from preapproved numbers.
“There’s always an alternative,” says Dopplick. “We can always do better.”
Banding together with other parents helps, said Amanda Meer, a member of the U. City home-phone crew and a mother of four.
Meer’s fifth-grader, Lillian, was unimpressed when her mom told her in July that they would be getting a landline.
“She said, ‘I am never using that phone,’” Meer recalls of the cordless set they picked up at Best Buy.
Within a couple of weeks, the 10-year-old had changed her tune.
“Lillian is very social,” her mom says. “It’s strengthened the friendships she already had.”
And the family has started a new tradition: Every afternoon, Meer’s husband, Sam, calls home to let them know he is leaving the office. The kids race to answer.
“It is nice to hear a phone in the house again,” says Meer. “I had kind of forgotten what that was like.”
Blythe Bernhard of the Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.
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