Will a resolve to reduce screen time see a revival of landline telephones?
For parents trying to limit their kids’ exposure to smartphones, the answer could be yesterday’s tech.
When the Chatter Telephone toy was released in the 1960s, it gave children the opportunity to play pretend phone calls, imitating their parents on the household landlines of the era.
Six decades and a few technological revolutions later, and kids are now being given actual landlines for amusement... while a few nostalgic adults are themselves turning to functioning Bluetooth versions of Fisher-Price’s iconic plastic rotary dial.
Familiar ring
Last week, The Wall Street Journal published details of how some American parents are attempting to minimize their families’ screen time by installing low-tech landlines, rather than succumb to buying smartphones for their youngsters.
The shift toward analog phones comes as many telecom companies are already making moves to phase out copper wire, the cable network that’s conventionally been used to service landlines, in favor of fiber-optic or wireless providers — though some traditionalists are pushing back.
Back in December 2024, cellular giant AT&T announced that it would shut down its legacy copper service, citing $6 billion of annual costs. Since then, landline holdouts, which represent less than 5% of AT&T’s customer base, have been slow to switch. (A string of thefts also hasn’t helped.)
Per the latest results from the biannual National Health Interview Survey, the landline is indeed a dying breed in the US. At the end of 2024, almost 79% of American households reported using only wireless telephone services, in stark contrast with the 0.9% that were landline-only — a significant decline from roughly 40% only two decades before.
Owing to sinking demand and the reduced availability of copper networks, installing and running landlines has become costlier for screen-averse families, the WSJ reported. Happily, though, companies like Tin Can have created Wi-Fi compatible, kid-friendly screenless phones, which are proving so popular that its website crashed this Christmas.
Scroll it back
Parents’ concerns about their kids’ screen time are well founded, as a growing pile of data points to the rise of a digitally dependent generation.
Last May, a survey found that 57% of US children own their own smartphone by the age of 12, while nearly 40% of kids under 2 have interacted with the devices, according to their parents.
