The first thing my 9-year-old does when she gets home from school these days is take our Pepto-Bismol-colored family telephone off its cradle to call her friend Archie and make plans to play.
Archie is only 8 and doesn’t have access to a phone of his own, so it’s Archie’s mom’s cellphone she calls. My daughter knows the number by heart, though it’s also in our family phone book. When we first got the phone, last fall, Frankie and her older sister transcribed all of their friends’ parents’ cellphone numbers, and the occasional family landline, into a notebook we keep in the kitchen.
These days, as parents grow wary of giving their kids smartphones and schools crack down on allowing them in class, good old-fashioned home phones are becoming popular again.
I started my campaign to convince my husband that we should install a household phone a few years ago. Friends of ours have had one forever, and I loved the agency it seemed to give their kids, the younger of who is my 12-year-old daughter’s best friend.
During the pandemic, when this little girl and her older brother — who didn’t have a cellphone yet — were home alone during the workday, she’d sometimes call me on my cell. At age 6, her phone etiquette was impeccable. She always introduced herself, asked politely if she could speak to my daughter and carried on amiably with my chitchat.
Meanwhile, my kids were monosyllabic and panicky when presented with a phone to speak into — like Garth Algar abandoned on the air in the “Wayne’s World” studio set.
My husband and I plan to hold off on getting our kids their own cellphones as long as we possibly can. Their entire adult lives are likely to be dictated by addictive devices. They deserve a childhood free of them for as long as it’s practical.
But we also want them to have some independence. I hate being the middleman in their social plans. I want them to learn basic phone manners and to appreciate the pleasure of talking to a friend you can’t see while pacing the kitchen and twirling a long, coiled cord around your fingers — like I did as a kid.
My husband was on board, mostly, but he couldn’t get over the cost. Maintaining a traditional landline, with copper wires and a phone jack, would cost us about $100 a month. Was it worth it? For this antiquated technology?
He changed his tune when we discovered a different kind of home phone option, called a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), that connects directly to our Wi-Fi. Technically, it’s not a landline: If the power goes out, the phone stops working. But you use it just like a landline. And the service costs just $6.50 a month.
There are lots of options. A friend got her VoIP directly through her internet service provider, Maple Broadband. My social newsfeeds have been overrun with ads for Tin Can, which is an extremely cute, closed VoIP network that allows parents to monitor who can call their kids and whom the kids can call.
We didn’t feel like we needed all that monitoring, so we opted for Ooma, whose line of retro phones (including a rotary phone!) I couldn’t resist. Ours was wall-mounted, with buttons and a curly cord, though it kept coming off the wall, so we keep it on a little side table now. It cost $160 for the phone plus the Wi-Fi adapter device, which plugs into our modem.
Six months in, we all love it. It’s made it easier to leave the kids home alone, because we can call anytime to check in. It’s made it possible for us to hire a babysitter who doesn’t have her own cellphone yet — and for our 12-year-old to try out babysitting the neighbors’ kids for short stints at our house.
The girls’ phone manners are still evolving. Early on, they would hang up on their friends without saying goodbye. Sometimes they say goodbye back and forth for many minutes until I have to intervene with “OK, enough already!” Occasionally the kids yank the phone too hard and the whole cradle flies across the kitchen.
They’re learning.
And it’s so fun to see their personalities emerge through this new-old technology. My 12-year-old calls me sometimes when she gets home from school just to chat about the book she’s reading. I tell her what I’m seeing out the window of the bus on my way home from work, and she listens in an entirely different way from when we’re in a room together.
When the telephone rings at home, the girls run to answer it. It might be their grandmother asking if they want to come over next Thursday after school. It might be a friend who wants to tell them about her trip to Six Flags. Or it might be Archie’s mom calling for him to come home, or to invite Frankie to dinner at their house.
It feels like the old days. At the same time, it feels like the future. Every time they answer the phone or make a call, I catch a glimpse of who they are when I’m not involved, and who they might become. I like how it sounds.
The original print version of this article was headlined “On the Phone | Why we got a landline for the kids”
This article appears in Kids VT Summer Fun • 2026.
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