Hearing my eleven-year-old on a phone call is equal parts cringe-worthy and hilarious.
You’ll note I said “call”. Not a Zoom or FaceTime or text thread, but an old-school phone call, where you dial up someone’s number and only talk to them. Kids–strike that, anyone under 25–ask your parents about what “phone calls” are. It was a pretty big deal for the last near-150 years.
My daughter often gets “Hello?” right when she answers a call, but of course with call display removing the previous mystery of who’s calling, she’s also been known to answer with a casual “What?” (Told you it was cringe-worthy.)
Long stretches of silence during the call seem to be de rigueur. A friend will call, or she’ll call a friend, and once both people are on the line–sometimes following a flat “Why did you call me?”–the topic at hand is discussed, sometimes quickly and efficiently but more often at length with evidently amiable long pauses between either person talking.
Her calls are typically done while she’s doing something else in the background, like reading or playing a videogame or otherwise occupied on her laptop. That in itself has prompted my wife and me to prod her into stopping whatever else she’s doing to focus on the person calling. But to the kiddo’s credit, what is there to focus on when the extended silence from her and the other person has stretched into its third minute?
Part of my pain/amusement comes from how quickly the issue at hand could usually be covered if not for said distractions and pauses. What would take twenty seconds for my wife and me to resolve over a call sometimes stretches out into minute after minute for our progeny.
And 99% of the time the call is on speakerphone. I don’t fully grasp why, but it’s clearly the case for both parties on almost every call. I suspect it may be part and parcel as what the kids think a call entails, along with said long stretches of silence. If I was discussing twenty seconds of content over nearly seven minutes of call featuring mostly dead air, I wouldn’t want to hold the phone up to my ear the whole time, either.
I can only assume it’s the same for the parents of the other kid on the line, largely overhearing the two kids listening to each other doing anything and everything other than talking.
The calls end when the topic and its share of anxiety-causing long stretches of no talking have… I can’t say “concluded” so much as “wound down from really barely ever starting to the point where one or the other of them asks if there’s anything else to talk about and there isn’t”.
Usually my daughter will skip over any pleasantries I’d normally wrap such a call with (Thanks for clarifying that, or Sounds good, or Cool. Well, have a good night. See you tomorrow.) but instead will usually end it with some variation of an abrupt, “Okay. So… bye.”
A real-life example of how this all plays out happened last week.
A friend of hers had called to go over a project they worked on together and were presenting that day.
Which was great. Go proaction!
The thing is, both of them had their speakerphones on the whole time. As evidently one now just does. Her friend is in a smaller space than usual while the family goes through a home reno, and that family includes two younger siblings (who, being young kids, often talk over each other or at the friend while she’s on the phone) and two working parents.
That morning it sounded like the mom was getting the kids ready for school, so was of course talking to them, while also making suggestions for the project being discussed, as all the kids were talking over each other, and while there was some kind of either very loud vegetable chopping or some kind of hammering happening in the background.
My daughter was listening(ish) and offering feedback for the most part as the friend rehearsed her parts of the project, but she was also listening to something in headphones while also on her laptop doing a whole other thing that didn’t involve the project at all. Of course.
The call ended when we had to leave to get the kiddo to school for first bell. My daughter duly said she had to leave to get to school. There was no response, just the loud ambient noise on the other end of the line. My daughter said her friend’s name to get the friend’s attention and was repeating she had to leave to get to school, but was cut off by the friend–seemingly unable to hear my daughter, perhaps with the apparent building of a ship in the background–saying she had leave to get to school.
My default thoughts for replies:
Ok, see you in class.
Sounds good. See you soon.
Cool. See you shortly.
My daughter’s reply: “Ok. Bye.” (Cringe.)
This came on the heels of the previous night, when a phone call or two were needed with other friends working on the same project. My wife and I shared looks at the odd, stilted quality of the (loud) calls, at times suppressing laughter for how awkward and weird it all seemed.
One of her friends that previous night, bless her little heart, actually stepped up after the brief discussion was done and there was dead air for all of fifteen seconds and asked if there was anything else they needed to talk about. When my daughter, a bit confused (as one understandably would be when presented for the first time with one of her peers suggesting this was a valid form of discourse) said there wasn’t, the other, pleasant but clearly intent on her path of being done with the call, said that ok, then she was going to hang up. And they said bye and the call was ended.
This led to a brief discussion between my wife and me about an idea I was struck with: What if we got together with friends who have young kids and basically teach them how to interact on phone calls?
Lesson briefs:
– Here’s how you politely answer an incoming call.
– Here’s how you politely introduce yourself when the person you’re calling answers. The call-ee will then usually offer a form of greeting in reply and may (politely) ask what’s up. Then you say why you’ve called.
– [Advanced class, perhaps saved for the afternoon lesson] What a “discussion” is.
[sample] A “discussion” happens when one person says something and the other person replies and maybe adds something to it or asks something back, then the first person replies to that and maybe adds something or asks something else, and then the second person replies again. That pattern keeps going until the conversation is done. Underscore this in your notes, kids, because it’s key: If there’s a long pause, and FYI that’s more than just a few seconds, something’s up and you should strive to keep the discussion going. Or maybe it’s just winding down. If the other person still doesn’t respond after an attempt or two, they may have wandered away forgetting to hang up and a younger sibling may have given the phone to the cat.
I quickly waved the idea off, though. Making kids learn how to behave during a phone call would be like if, when I was a kid, my grandfather insisted I learn how to communicate over a telegraph “because it’s important”. It’s an old technology that has had its day.
Don’t get me wrong, phone calls are of course still widely used. What else would heads of state use to contact each other? And how else would the police commissioner directly communicate with Batman?
But I believe as a whole, calls are on the way out, in the same way that letter writing used to be the primary means of communicating over a distance and that has almost completely disappeared as telephones came into favour. I would bet that a chart showing the popularity and use of phones would pretty close to mirror the decline in letter writing.
In my own lifetime I’ve gone from having a single household phone number to having an extension of that number in my room (a huge deal at the time), to having my own household number in the same house (crazy!), which I then kept when I moved out on my own, to getting it on a cell phone instead, to moving in with my future wife who of course had her own phone with her own number on it. As I type this, my daughter is likely weeks away, if that, from getting her own phone number as well. Each person with their own phone number. Such is the way of the world these days.
As that has all happened, aside from occasional gift packages, the only things I’ve sent by mail for years are my mother’s bank statements that I look after that my mother wants to see. Were it not for those (and just with that, for a while I’ve been getting weird looks from friends when I inform them I just mailed something), there would be zero outgoing envelopes from me for *looks at watch* probably at least half of my life.
But I digress.
Point being, making our kids learn proper phone etiquette seems a huge waste of time for all involved over a technology that’s being phased out, if only gradually, for emerging forms of communication. Phone numbers are becoming less a place to call someone at and more are simply needed to connect a digital signal to.
To my point, when’s the last time you saw an ad about the quality of phone call clarity? Readers my age and older will likely remember the TV ads from AT&T not that long ago (he opined from his rocking chair), whose touchstone was that during a phone conversation, the signal was so clear you could hear a pin drop from the other end of the line.
These days you’re buying a device you can fit in your pocket that will get you in digital contact with the world and show you TV and movies and videos and you can play games on and listen to music on and take high-end photos with–that you can literally make movies with–and oh, by the way, will make phone calls, as well.
Focusing anyone’s attention, let alone time and effort, on the least cared about and ever-fading of those features seems well-intended but misguided.
And if I tried to rally kids to the cause of learning how to properly make calls, I’m sure the more outspoken of them would convey the same conclusion in no uncertain terms. “You want us to learn how to use a telephone? Like, to make calls on? Kick rocks, old man.”
So I propose instead that we, parents as a whole, teach our kids how to effectively (and properly and politely) interact with people using current technology in the hopes that maybe that will carry onward instead of working on use of retroactive types of communication. Get them to be clear and concise with emails and during video meets, etc.
It behooves all of us, but particularly for this and future generations, to learn to engage well with each other using whatever popular or emergent technologies we can. Because if we don’t, soon enough we’ll be stuck with a world of teenagers using their wristbands to make holocalls on, but they’ll just be looking at each other in cringe-worthy silence.