E.T. Phone Home

When the two of us began dating at 21, I was already fighting addiction to my Blackberry (embracing my corporate spirit from a young age) while Shane – ever the anarchist – clung to his flip phone, finding joy in every T9-typed text message.

Even as I cycled through multiple smartphones, tediously selecting the right filter for each Instagram photo, Shane maintained a flip phone + an iPod mini for music was obviously the way to go. It took years of persistent advertising for this stubbornness to collapse. Now he’s just like me -- and the rest of us – hunched over, scrolling, and unable to remember how the last hour went by. Welcome, my love. The water is dangerously warm.

There’s nothing like kids to make one painfully aware of their phone addiction. After all, many of us want nothing more than to be present, good parents. And the solution at face value seems so simple and obvious: abandon these silly screens! But the reality is much harder. (They help us see family & friends! How will I navigate? Who will answer the 10pm work Slack?? And how can I stand to miss those TikTok deals on exercise shorts?) Let’s be honest – most of us aren’t Christopher Nolan. We can’t afford an army of assistants to manage our lives while we revel in the quiet of a modern, screen-less life.

Clearly we haven’t figured this out for ourselves yet. And we continue to cycle through and test ideas of how to be better ourselves: no screens in bedrooms, no phones between 5-8pm, etc. But there has been one experiment that’s now stuck for two years: a house phone.

The $9.99/month experiment.

The original pitch for the house phone was based on two simple premises:

A. A way for our kids to – independently – build a habit of keeping in touch with grandparents and cousins.

B. In case of emergency and if we’re both out of commission, having an easy way for them to call 911 – without needing to figure out how to unlock one of our screens in a moment of panic.

In the end it was a minor emergency (see: reason B) that made us quickly take the plunge, but since then the beauty has been much more seeing reason A manifest in real life. For a mere $9.99/month (shout out Google Fiber) and a $5 phone book, we’ve been able to see our kids build more direct relationships with their grandparents, call us to say “goodnight” when they’re with a babysitter, and figure out that indeed one does need to say “hello” first when you make a phone call. Increasingly, they’re also making their own plans. Want to go play with the neighbor kid? Great – you make those plans.

The house phone clearly hasn’t solved our screen problem. (Thank you Shane for my latest TikTok rain jacket!) But it has given our kids a little more independence and a way to connect with the people they love without first entering an algorithm. It rings, someone answers, and a small human learns how to make a plan, ask a question, or simply phone home.

Turns out that sometimes the future looks like a phone attached to the wall.