There’s a growing consumer movement to bring back landlines as an alternative to smartphones, writes Erin McCarthy for The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Parents, particularly, want the old technology back for their children.
Groups like Delco Unplugged are encouraging parents to wait until their children are in high school to introduce smartphones. The worry is over mental health, social media, and screen time.
“There’s an attention crisis. Kids are not able to focus in lectures. Kids are not reading books anymore,” Delco Unplugged founder Alex Becker told The Inquirer this summer.” As parents, “we are the first line of defense.”
Becker, a Rose Valley parent of two children, founded Delco Unplugged, a coalition of Delaware County parents who are delaying smartphone use until high school.
About 21 percent of U.S. adults and 13 percent of children had a landline in their home last year, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey. Twenty years ago, 90 percent of U.S. households had a landline.
Back then, landline phones were connected by copper wire with strong reception that worked in a power outage.
These days, providers set up home phones over the Internet, which is affected by power outages.
Read more about home phones as a smartphone alternative in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
