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A few days ago I talked to Ava, an Indiana fifth-grader, on the phone.

I mean the phone phone — Ava’s dad recently installed a landline for her, and she chatted with me using the handset, sitting in her family’s upstairs hallway. “I’m holding it in my hand up to my ear and it’s connected to a base,” she told me, an explanation that would have seemed unnecessary a few decades ago but that is needed now.

Unlike on a FaceTime call, “I’m just hearing audio instead of a person that I can look at,” Ava said. The audio quality was noticeably good.

Ava’s dad, newspaper publisher Chris Hardie, decided to get the phone this spring as an alternative to a mobile device. “Access to social media and the kind of social experiences that those bring are going to be hard and complicate life in all sorts of ways,” Hardie told me. “We’re going to try to wait as long as we can.”

Hardie is one of a growing number of parents around the country turning to landlines for their kids. Tin Can, a company launched last year that offers landline-style phones aimed at children, now has customers in all 50 states as well as Canada, co-founder Chet Kittleson told me.

I understand why parents choose landlines: The phones are often a way to let their kids talk to friends and family without the social and mental-health concerns some associate with smartphones. “I really wanted to give myself and other parents something they can just always say yes to,” Kittleson said.

What’s in it for kids, though? Hearing about the potential resurgence of landlines made me curious whether these older phones were just a worse version of something kids want, or whether the landline itself has its own, organic appeal. After all, landline phones are one of a handful of older technologies that have retained a place in kid culture long after most adults stopped using them; the play phone, complete with handset and buttons (or sometimes rotary dial) remains a fixture in daycares and preschools. Do kids know something we don’t about the pleasures of a retro device?

A........

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