By Mallory Mattingly
While teens seem attached to their phones, if you’ve ever tried calling one, you know they’re not likely to answer.
This reluctance to talk on the phone isn’t just a generational cycle; it has to do with a shift in “communication practices, social norms, and digital etiquette,” according to The Conversation.
“I never answer calls unless it’s my mum, or an emergency, like a surprise test at school, or a friend who freaks out about something,” 15-year-old Léa said.
According to data collected from Uswitch.com, one-quarter of people aged 18-34 don’t answer their phone when someone is calling them.
Instead, young people prefer “written communication,” such as texts, voice notes or social media DMs because it gives them more control.
Phys.org explained that “immediacy” of phone calls stresses teens, as there isn’t time to think through what they want to say. Written communication, on the other hand, gives young people time to organize their thoughts, rewrite, delete or postpone a conversation until they have time.
But it’s not that young people don’t want people to call them on the phone; they just want the phone call to be prearranged so they can prepare for it.
“We just don’t do spontaneous phone calls anymore – I prefer a voice note, there’s much less pressure that way. My mum, on the other hand, loves an out of the blue phone call, no matter how I feel about it!” Freya Mallard, 26, said in an interview with Uswitch.
These statistics seem to indicate that telephobia is on the rise.
The National Institues of Health defines telephobia as “a kind of anxiety disorder in which the individual is afraid of either answering or making telephone calls.”
Gen Zers “just simply have not had the opportunity for making and receiving telephone calls,” explained Liz Baxter, a careers advisor at Nottingham College, a U.K.-based school for pupils aged 16 to 18 and older. “It is not the main function of their phones these days; they can do anything on the phone, but we automatically default to texting, voice notes, and anything except actually using a telephone for its original intended purpose, and so people have lost that skill.”
Baxter’s school offer Gen Zers telephobia courses to help them make phone calls without the added anxiety.
The course features “practicing a series of scenarios where you have to make a phone call, for example, calling the doctors to make an appointment, calling in sick to work, and other everyday scenarios. The pupils are expected to sit back to back to mimic a regular phone call where they can’t see the person on the other end and practice by using scripts.”
While talking on the phone might not be your teen’s favorite thing, teaching them that skill will certainly help them in the long run.
Read Next: Home Phones Are Making a Comeback — Here’s Why
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