I am looking for information/ideas about how to teach my child phone etiquette. Is that even the right term? What I mean is, how to have a phone conversation with another human.

Do I remember learning how to use the phone? No, I do not. I am guessing that I learned it through emulating my parents. You answered the phone a certain way, you handled the call a certain way, you closed the call a certain way. Those were all things I probably absorbed just from living in my house.

But… How do you teach a child how to use the phone when you can’t teach by example?

My house as an adult is nearly phone free. AS I PREFER, of course. We have no landline. My husband and I each have a cell phone, but we both actively avoid phone calls. I talk to maybe three people on the phone on a regular basis. I call my mom once or twice a week. I call my best friend from back home once or twice a month. And then there’s a mom from school who is a Phone Fan and who calls me, on average, once a week or so.

I do have phone meetings with clients, as well. But those are infrequent and tend to cluster.

All of these phone calls take place, almost without exception, when Carla is in school. Sure, sometimes I am still talking with my mom when I pick up Carla from school. Sometimes the mom friend calls when I am at home with Carla. But those instances are rare. The VAST MAJORITY of all of my human interactions take place via text or in person.

(This is the third time I’ve used the word human in this post; I deleted one of the instances, so you are only seeing two of them. Well, now three since I used it again just a second ago. What is the deal? Am I subconsciously worried that you might think I’m spending time talking to… cats? Birds? The deer in my yard?)

Back to the subject at hand: I wish I could just wiggle dismissive fingers at the whole idea of talking on the phone. By the time Carla’s old enough to want to communicate with her friends outside of school, she will probably want to text them or snapchat them or whatever it is young people do these days.

Be that as it may, being able to talk on the phone is a SKILL. A dying one, perhaps. But one that could come in handy in Carla’s future professional life and at the very least is useful now when talking to her very patient grandparents. (I have a full-body cringe thinking about my poor mom saying, cheerfully, “Hello? Carla? Are you still there?” when Carla has CALLED HER and then given up on the call halfway through, with no heads-up to my mother.)

My parents wind up being the guinea pigs for phone calls, by the way. And I am sure that the conversations are as frustrating on their end as they are on my end (where I am gesturing to Carla to pay attention and stop doing a backbend off the couch and answer the question your grandfather just asked you). But how does a child get better at talking on the phone without talking on the phone?

I have googled, of course. The majority of articles seem to be mainly about… when to talk on the phone (as in, appropriate situations for phone conversation), rather than how to hold a conversation. And maybe THAT’S where I need to start. With conversations.

Because part of learning the phone skill, I think, is learning how to hold a regular old in-person conversation. A conversation is a conversation, after all, no matter what medium you use to hold it. And I definitely could do some additional coaching in that regard. My husband and I try to teach Carla, in our own conversations, with each other and with her, not to interrupt, to pay attention, to ask questions and show interest in what the other person is saying, to take turns, etc. etc. But I admit that we aren’t perfect about it. It’s easy, when there are only three of you, to be a little bit lenient on the interruption front. And when we are all chatting around the dinner table, requiring Carla to look us in the eyes just isn’t super important. Plus, my husband and I both need to be better about putting our phones down when we are talking to one another and to Carla because THAT is certainly giving Carla the wrong idea about what’s appropriate. And it’s easy enough to have a conversation with your parents, or with people you see all the time. It’s a whole other thing to have a conversation with a stranger, or someone you see infrequently. When I am on top of things, I can remind Carla to smile when she says hello, to look the person in the eyes, to do that little “hi how are you fine how are you” exchange that humans do. But I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, most conversations are sort of impromptu, rendering preparation impossible.

Another part of learning how to talk on the phone is, I think, understanding how different it is from in-person conversation. There are no visual cues. You have to convey everything with your words.

And part of it is… a lot of intangible stuff about social cues and social expectations that Carla is still learning. Like… if one grandparent asks if you want to talk to the other grandparent, you say YES, even if it is not technically true. And… as I mentioned above, it is polite to ask how someone is doing, even if you don’t technically care. And… long silences are not a good sign, on a phone call. And… it is totally okay to end the call if you’ve run out of things to discuss, but you need to do it in a polite way, rather than just setting the phone down somewhere and wandering into a different room to build something with LEGOs.

Carla is six-and-a-half. I feel like… this should be something she’s working on, if not something she’s already mastered. But I have no frame of reference. Are other little kids having full conversations via phone? Are other parents working on this skill every weekend? Are we failing our child because we, ourselves, are so phone (and human) averse?

Do I need to start having Carla call one of her friends on the phone, to practice? Should I try to incorporate phone calls into our pretend play? Should I stop stressing out about this and remember that Carla is learning a TON of things right now and this probably doesn’t need to be a top priority?

Probably the latter. But it is really hard to notice gaps in your child’s knowledge and have no real idea how to fill them in.

Sort of how I feel when I remember that she is already six-and-a-half and we have only read half of the Ramona books and NONE of the Little House books and are the Winnie the Pooh years already in the rear-view, because we have yet to read that book all the way through. I get panicky, thinking of ALL THE THINGS I want her to experience and ALL THE THINGS I want her to learn (and read). And yet we only have so many hours in the day.