Children of today

A recent survey found that a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds never answer their phone. Respondents said they ignore the ringing, respond by text message, or look up the number online if they don’t recognize it.

The Uswitch survey of 2,000 people also found that almost 70 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds prefer text messages to phone calls.

For the older generation, making phone calls is normal.

Psychologist Dr. Elena Touroni explains that young people are not used to talking on the phone and that is why “it feels strange today because it is not the norm.”

This can lead to fears among young people that the worst will happen when their phone starts ringing (or lights up silently, because no one under 35 has a loud ringtone).

More than half of young people who took part in the Uswitch survey admitted that they considered an unexpected phone call to be a bad news symbol.

Psychotherapist Eloise Skinner explains that fear of phone calls comes from “an association with something bad – a feeling of foreboding or dread.”

“As our lives become more hectic and our work schedules more unpredictable, we have less and less time to call a friend just to catch up. Phone calls are then reserved only for the important news in our lives, which can often be complicated and difficult.”

Younger people never respond to unknown numbers because “they are either scammers or cold calls. So it’s safer to ignore the calls rather than screen through them and find out which ones are real.”

However, just because young people aren’t using their phones doesn’t mean they’re out of touch with their friends. Our group chats are buzzing with a mix of banal messages, memes, gossip and, more recently, voice messages.

In the Uswitch survey, 37 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds said voice messages were their preferred method of communication. In comparison, only one percent of 35- to 54-year-olds preferred voice messages to a phone call.