The phone rings. Then it rings again. If it keeps ringing, Sarah Ecker, a student in Crownsville, Maryland, might pick it up. “I’d pick up the call, but I’d wait a second to make sure that they didn’t accidentally call me.” She added that more of her friends call her by accident than on purpose.
Ecker isn’t alone. Many young people these days are less likely to pick up their phones when receiving a call. Thanks to the convenience of smartphones and cultural changes caused by COVID lockdowns in 2020, some teens are spurning live phone calls for texting.
This shift is backed up by numbers. A 2024 survey from Uswitch, a UK-based consumer research website, found that 61% of people aged 18-34 prefer texting to hopping on a phone call. News outlets,, including The Conversation and CBS News,, have outlined that young people prefer texting or DMs to ringing somebody up.
The reason has to do with the differing demands of the two ways of getting in touch. “Nobody wants to pick up because texting feels safer,” said Annie Pezalla, a developmental psychologist at the University of St. Thomas. “They can do it when it works for them, at an asynchronous pace, and they can practice what they want to say.”
Ecker agrees with Pezalla. Ecker said that over text, “I’m able to say what I mean a lot better because I can think more.” This changes with phone calls because she has to think on the spot. “I’m stumbling over my words a lot right now because I’m, like, trying to figure out how to phrase everything,” she said during a call with The Sunn Post.
Micah Wagoner, a high schooler in Minneapolis, agreed that “texting is much easier,” but noted that he has never really thought about why that is. Phone calls bring formality, he added. “I feel like I want to be more courteous when calling.”
Sia Sankaran, a high schooler from Dallas, is among the large minority who still prefer calling. Her preference comes in part because of the convenience, in part because she likes calling her frequently traveling parents, and in part because she can express “thoughts a lot better spoken rather than in text.”
She has firsthand experience of why some students balk at picking up: the misperception of what a call even is. The same Uswitch survey found that 56% of people aged 18-34 assume a spontaneous call means bad news.
Sankaran said her classmates tend to immediately ask, “Is something wrong?’ when she calls just wanting to talk. She linked their question to the bad-news assumption. “Once we get to know me, they realize I just like calling,” she explained.
Macey Paul, a high schooler from San Francisco, also prefers phone calls, but nearly has to negotiate them with her friends. “They’ll kind of be like, ‘Okay, I’ll like set aside a time to call with you,’ even though I can tell they’d prefer to keep it over text because they’re less social than I am,” she said.
Paul likes dialing a number because spoken words can communicate a degree of feeling that three bubbles on a screen might not quite capture. “I feel more connected to someone when I call.” She also added that she can “hear their voice and catch emotion” — an idea Sankaran agreed with.
Researchers have found that a live voice call does, in fact, foster feelings of closeness between people — similar to in-person communication. A 2025 study published in Psychological Reports found that “In-person, video, and voice communication resulted in similar perceived levels of received support.”
Beyond that, there’s “a sensory richness to a phone call,” Pezalla said, “as opposed to the flatter experience of receiving a text.”
The pandemic briefly sparked a surge in video calls when in-person hangouts weren’t possible. During the lockdown, apps like FaceTime, Skype, Zoom, and countless others temporarily spiked in usage. Wagoner remembered, “I did a lot of calls with my friends, playing video games and just talking about life.”
Ecker, who used different video calling platforms, was nostalgic.“Sometimes, it’d just be two people, and everyone else was still on the call, but eating lunch or something. It was our substitute for being together in person,” she said. “I do miss it. You got a lot more of a sense of community.”
The overall decline in phone calls and preference for texting has concerned developmental psychologists like Pezalla, who have argued that participating in spontaneous conversation, including calls, is a skill that helps young adults grow. “You have to understand how to talk with that person in a way that might be unfamiliar to you in your own vernacular. It gives you skills for talking to elders or to someone younger than you are,” she said. “It requires practice with salutations, saying hello and goodbye. Those are really simple, but really important social skills that are often lost.”
She sees this as part of a larger trend where younger generations have lost the art of spontaneous conversation. “As a college professor, I see a huge opportunity for growth for low-stakes chitchat,” she explained. “There is so much joy to be experienced in small talk.”
She observes that the loss even extends into the classroom at the University of St. Thomas, where Pezalla has noticed that some students don’t know how to start a conversation during office hours. “They’ll stand like a ghost outside my office until I get this, like, prickle on the back of my neck that someone’s nearby,” she said. “They just don’t know how to begin the interaction.”
Some teens, like Paul, agree that the ability to talk over the phone is a skill. She suggested that many teenagers may feel uncomfortable during a call, not knowing “how to keep the conversation going when it’s live versus when it’s just a text,” she said.
But Ecker disagreed. “It’s not really a skill. You just have to talk like it’s real life, like how you would normally talk to people,” she said.
The conflicting views — and split opinions on phone calls — are evidence that teens are stuck: one half in long nights on the telephone and the other watching three little bubbles appear and disappear.
