It is fascinating to watch a 5-year-old talk on the telephone. This example is fairly typical: First, Pablo refused to take the call for him, saying his mother had just told him to go to his room. The fact that telephone calls have to be taken when they come in or lost was foreign to him. Second, when he finally grabbed the phone, he said he could not hear anything. The concept that he had to first talk to let the person at the other end of the line know to start talking was also new to him. Courtesy is definitely new too; he blurts at callers: "What do you want?". Yet by 5, children are perfectly capable of relating to their peers in face to face situations. Why is telephone conversation so much harder?

      My hypothesis is that it's because they never hear both sides of a phone conversation until they actually are faced with their own. Which means a telephone call is a new situation they are thrust into without any previous training obtainable by listening to adults. Since kids learn by imitation, that makes chatting on the telephone so difficult.

      How to test it? Expose kids to enough adult conversations on a speakerphone and the problem should disappear.

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