We're all desperate to stop our endless scroll. These parents came up with a solution.

Bombs being dropped in the Middle East. Weather bombs. A serial killer accepts a plea deal. An alleged paedophile was able to work in over 20 childcare centres. A generation ago, the only time you learned of such horrific news was between the hours of six and seven on the television. Or, you read it once — in the paper that comes out just once a day.

Now all you have to do is pick up your phone. And the news is not just bleak, but unrelenting. Then, there's our kids. If they're not exposed to the news, they're still seeing images, toxic and unattainable, that are subtly rewiring their brains or shortening their attention spans and sometimes both. 

Watch: This Glorious Mess hosts Tegan Natoli and Annaliese Todd discuss if they could delete Instagram off their phone to get time back. Post continues after video.

Is it any wonder some of us are opting to turn back time to a place when the internet did not exist? For Lauren, that means going all the way back to the 90s and installing a landline.

"A few of the families in our community have started to get landlines and I definitely intend to do the same," says Lauren, a mum of three who lives in Northern NSW.

"All the Year Four mums in my group are thinking about it and really keen to get on board – it feels so much safer."

Group participation is key, as this article from The Atlantic points out, because you don't want kids calling parents' phones, you want one phone for every kid, connected to — get this — the wall. For Lauren, it's about helping her 10-year-old daughter stay present.

"So when we're out and about, we're having family time, or she's at sport, she's not reachable by any of her friends or not thinking about checking an app, so it just allows her to be where she is, enjoying her activity or being with our family, and she's not accessible unless she's at home," she says. 

"Obviously, my daughter will get a mobile phone one day and there will be times I would want her to have a phone on her, but it just delays that need as long as possible." 

Another alternative? The dumb phone, a mobile phone with no internet access, which Lauren says she thinks is "a brilliant idea." There's also "The brick", which is when you turn all the apps off your phone for a short time and then turn them all back on.

But as Amelia Lester pointed out on Mamamia's Parenting Out Loud podcast, "It's hard to distinguish between the moral panic around phones and the inevitable nostalgia that a parenting generation has for its youth. Is that what we're doing here?"

Yes Ameila, I think it is. This is not to dismiss the real dangers of being chronically online and what it can do to our kids' brains. To say nothing of bullying and the subsequent anxiety and seriousness of self-harm. But it's a convenient myth to think that "Before Smartphones" kids were somehow more creative and intelligent, as if we weren't all just picking our noses and watching Sally Jesse Raphael ask a 14 year-old girl why she was desperate to have a baby.

I remember having a landline and, let me tell you, it was not great. Two older brothers could easily eavesdrop on my conversations because I was talking in the kitchen. Mum was also there, making dinner or a cup of tea — she'd do anything to listen in and give her unsolicited opinion, informed, probably, by Sally Jesse Raphel. 

This tweet sums it up nicely:

Image: X/@SketchesbyBoze.

Oh sure, we went outside, we touched grass, we even went to the beach — without sunscreen, where we could get bullied by someone in person. And if we were really bored, there was always smoking. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, in 1990, 24 per cent of boys aged 12 to 17 were smokers and 28 per cent of girls the same age were. Do you think Instagram invented making young women feel bad about themselves? Let me tell you about a little trend known as The Supermodels, and the other trend that came after, called Heroin Chic, starring women who had a collective BMI of 8. All we had was what the media fed us and diversity? What's that? An old wooden ship?  There were no comment sections! No discussion, no feedback, and definitely no community.

My son, 11, and my daughter, 9, don't have social media. But they do watch a lot of YouTube and play games on Roblox with their friends, and they do talk on Messenger Kids, probably too much.

So I understand the attraction of a dumb phone or a landline, but it's a little like putting a padlock on the fridge: sure, it stops the behaviour, but doesn't look at what's underneath. On the same episode of the Parenting out Loud podcast, Jessie Stephens made the point that there is no room for boredom anymore, or what The Cut calls "kid rotting", because every spare moment just translates into more screen time. Uh, in my day, every spare moment was spent watching terrible TV! Or tapes of terrible TV.

Listen: On Parenting Out Loud, they discussed the return of the landline. Post continues below.

Stephens added that this led to parents' desperation to get kids enrolled in activities. But, maybe the reason we think there are just two choices - screen time or activities - is because, as parents, we're kinda doing the same thing.

Parents are working harder than ever at their jobs and at parenting and are often battling burnout on both fronts. Then, we are so exhausted, we scroll, mindlessly, until our nervous systems return to neutral or numb. (TikTok Till 2am is the working title of my memoir).

Maybe, if we all had more time to rot as a family, we wouldn't need to go back to the 90s and settle for something "simple" that, honestly, was never really there in the first place.

Read more of our parenting stories:

• Yes, there are cues to support your baby's development. An expert told us how to spot them.

• No one is having sleepovers anymore and the reason why makes a lot of sense.

• Ariane's baby was just a few months old when the hallucinations started.

Feature image: Getty.