Ask your kids to make the hand signal for a phone call, and you’ll see immediately how much technology has changed since we were kids. (They do a flat hand like an iPhone instead of a thumb and pinky like a handheld.) There’s nothing like having kids to make you feel old! Sarah Michelle Gellar highlighted this when she “had to explain” a once-vital piece of technology to her kids Rocky, 11, and Charlotte, 14, who she shares with husband Freddie Prinze Jr.
“Had to explain to my son what this was,” the Buffy the Vampire Slayer actress wrote on her Instagram story on Thursday. In the photo, her son holds a phone up to his ear, pretending to make a call on a payphone. (PEOPLE has a screenshot HERE.) Ah, payphones. The best way to check in with your parents while you were out with your friends in the days before cellphones. Remember saying your message quickly — “Going to a movie with Jennifer, be home by 10” — instead of your name, so your mom could know your plans without paying for a collect call? Kids these days will never understand how good they have it now!
Gellar and her family encountered the pay phone when they visited Meow Wolf’s Omega Mat in Las Vegas. The interactive art experience is filled with unique and whimsical experiences. A video of Gellar’s “favorite room” was filled with moving orbs of light. While in Vegas, they also went to Iluminarium Las Vegas and saw the famous Las Vegas Sphere.
In an interview with SheKnowsin March, the Wolf Pack star shared how she struggles with parenting amid new technology “especially because we have no roadmap.”
“There are certain things where we can ask people that have been through it, ‘How did you handle this when I was a kid?’ But this is a new frontier,” she explains. “And so we’re really sort of learning as we go, and I think that’s always incredibly challenging.”
One rule she has is to set screentime limits for her kids. “I think it’s a big ask to expect our children to be able to self-regulate at this age,” she told us. “My son’s younger, so there’s websites I don’t want him on. Being able to block that is great. And hopefully, our idea is that by doing that, it will become a habit, and that eventually, when they’re on their own with their devices, they’ll be able to self-regulate and understand how much time they’re on their devices.”
Definitely not something you had to worry about in the days of payphones!
Before you go, check out these celebrities who have shared their technology rules for their kids.
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