Kansas kids are ‘sliding into silence.’ Let’s talk about why they are chatting less.

Our columnist asks you to "consider it a cultural public service that you are listening to me and my nonsense" when he tries to talk to you (Illustration by Eric Thomas for Kansas Reflector)

In the flotsam of things I read each week — academic research, online news, sports stories and fiction — one tidbit can get naggily lodged in my thoughts.

This week, the splinter in my mind is titled “Sliding Into Silence? We Are Speaking 300 Daily Words Fewer Every Year,” authored by a researcher at the University of Arizona in partnership with Valeria Pfeifer, who works right across the state line at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

How did the researchers discover a decline in our spoken words over more than a decade? Using a listening device, they sampled the daily conversations of more than 2,000 participants. Initially, Pfeifer told KCUR, the focus was gender differences in oral communication.

However, when Pfeifer initially ran the analysis over time, the drop-off was so stark she didn’t believe it.

Losing an additional 300 daily words each year — over 15 years — adds up to a stark cumulative decline: thousands and thousands of fewer spoken words.

But I think the most troubling news evades that headline.

Young people, the study found, are receding from conversation even more quickly than the rest of us. People below the age of 25 used 450 fewer daily words each year.

“Thus, younger participants lost about 44% more words than did older participants with each passing year,” the authors wrote.

An academic study like this one becomes my personal catnip when it reinforces something that I have been observing personally and anecdotally.

For years, I’ve told this cocktail party anecdote when talking to fellow 40-somethings who were on college campuses in the 1990s, before smartphones: “Do you remember,” I ask, “how auditoriums would be so loud before the start of lectures? So loud that the professor would need to shout to get our attention and start class?”

In my nostalgic mind’s eye, we were an unruly, curious bohemian mob, leaning over to the person next to us and striking up a random conversation.

That atmosphere (or myth) has largely evaporated in 2025. Instead, in my classrooms at the University of Kansas, students mostly silently scroll their phones before class. Or, they click-clack on their laptops.

They don’t hit on each other, looking for dates. They don’t discuss the topic of last night’s reading. They don’t borrow a pencil. It’s so quiet as to be awkward for me, standing at the front of a pin-drop quiet lecture hall ready to start class.

(I’m not alone in this. Steve Kraske of KCUR, who interviewed Pfeifer for “Up to Date,” had the same observation about his classroom, which he also requires to be cellphone free. He notes that he isn’t sure the policy is making any difference.)

Here’s another anecdote about youths and the anxiety of talking to others. I asked my son to make a phone call as a high schooler, after he had carried a smartphone around for a few years, customizing the arrangement of the apps so that they were carefully curated.

Nevertheless, when I asked him to make a phone call for me while my hands were full, he balked.

“I hate calling people,” he said. “It’s so awkward.”

I insisted, explaining that his hesitation likely made it even more vital. We have to learn sometime, I explained.

There was another obstacle, he explained. He didn’t know how to use his iPhone to make a phone call. I flinched, wondering if he had somehow deleted the app that allows you to — you know — type numbers into a phone in a sequence that allows you to speak to someone from a distance. Otherwise known as a phone call.

The reality was more simple. After years of owning his phone, he had never called a stranger. His mom and I constantly rang his phone, checking in. Sometimes, he dialed up friends to talk while gaming.

However, he never called a restaurant to see what time they closed. Never phoned a movie theater to ask about their lost and found.

More responsible than me and my anecdotal ways, Pfeifer and her colleagues resist the temptation of blaming certain technology for the trend they found. They suggest some likely culprits though.

“One factor that might be informative when considering the role of technology in the loss of spoken conversation is age,” they write. “Younger individuals are more likely to use technologies such as texting or social media to communicate than are older adults, and, if spoken words become typed, younger adults should lose more words than do older individuals.”

Most worrisome to me is how young people are not only declining in their spoken words each year — many of them have only grown up in a world defined by this decline. In other words, they haven’t known decades of “normal” oral conversations followed by a decline. A 15-year-old has only lived during this cultural conversational ebb.

The end date of the research should be striking, as well. The COVID-19 pandemic, which drastically disrupted personal conversations in my life, changed American life beginning in 2020. It’s difficult to imagine the years of social isolation during the pandemic as reversing the trend shown by the research. Our culture, I fear, may have shrunk further away from talking to each other.

The solution (and yes, this is a problem) is both simple and arduous.

We simply need to normalize the spoken word in our daily lives. Bring back the work session at the office. Return to the coffee dates. Stash the phones during a road trip.

The task is made more simple by the modest word count: 300 additional words each day is a pittance. During my lecture today, which included some breaks for group work, I spoke 8,500 words, according to the automated transcript. (I don’t guarantee that every word was lyrical genius.)

At that rate, it would take me less than three minutes to rack up 300 more spoken words.

But the interactions that provide more talking can also seem arduous, especially for young people who have grown up doing less and less of it. For these young people, making the effort will need to be intentional.

And it will often need to be modeled and led by older people who should be more familiar with the Before-Times, an era when nudging the stranger next to you and chatting about the weather wasn’t quite so “weird.”

During her interview on “Up To Date,” Pfeifer described the social importance of small conversations, like asking directions. She also suggests offering more detail — more words — when someone asks you how you are doing.

She went on to describe how these interactions can be “a training group for those larger, more important conversations,” making us more skilled and comfortable with vital and significant interactions down the road.

Losing even a little bit more of that conversational skill across our culture seems like a travesty to me. So, if you see me striding across the room with a drink in hand, brace for me and my cocktail chatter.

And consider it a cultural public service that you are listening to me and my nonsense.

Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.