I think this is a symptom of the way kids have been raised in the last twenty years or so. "Don't talk to strangers" extrapolates to letting mom and dad answer

I think this is a symptom of the way kids have been raised in the last twenty years or so. "Don't talk to strangers" extrapolates to letting mom and dad answer the phone. Plus, in the era of dial-up, nobody could use the phone while you were going on Neopets. A surprisingly large subset of my peers (think Google, Facebook interns) are afraid of calling up a restaurant -- they have no idea what the social norms for using a telephone are because they've never been taught.