Parents avoid calling kids for fear of racking up phone bills
More than half (54%) of the nation’s parents – equivalent to 8.6 million people – avoid calling their children on their mobiles for fear of it being too expensive, according to research from TalkTalk, the phone and broadband company.
And one in seven parents whose kids have left home said they wait for their children to call for a chat rather than calling them first. This means 2.4m parents are left sat by the telephone waiting for their kids to ring, while almost a third (29%) of parents – or 4.6m – regularly go more than a week without hearing from their children.
The research also found that, when it comes to calling their parents, a remarkable ten million grown-up children (62%) use their mobiles all or most of the time, rather than using a landline phone.
This shift away from landlines is causing 8.6 million parents across the UK to miss out on regularly interacting with their children due to the fear of overspending on their telephone bill through costly landline-to-mobile calls.
To address this problem, TalkTalk has launched a 500 Mobile Minutes Boost, which provides 500 minutes of calls to mobiles at just a penny a minute, enabling parents to call their children on their mobiles without the fear of racking up huge bills in the process.
Trisita Clarke from TalkTalk said: “It’s totally unacceptable that millions of parents are left waiting by their telephone because of worries about the phone bill they’ll get if they call their kids’ mobiles.
“We know from a recent Ofcom report that about 2.4m people received an unexpectedly high phone bill in the past year, with one in nine of them blaming calls to mobiles as the main reason – so this is clearly a big issue for lots of people.
“Our own research found that 48% of parents said they would call their child’s mobile more often if they knew calls would cost a fixed monthly price. So with our new 500 Mobile Minutes Boost, which costs a flat fee of £5 every month, we hope to enable families to talk not only for longer but more often.”
The 500 Mobile Minutes Boost costs just £5 and allows TalkTalk customers to make 500 minutes of calls to any mobile network at any time. It joins TalkTalk’s existing 100 Mobile Minutes Boost, which was launched last October and costs £3. With the average customer saving £12 per month this way, TalkTalk has already helped the tens of thousands of customers who signed up to the 100 Mobile Minute Boost save over £3.2 million.
The new 500 Mobile Minutes Boost now means customers will be able to enjoy savings of up to £50 a month and never have to worry about the cost of calling mobiles again.