If you’ve tried to FaceTime an older parent or grandparent, you know the drill. They answer with the camera pointed at the ceiling. You hear how do I turn this thing around?
Then they get it flipped, and all you can see is a forehead and a pair of glasses perched on top of their head.
After the fifth I still can’t see you, they get annoyed and say, just hang up and call me.
Typical, you think. Technophobe. Won’t keep up with the times.
But there’s a reason video calls feel more demanding than a regular phone call, and the thing we blame older people for disliking is the same thing younger people get tired of too. They’re just more willing to sit through it.
They’re not just talking to you, they’re watching themselves talk
Think about what a video call adds to an exchange. In a normal phone call, you listen, you respond, you hang up.
In a video call, you do all of that while a tiny rectangle in the corner of the screen shows you exactly what you look like every second.
Nobody asked for that. In a normal conversation, there’s no little mirror floating beside the other person’s face. You’re not checking your hair while your friend tells you about her week. You’re not wondering whether the camera is too close or whether that shadow under your eyes looks as bad as you think it does.
Olga Abramova, a researcher at Leuphana University in Germany, studied what happens when people can see themselves during a video call. The answer is what psychologists call self-focused attention: the tendency to start monitoring how you’re coming across instead of focusing on the other person.
So while your parent or grandparent is trying to listen to you, part of their brain may be pulled toward the rectangle. Why do I look so tired? Can they see my whole face? Is the angle weird?
Suddenly the call comes with a layer of self-monitoring that a phone call doesn’t have. And for someone who didn’t grow up staring at themselves on a screen, that layer can feel more uncomfortable than it does for you.
A phone call is the same exchange without the performance
That preference for the phone shows up in the research too.
When researchers tested 132 older adults in hospital and nursing home settings, most could set up phone calls on their own, most struggled with video, and most preferred the phone.
But once the call was happening, satisfaction was similar regardless of the method. In some settings, people were even more satisfied with video.
It means the resistance isn’t about the call itself. It’s about everything around it. Holding the phone at the right angle. Figuring out which camera is on. Wondering whether the other person can see them. Staring at their own face while they talk.
A regular phone call strips all of that away. They pick up, they hear your voice, and they get straight to the part they wanted: you. No setup, no performance, no screen reminding them that they look older than they feel. Just the words and the connection.
Maybe your grandparent likes seeing your face just fine. They just don’t like everything required to get there.
More Bolde Stories
This isn’t just an older-person problem
Pay attention the next time you’re on a video call. Not to the other person. To yourself. How often are you looking at them, and how often are you glancing at your own square?
You notice the pimple you forgot about. The gray hair that appeared overnight. The angle that makes your chin look different than it does in the bathroom mirror.
Maybe you start fixing your hair or adjusting where you’re sitting while the other person is still talking. You’re half in the call and half watching yourself have it.
That’s the self-consciousness piece, and it’s not limited to people over seventy. Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, compared video calls to spending an entire workday holding a mirror in your hand.
He pointed out that people are now seeing their own reflections at a frequency and duration that’s never existed before. Everybody adjusts. Everybody glances.
The difference is that younger people have been doing it long enough that the discomfort has faded into background noise. For an older adult who didn’t grow up with front-facing cameras, the mirror feels new every time.
And the face in the rectangle may not match the one they carry in their head. They feel sixty. The screen shows seventy-eight. A phone call doesn’t ask them to reconcile the difference.
Being on video adds a lot of work to the conversation
The problem isn’t only vanity. Video calls are more cognitively demanding than phone calls.
Bailenson and his colleagues surveyed more than 10,000 participants and found that people reported more exhaustion after video calls when they experienced mirror anxiety, felt intensely watched by multiple faces on screen, had to manage their own nonverbal cues, and worked harder to read everyone else’s.
Women reported higher fatigue than men, partly because they experienced each of those mechanisms more intensely. And separate research using EEG monitoring found greater fatigue-related brain activity when self-view was turned on compared to when it was off.
So by the end of a long video call, you haven’t just been talking. You’ve been watching yourself talk, managing your facial expressions, checking whether the other person seems engaged, and wondering if you’re making enough eye contact with a camera instead of a face.
Maybe just call me isn’t stubbornness. Maybe they’re doing what everyone on a video call wishes they could do: stop performing and start talking.
It becomes a problem when the phone call is about avoiding connection, not finding it
Video calls can be wonderful, especially when people live far apart or when seeing someone’s face is the whole point. And some older adults love them. Sometimes the problem is unfamiliarity with the technology, and getting comfortable with it can make a huge difference.
The point isn’t that phone calls are better. It’s that preferring them isn’t evidence that someone has given up on keeping up.
An older adult who calls you every Sunday and talks for forty minutes isn’t failing to connect. They’re connecting on the terms that let them be present instead of distracted by their own face in a corner of the screen.
The next time your mom gets the camera pointed at herself, spends two minutes asking whether you can see her, and then says forget it, just call me, maybe don’t write her off.
She may be rejecting the exact thing the rest of us have learned to tolerate: having a perfectly normal conversation while a tiny mirror asks you to think about your own face the entire time.
