The Retro Kids’ Phone That Teaches Kids How To Talk Again

On December 21, the third-to-last day of the year, my young friends Amos and Clara blew up my phone 17 times. The next day, they called eight more. Each chat was fleeting—rarely stretching past 30 to 45 seconds—and almost always timed to catch me mid-important task: deep in work, pushing a grocery cart through the store, or midday napping. “Hi Anna,” one or both would chirp. “Hi!” I’d answer back. More than once I worried I sounded too eager, like I’d just been sitting around waiting for their ring. Other times, I felt a little silly, even pathetic.

If anyone else spammed me that often, I’d have blocked their number within a day. But Amos is 6, and Clara is 9. Here’s the backstory: Two days before the calling spree, on December 20 for Hanukkah, the sibling pair unwrapped a brand new, ultra retro kids’ phone as a gift. For the next week straight, they couldn’t stop dialing every approved contact on their list—and I couldn’t stop picking up every time they called.

Called the Tin Can, the device launched last April and has already sold more than 100,000 units with barely any paid advertising. It’s essentially a “dumb phone” that makes and receives calls over Wi-Fi—think of it as a cordless landline for kids. It has no screen at all, not even a tiny display to show who’s calling; its entire surface is just buttons, a receiver, and a speaker. The product is marketed to parents who want their kids to practice communication without handing them access to browsers and social media. (One X user joked that next, kids will start writing chain letters to each other.)

The standard Tin Can comes in four bright colorways, retails for $100, and is shaped like a candy-colored soup can. A retro “Flashback” model styled after classic cradle landlines also costs $100. Calls between two Tin Cans are completely free, but the company charges $10 a month for calls to numbers outside the Tin Can network. Parents hold all the control: they add contacts to an approved caller list, only calls to and from those numbers go through, and parents can set preset active hours (for example, only between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.). They can also review full call logs any time. You could call this spying with the implied consent of the spied on: a miniature electronic surveillance state built for family life.

Many parents turn to smartwatches or standard dumb phones to cut down on kids’ screen time, but those products are mostly designed to let adults track their kids’ location 24/7. The Tin Can’s core goal is different: it’s built to get kids focused on talking to each other with their own voices.

That’s really all it does. Tin Cans don’t show missed call alerts and don’t support text messaging. In an era where almost everyone is pushed toward addictive, screen-based, endless-scroll engagement, giving kids space to get lost in casual conversation feels incredibly appealing to many parents.

Chet Kittleson, 38, is Tin Can’s co-founder and a dad of three kids aged 10, 8, and 5. I suspect he wouldn’t love my framing of call logs as “spying” (watching over kids is just part of parenting, after all) or my description of the product as a “toy.” Instead, he sees it as a utility: a way for kids to call Grandma, lock in playdate plans with friends, and feel “part of the same world that grown-ups are a part of.” When he was a kid, he says, the home landline was “arguably the most successful social network of all time.” Every house had one. Then cell phones and smartphones arrived, bringing direct access to the internet. “And somewhere along the way we decided the landline was obsolete,” Kittleson says. “In doing that, we overlooked a group that was a major beneficiary of it: kids.”

We spoke over Zoom one afternoon, me from my home in Los Angeles and him from his office in Seattle. When I told him Amos and Clara had called me more than two dozen times in two days, he didn’t sound surprised at all. There’s always an initial burst of nonstop calling, he explains, and over a few weeks, kids settle into a more mature rhythm. “They're like, oh, OK, I see that I can actually do things with this that are important,” he says.

Kittleson estimates most Tin Can users are between 5 and 13, and says he wants to help create a “better childhood,” or as he puts it, “giving kids back a sense of independence and confidence.” Mike Duboe, a partner at Greylock Ventures, which led a $12 million investment round in the company last October, echoed that sentiment. One parent shared their kid’s experience with the Tin Can on X, writing that it “felt like the old days.”

Amos and Clara weren’t the only kids obsessed with their new Tin Can over the holidays. That late December, frustrated parents flooded the company’s feedback forms and posted on Reddit that their devices weren’t working. Though Tin Can engineers expected a small holiday usage surge, the hundredfold increase in call volume caught them completely off guard.

When I asked Kittleson about the holiday network meltdown, he winced. “It was a stressful Christmas,” he conceded. (At the time, a notice on the Tin Can homepage read: “We’re investigating an issue impacting the network.”) He says future product shipments will be staggered to avoid future overloads.

The product is far from perfect: users report call echoes, inconsistent sound quality, and awkward long pauses mid-chat. The device’s buttons are stiff, which is a challenge for small fingers like Amos’. His mom, Rebecca, often has to help him dial. “It takes a little bit out of the independence of it,” she says.

My first experience with a phone, like most kids of my generation, was the family landline: a mustard yellow hunk of hard plastic that sat on the mottled brown linoleum counter next to our kitchen. It held a special, magical place in my imagination—an object full of potential—but like most phones back then it was shared by the whole family, and calls were often overheard or monitored. It was also tethered to a wall, making it impossible to multitask or wander while on a call. In fact, Kittleson says one inspiration for Tin Can came from his own frustration calling his mom on her cell phone. She was, he says, “the worst”: the sort of person who ran around the house mid-call, doing laundry or other chores, hard to hear and easily distracted.

“I’m like, ‘Mom, can you sit down?’’’ he says. “Now she’s literally stuck to a spot, and she can’t do anything else.” That works for calls with both him and his grandkids: when Kittleson is at home, he calls his mom on the Tin Can. “I think it's a better conversation with my mom, and I think it shows my kids that this is a great way to have a conversation with someone,” he says.

Parents report their kids now arrange their own playdates, cutting parents out of the role of permanent middleman. This pushes back against the trend of AI-dependent smart devices; as Sherry Turkle wrote in her 2011 book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other, “Digital connections and the sociable robot may offer the illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship.” The Tin Can is a rare piece of digital technology that exists solely to foster human connection. “Watching them just chat on the phone and figure out what you talk about or don't talk about is so awesome,” says Rebecca, who doesn’t limit how much time her kids spend on their Tin Can. “It’s connectedness, and it also doesn't have to have purpose, and that feels really nice.”

At first, Amos and Clara played with their phone nonstop. After a few weeks, they settled into a routine. Their use of the device shifted: it wasn’t just a toy anymore. They weren’t just calling random contacts—they were planning playdates, checking in with friends their age (“What are you doing now?”) and holding longer conversations.

They also got far more polite. Kittleson told me many parents report their Tin Can-using kids just hang up immediately when they finish talking at first. That’s exactly what happened with Amos and Clara: their first few calls to me were just a quick “hi” and nothing more. They didn’t even say their names, leaving me to carry the whole conversation. Did you know experts say rarely 30 seconds pass without someone asking or answering a question? In other words, I quickly got sick of the sound of my own voice filling all the silences.

Yet it was clear the kids were learning new social skills along the way. Not only did Rebecca discover she loved getting calls directly from her kids when they were out, she also began to notice her daughter is funnier than she’d initially realized. “We're not privileged to get to hear our kids and their friends chatting with each other so much, what they talk about at school or when they're playing in a room with the door closed,” she says. “And so it just feels fun to watch how they figure out how to interact and what makes them laugh.”

Kittleson says his own kids have begun to “use their voice” in other areas of life too, like ordering food at restaurants. Based on his own experience and anecdotal reports from users, girls are more likely to hold longer casual conversations, while boys stick to more transactional exchanges like, “Can you play? OK, when?”

Claude Fischer, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, notes this learning curve mirrors adults’ early experience with telephones when the technology was new. From the beginning, he says, phones were never intuitive, “not just mechanically but socially.” When they entered domestic life in the 19th and 20th centuries, people had to be taught how to answer the phone, how to introduce themselves, how loudly to speak, how to end a conversation, and what counted as impolite or improper behavior. Phone companies even printed pamphlets and school materials on phone etiquette.

So why not just get a traditional old landline instead? It’s harder than it sounds. Phone companies have no incentive to promote landline usage these days; all their profit is in mobile service. After my mother died, I had to cancel her landline service, and closing that account took me just as long as filling out and signing all the paperwork for the mortuary.

Plus, as Kittleson reminded me when we talked, traditional landlines don’t have modern features like “Do not disturb” or approved caller lists, which also block spam calls. Of course, like any kids’ tech, vulnerabilities can pop up, but when I asked security expert Karsten Nohl, he told me that in this case concerns are limited and would “mostly manifest in the cloud, where the provider reserves the right to record conversations, which could potentially be accessed by third parties.”

Of course, as a cultural product, Tin Can is nowhere near as ubiquitous as traditional landlines once were. Orders have taken months to fulfill, and competitors are already on the way: this spring will see the release of the Pinwheel Home, which brands itself “the modern kids’ landline.” There’s also the question of whether the device will create a divide between kids who have a Tin Can and those who don’t.

Rebecca says that around 10 percent of the kids in Clara’s and Amos’ classes at their Los Angeles public school have the devices. Mike Duboe, the investor, tells me the company has gotten inquiries from schools about buying Tin Cans in bulk. When I asked him how—and why—this might work, he told me he imagines school administrators using the devices to broadcast school announcements to both kids and parents.

In mid-January, I sat down with Clara and Amos to hear how things were going a month in. Who have they been calling? “Mostly my adult friends,” Clara says. “I mostly call you.” What do they say to people when they call? “I’m just calling to say hi,” Amos says. What have they learned? “You have to talk into the three dots [the mic hole],” one of them says. “Sometimes my eardrum starts hurting,” the other adds.

Amos tells me that he would like future Tin Cans to have little cameras and screens that show the other person you’re talking to.

“So, basically you’re saying you want FaceTime,” I say.

“Yeah,” he replies.

About a week after I interviewed Clara and Amos, my phone began to go quiet. I’d gotten used to the little thrill of being on their mind, and then—poof!—I was yesterday’s news. I worried that talking to them at length about the phone had dulled the magic, either of the device or of me. (Familiarity breeds contempt, and all that.) I worried that they had become self-conscious about reaching out. So I started calling them: I left voicemails during the day when they were at school, and called in the early evenings. Usually they picked up, never knowing who they were going to get. The disappointment that I wasn’t a school friend was sometimes palpable. “Hi, Anna,” Clara would say, and I could hear the lack of excitement in her voice.

Finally, I couldn’t take the suspense any longer. I asked Clara how often she was using her phone. She told me she makes about five calls a day.

“Yeah, I noticed that you don’t call me as much,” I said. I laughed a little when I said this, so that I would sound cheery and bright and unbothered. Embarrassed, I backtracked a bit. “Do you think you’re bored with the phone?” I asked.

“No,” Clara said.

“Hmm, maybe it’s not that you’re bored, you’re busy,” I offered, helpfully.

There was a beat.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “It’s not that I’m bored. I’m busy.”

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