Tin Can Is a Dumb Phone for Kids. Can Someone Teach Them How to Use It?

In late December, the 21st to be exact, my friends Amos and Clara called me 17 times. On December 22 it was eight times. The calls were short—sometimes only 30 to 45 seconds, and they usually arrived when I was doing something important: working, grocery shopping, napping. “Hi Anna,” one or both of them would say. “Hi!” I’d respond. Sometimes I worried that I sounded too eager, or like I was just sitting around waiting for their call. Sometimes I felt a little pathetic.

If anyone else called me that often I’d block their number. But Amos is 6 years old, and Clara is 9, and what happened is that on December 20, for Hanukkah, the siblings got the gift of a newly released, extremely old-school kids’ phone. And for the next week or so, the two of them couldn’t stop calling. And I, for one, couldn’t stop picking up.

Called the Tin Can, the phone came out last April and has since sold more than 100,000 units without much paid advertising. It’s basically a “dumb phone” that makes and receives calls over a Wi-Fi network—a landline without the line. It has no screen, not even a tiny one to show who’s calling; its surface has only buttons, a receiver, and a speaker. The product is marketed to parents who want to encourage their children to communicate without giving them access to web browsers and social media. (One user on X suggested, jokingly, that children start writing chain letters next.)

The standard Tin Can, which comes in four colorways and costs $100, looks like a candy-colored soup can. A “retro” model called The Flashback appears nearly identical to an old-school cradle phone and also retails at $100. Calls between Tin Cans are free, but the company charges $10 a month for users to call outside the Tin Can network. Parents get to set the rules—they add numbers to an approved caller list, and only calls to and from those numbers go through, and only in preset time frames, say, between 8 am and 8 pm. Parents can also monitor call logs. Call it spying with the implied consent of the spied upon; an electronic surveillance state in miniature.

Some parents have tried to solve the problem of intrusive screens by buying their kids smartwatches; others opt for typical dumb phones. But these products are more about letting adults keep tabs on where their kids are at any given moment. The Tin Can is more about getting kids to focus on using their voices to communicate.

And that’s about it. Tin Cans don’t show you missed calls or support text messaging. In an era in which most everyone is being nudged toward addictive, screen-based, endless-scroll engagement, giving kids the opportunity to get lost in conversation can seem incredibly appealing to parents.

Chet Kittleson, 38, is the cofounder of Tin Can and a father of three kids, 10, 8, and 5. I suspect he wouldn’t much like my description of the product’s function as “spying” (keeping watch over one’s kids is part of a parent’s job) or the product itself as a “toy.” He thinks of it, instead, as a utility: a way for kids to talk to Grandma or make plans with friends and to be “part of the same world that grown-ups are a part of.” When he was a kid, he says, the landline was “arguably the most successful social network of all time.” Every house had one. Then came cell phones and smartphones. Direct lines 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.”

I’m talking to him over Zoom one afternoon from my home in Los Angeles and his office in Seattle. When I tell him that Amos and Clara had called me more than two dozen times, he doesn’t seem particularly surprised. At first there’s a burst of activity, he says, and then over the course of a few weeks, the kids mature. “They’re like, oh, OK, I see that I can actually do things with this that are important,” he says.

Kittleson, who guesses that most Tin Can users are between the ages of 5 and 13, 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 round that invested $12 million in the company in October, says something similar.) One parent, describing their kid’s Tin Can use on X, wrote that it “felt like the old days.”

Amos and Clara weren’t the only ones who, over the holidays, got the gift of gab. In late December, frustrated parents flooded the company’s feedback forms and posted on Reddit that their Tin Cans weren’t working. Though the Tin Can engineers had anticipated a surge in usage around the holidays, the hundredfold increase in call volume took them by surprise.

When I ask Kittleson about the holiday meltdown, he winces. “It was a stressful Christmas,” he concedes. (A message on the Tin Can homepage said, “We’re investigating an issue impacting the network.”) He says that future shipments of the product will be staggered.

And the product’s far from perfect: There can be echoes, unstable sound quality, and long pauses. The buttons on the device are hard to press, which can be challenging to little fingers like Amos’. His mother, Rebecca, sometimes has to help him make calls. “It takes a little bit out of the independence of it,” she says.

My first phone, like that of other kids in my generation, was my family’s, a mustard yellow piece of hard plastic that sat on the mottled brown linoleum counter adjacent to the kitchen. It held a special place in my imagination—an object full of potential—but like most phones back then it was shared within a family and maybe even overheard or monitored. It was also tethered to a wall, making it difficult to multitask or move around while on a call. Kittleson, in fact, says that one inspiration for Tin Can was his frustration when he called his mother on her cell phone. She was, he says, “the worst”: the sort of person who ran around the house while on the call, doing laundry or whatnot. Difficult to hear. 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 goes both for talking to her grandkids and Kittleson himself: If he’s at home, he calls her 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 say their kids are now arranging playdates, exempting adults from the role of executive assistant. This bucks the trend toward 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 the rare digital technology that’s only about 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 the 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 incessantly. After a few weeks, they settled into it. Use shifted. Not only were they planning playdates, they were calling to check in with their similarly aged friends (“What are you doing now?”) and having longer conversations.

And more polite ones. Kittleson told me about parents who reported that at first, their Tin Can–using kids simply hung up when they finished talking. Indeed, the first few times that Amos and Clara called they greeted me with a little “Hi” but not much else. They didn’t even say their name. It was on me to sustain the conversation. Did you know that 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.

Yet it was clear that the kids were learning new social skills. Not only did Rebecca discover that she loved getting calls directly from her kids, she also began to notice that her daughter is funnier than she first 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.” (For example, when ordering food at a restaurant.) His experience, anecdotally and from watching kids use the product, is that girls are more likely to have longer conversations, whereas boys have more transactional exchanges like, “Can you play? OK, when?”

Claude Fischer, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, finds in this echoes of adults’ early use of telephones. From the beginning, he says, phones were never intuitively understood, “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 constituted impolite or improper behavior. Phone companies even produced pamphlets and school materials on phone etiquette.

So why not just get one of those original landlines? It’s more difficult than it sounds. Phone companies have no incentive to promote the usage of landlines; the money is in mobile. In the days after my mother died, and I had to cancel her landline service, it took me as long to close the account as it did to fill out and sign the forms for the mortuary.

Plus, as Kittleson reminded me when we talked, landlines don’t have features such as “Do not disturb” or approved caller lists, which among other things blocks spam calls. Of course, as with any kid 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 icon, the Tin Can is nowhere near landline status. Orders have taken months to fulfill. And competitors are coming: This spring will see the release of the Pinwheel Home, which deems itself “the modern kids’ landline.” And what about creating a cohort of Tin Can haves and have-nots?

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 that inquiries from schools have come in about buying Tin Cans in bulk. When I ask him how—and why—this might work, he tells me that he imagines school administrators broadcasting school announcements to kids as well as parents.

In mid-January, I sat down with Clara and Amos to hear how things were going. Who have they been calling? “Mostly my adult friends,” Clara says. “I mostly call you.” What do they say to people? “I’m just calling to say hi,” Amos says. What have they learned? “You have to talk into the three dots,” 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.

“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 flattery of being thought of and then—poof!—I was yesterday’s news. I worried that talking to them at length about the phone had dulled the magic of it. Or of me. (Familiarity, contempt, etc.) I worried that they had become self-conscious about reaching out. So I started calling them, both during the day when they were at school, to leave a voicemail, and 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. I didn’t hear much 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 engages in 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.”