Tin Can is making landlines cool again

Anyone who grew up before Y2K remembers what it was like to make a phone call on a landline: You’d punch in your friend’s phone number (which you had memorized), make awkward small talk with their mom or dad until your friend got on the line, and then see how far you could stretch that curly cord to get some actual privacy while you chatted.

While landlines never really went away, it’s been many years since their heyday. Most Americans — 76% of adults and 86.8% of children — live in wireless-only households, according to a 2023 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and that number has been increasing for the past 20 years.

But the landline may be making a comeback. Parents, concerned about their kids’ mental health and online safety, are seeking out ways to keep them off screens (an almost Herculean task these days). A growing number of them are trying to delay giving their kids a smartphone, knowing there’s no going back once they do. Landlines are a low-tech solution: They let kids chat with their friends without all of the distracting apps, pings and bright colors of a smartphone.

That’s where entrepreneurs like Chet Kittleson come in. Kittleson is the chief executive officer of Tin Can, which sells landline phones made just for kids. He’s also a dad of three. Like many parents, Kittleson became his eldest child’s de facto social director, constantly arranging play dates and coordinating with other parents. At a school pick-up two years ago, Kittleson and a group of parents were lamenting this fact. “I think one mom made the comment, ‘I feel like I’m an executive assistant for my kid,’” he tells Yahoo. Even though they were all frustrated over having to manage their children’s social lives, they were also worried about giving their kids smartphones to manage it themselves after reading psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation, which asserts that kids today spend too much time on screens and too little time being independent and having unstructured playtime.

Kittleson says he and the other parents felt “sandwiched between those two problems.” But then it sparked an idea. “All of a sudden it came to me: I was like, Man, when we were kids, our first social network was the landline, and our kids don’t have that,” he says. “It was this lightbulb moment. The idea for a Tin Can was born in that conversation.”

He thought it would be cool to have a “New Age landline” that worked off of Wi-Fi and also had parental controls. So Kittleson, an entrepreneur, took a crash course on hardware and the supply chain to create landlines with a modern twist. His company has two products: Tin Can ($75 and currently on back order), a Wi-Fi landline for kids that comes in a variety of candy-like colors, and Tin Can Flashback ($75), an '80s-inspired landline that plugs into your internet router. “No phone jack required,” Kittleson says. “That was a must for us because most people don’t have those anymore.”

An app allows parents to set “quiet hours” (similar to “do not disturb”) and manage approved contacts, like grandparents and your kid’s favorite cousin. “The most important thing to me was that kids could only call and receive calls from people that the parents trust,” Kittleson says. And because it’s a fully private network, there are no spam calls, he adds. Calls between Tin Can phones are free, no subscription required. There’s also a party line plan ($9.99 per month) that allows kids to call friends and family who don’t have a Tin Can (both phone types also support calls to 911).

Kittleson, who lives in Seattle, had some of his kids’ friends try prototypes of the Tin Can Flashback phone last year. Although he admits he was doubtful about whether the kids would be into the retro style, he was pleasantly surprised. “It was evident from the first install that kids love the look and feel of the landline phone,” he says. “I was surprised by how excited they were by a phone that sat in a cradle, and all it had was buttons on it.”

Chelsea Miller, a mom of a 7-year-old and a 10-year-old, is one of the parents who got an early model of the Tin Can phone. She sees it as a solid solution. “I don’t want to get my kids a fancy iPhone for as long as possible — if we can get them another way to communicate first, maybe we can delay that,” she tells Yahoo. “I love that they can call their friends or grandma without me. My child doesn’t have to come to me and say, ‘Can I borrow your phone?’”

Instead, Miller says her kids race for the phone when it rings. “They could be playing Minecraft or on another floor of the house, and they just immediately stop and run to the phone,” she says. “It’s a very exciting thing for them.”

Megan Timmermann, a mom of a 6-year-old and almost 9-year-old, has two Tin Can Flashback phones (one for each kid to keep the peace) after hearing about it from her neighbors. Like Miller, Timmermann is also trying to delay giving her kids a smartphone for as long as possible and says she signed a “Wait Until 8th” pledge delaying smartphone use until eighth grade. After the phones were set up, “I just nerded out,” she tells Yahoo. “It was so fun to see a dial-up phone and have flashbacks of your teen years, hearing the dial tone and the button pushing.”

Timmermann had to teach her youngest child how to put the phone to her ear and wait for the dial tone. One day, “my little 6-year-old answered the phone and, unprompted, she said, ‘Hello, this is Emily speaking.’ It just melted my heart — so prim and proper!” she says. Timmermann’s kids mostly call the house across the street and ask if they can come over and play, but when they do chat with relatives, she’s noticed that her kids are more focused on the conversation. “With FaceTime, kids get so distracted while talking to grandparents,” namely, staring at themselves on the screen and using filters. “This helps with that,” Timmermann says.

Kittleson says landlines like Tin Can are “bringing voice back” — encouraging kids to talk rather than text. Not only does that help them brush up on their social skills, it also helps create connection, something that many people feel is missing in their tech-saturated lives.

Kittleson says that now that he’s no longer managing his older kid’s social calendar, his daughter is arranging it on her own. “She probably has three times the number of playdates now than she did before,” he says. The landline allows kids to be independent in other ways too. Kittleson says some customers add their local pizza joint to their approved call list and have their kids order pizza on their own. “There’s a lot of different ways to create a little more autonomy and build that confidence in your kid,” he says.