Many of us who grew up before Y2K still remembers what it was like to make a phone call on a landline: You need to key 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 percent of adults and 86.8 percent 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 (US$ 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 (US$ 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 (US$ 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."
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