Your kid has a better social life than you, and their phone has a cord. Meet the Tin Can, a $100, Wi-Fi-enabled, landline-inspired device that hundreds of thousands of children across the US are now rushing home to use after school. No TikTok. No group chats. No algorithmic rabbit holes. Just a curly cord, a speakerphone, and the radical act of actually talking to someone.
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The device was founded by Chet Kittleson, a Seattle-based dad who got fed up coordinating after-school playdates in the smartphone era and thought: what if kids just… called each other? Growing up in the ’90s, Kittleson realised the landline was his social network. So he built a modern version of it – retro styling, bright colours, answering machine included – and aimed it squarely at Gen Alpha.
Here is how it works. The Tin Can plugs into a wall outlet and lets kids make free calls to other Tin Cans and emergency services right out of the box. For $10 a month, parents can unlock calls to and from an approved list of external numbers. There is no internet browser, no social media, and no way to doom-scroll at 2am. Kids who want to call a friend have to write down their number in a paper directory first (Welcome back 2012).
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It sounds absurd. According to Bloomberg, Justin Finn, a parent whose two elementary schoolers use the device, said that his kids are now more thoughtful when they speak, better listeners, and more confident overall. His kindergartner did, however, accidentally discover that 911 works on the Tin Can, which resulted in a surprise visit from emergency services. Lesson learned.
Schools have taken notice. Orders from education institutions are among Tin Can’s fastest-growing customer segments, with thousands of administrators across the US considering bulk purchases. At Nativity Parish School outside Kansas City, about 95% of kindergarten-through-fifth-grade families have signed on. St. James’ Episcopal School in Los Angeles is handing a Tin Can to each of its 220 families ahead of summer break.
The timing is not accidental. Parents, educators, and lawmakers are deep in a reckoning over children and screens. Australia has already banned social media for under-16s. In the US, Meta and Google recently lost a landmark court case brought by a young woman who said social media addiction fuelled her mental health problems. The Tin Can is landing in the middle of all of this as a remarkably low-tech answer to a very high-tech problem.
Kittleson raised $3.5 million last summer and closed a $12 million seed round in December led by Greylock Partners. The biggest challenge now, he says, is keeping up. After a surge of Christmas Day installations, the company’s servers buckled. The landline, it turns out, scales harder than expected.
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