Parents are bringing back the landline

THERE were eight children among the four close-knit families in their Seattle neighborhood, and by last fall, the oldest child - who was almost 9 - had already started asking for a smartphone. But the group of parents had made a communal agreement: They would keep their children away from smartphones for as long as possible.

There was strength in that solidarity, says Lauren Zemer, a Seattle-area therapist and mom of two: “We had agreed that we were going to share these values.” But she and her neighbors also wanted their children to feel connected to their peers and to develop a sense of social independence.

So in October 2024, when one of the parents heard about a local father who had built a prototype for a kid-specific, adult-controlled landline phone - and had created a waitlist for families who wanted one - Zemer and her friends were ecstatic.

“Our neighbor was like: ‘Everybody, text him right now, we’re all going to get them,’” Zemer says, and within days, they were among the first parents to acquire an early model of what has now become a virally popular phone for kids - the Tin Can, a Wifi-enabled, curly-corded landline that allows parents to control the hours when it is in use and which phone numbers are approved to call in to (or be called from) the closed network.

In the year since then, Zemer says, the Tin Can has been transformative for her children, ages 5 and 8. Her 8-year-old son has autonomy to call his friends when he wants to talk; the neighborhood kids often work out their own playdates, without their parents having to text one another.

The landline has also been a boon for the children’s relationship with their grandparents, Zemer says: They used to video-chat over FaceTime, but “the kids would get so distracted by the screen and the poop emojis they could drop in, and how they could change their face or turn into a unicorn,” she says. “Now they have thoughtful, nuanced conversations.”

Among the parents in their neighborhood community, she adds, there is a unanimous sense of gratitude for their landline phones: “We’ve seen such a social dynamic shift, a change in the kids and in the way they communicate with one another,” she says. “We’ve really doubled down on it.”

This scenario remains an outlier in a reality where smartphones are ubiquitous among American adolescents and teenagers - Pew reports that 95 percent of teens ages 13 to 17 have or have access to smartphones - but a rising number of parents are worried about what that level of exposure means for their kids. Many have sought other options, like “dumb phones” or smartwatches, or signing the “Wait Until 8th” pledge to withhold smartphones until the end of 8th grade.

Now, as more parents look to steer their children away from screens and social media, the landline phone - a mainstay of Gen X- and millennial-generation childhoods - is having something of a renaissance. Over the summer, a group of parents in Maine made headlines after they established a “landline pod” of families who opted for stationary, corded, audio-only phones for their kids; one mom created an online resource for other parents who are inspired to do the same.

Kylie Kelce, wife of retired NFL player Jason Kelce, set off a spirited discussion after announcing on a July episode of her podcast that she plans to implement what she called “the kitchen phone” rule for her four daughters - an extra cellphone that would “live in the kitchen,” she explained; not a landline, exactly, but a similar effect.

Amy Tunick, a mom of two in New York state, learned about the Tin Can through a group chat of parents from her daughter’s sleepaway camp. The parents had been looking for ways to help their kids keep in touch with camp friends during the year: “There was a lot of excitement among the parents on that text chain,” Tunick says. After feeling less than impressed with her 12-year-old son’s Apple Watch, she was ready to try something different for her 9-year-old daughter.

The phone arrived earlier this month, and so far, they’re pleased, Tunick says. She likes that her daughter knows she can call her grandparents, her friends or 911. Their family signed the “Wait Until 8th” pledge, she says, so her kids have long understood that they won’t have smartphones until high school, at least - so the Tin Can “feels like kind of a delay tactic,” she says, something fun and social to offer in the meantime.

Tin Can co-founder and CEO Chet Kittleson, a Seattle father of three, says the idea for the reinvented landline first came to him in 2022 at after-school pickup. A group of parents were chatting and scheduling playdates, he recalls, and one mom joked that she felt like her daughter’s executive assistant.

“So I said, ‘remember when we were growing up, and our social network was the landline?’” he says. They all laughed (and some recited their high school best friends’ numbers from memory), but Kittleson found himself holding on to the idea of a landline phone with parental controls. He wondered whether it might be a solution to a dilemma that his family was struggling with.

“I felt sandwiched by these two problems: On one hand, I didn’t want my kid to have unfettered access to a pretty addictive thing, and on the other hand, I did want them to be able to call their friend and say, ‘Hey, do you want to spend the night at my house tonight?’” he says.

Kittleson remembers how thrilled his then-9-year-old daughter was the first time she heard the prototype ring: “It was the first time she’d ever heard an analog phone ring,” he says. Within a week or so, Kittleson and his two co-founders were dropping off phones at friends’ houses. He told those friends to let him know whether other parents were interested - and soon he was bombarded with text messages from other families who wanted one of these phones.

“We saw a very natural virality. Within a couple of days I had dozens of text messages from parents around west Seattle, asking ‘Can I get one?’” he says. “The kids lost their minds. They were so excited when the phone rang, they would jump over the couch to see who it was. The no-caller-ID thing was surprisingly magical - you always knew it was someone you wanted to talk to, it’s an approved contact, but you didn’t know who it was.”

In the past year, he says, the company has sold “tens of thousands” of the phones to households in all 50 states and Canada; they’re currently back-ordered, with deliveries expected by December.

“There is a cultural moment, a big shift happening. People are becoming really aware and awakened to this idea that we have an unhealthy relationship with technology, and we’re feeling a little cut off from the people that matter most to us. We all know there is a problem,” Kittleson says. “For us, this feels like an antidote.”

Lindsey Voorhees, a mom of three and an early childhood autism consultant in Oregon, plans to stick to the same rule for all of her children: no smartphones before high school and no social media until at least age 16. But Voorhees also wants her children to have the opportunity to develop social skills and engage with friends independently - so a landline phone feels like a good compromise.

“We’ve been able to present the landline as something to look forward to: ‘You can help us pick it out. You’ll be able to call your friend and ask if he’s available for a playdate,’” she says. “They’re excited about it. We can tell them funny stories about landlines when we were kids, because that’s what we had, and they like that.”

The family plans to set up their landline in a central, shared space, Voorhees says. “We will teach them how to answer the phone. Kids don’t even know how to answer phones,” she says. “They don’t know how to say hello and have a brief conversation with an adult if they’re trying to get ahold of their friend. There’s really an entire generation that is incapable of basic interactions.”

She wants better than that for her kids, she says, and she believes a growing number of parents feel the same: “Momentum is building,” she says. “I just wish there was more haste.”

In her Seattle neighborhood, Zemer says, she’s seen what’s possible when parents collectively buy into a different form of social connection for their kids. Just the other day, her son wanted to play with a neighbor on a Saturday morning; he used his Tin Can to call his friend, “and she said, ‘I can’t play - I have to clean my bedroom,’” she says. So her son asked if he could come over to help, “and before you know it, he’s over there at her house and was there for four or five hours,” Zemer says. “They made her room immaculate. They strung Christmas lights under her bed and made a fort.”

This would never have happened, she says, without the landline phone: “I wouldn’t have let him just walk over there and knock on the door, and I wasn’t going to text a mom or dad to ask if he could come over,” she says. “It alleviated some of those social barriers, and allowed them to engage in something that wasn’t a structured playdate. They were bored together. They cleaned together. They had so much fun just being together.”

SUNDAY TRIBUNE