Seattle’s Tin Can reinvents the landline phone for kids

Imagine traveling back in time to your childhood bedroom, where you wait for your best friend to call and organize a playdate. Suddenly, you hear it: The landline phone begins to ring, and you race to pick up the curly corded receiver.

Today, the landline is all but obsolete as the vast majority of Americans own a cellphone.

Two years ago, Seattle entrepreneur and millennial parent Chet Kittleson found himself sandwiched between two problems. On one hand, he wanted to give his then-7-year-old daughter Emma a way to independently communicate and make plans with friends. On the other hand, he was concerned about the possible risks of screen addiction.

“There’s this rising awareness, which is very much the zeitgeist right now, that cellphones are things that we probably shouldn’t give to our kids at a super early age,” he said. After hearing other Seattle parents struggle with the same problem, Kittleson came up with the idea for Tin Can: a phone system for kids to communicate the old-fashioned way.

“When we were kids, our first social network was the landline,” he said. “I totally forgot that that was the way I communicated when I was a kid.”

With Tin Can, Kittleson and other parents are hoping to bring back a nostalgic sense of independence for their children. At a time when schools and parents are grappling with the boundaries of cellphone use, the Seattle-based startup is reinventing the classic landline for a new generation — and it’s helping kids across the country build genuine relationships beyond the screen.

A landline reinvented for kids

With a curly cord and physical dial pad buttons, the Tin Can Flashback phone, priced at $75, looks straight out of an ‘80s catalog. It comes in black, white and — for a playful twist — pink.

“The way it works is very much how you would have experienced the landline as a kid,” Kittleson said. But instead of plugging into a traditional phone jack, the Flashback model uses a wired internet connection and plugs into an internet router, Ethernet port or extender. Another model (on preorder sale for $75) resembles an actual tin can and plugs into a normal electrical outlet, connecting wirelessly to Wi-Fi.

To ensure a fully private call network, Tin Can phones can only make and receive calls from parent-approved numbers listed in a companion app. The phones support calls between other Tin Cans and 911, while a $9.99 per month phone plan supports calls to external numbers so kids can call family members’ mobile devices.

Developing Tin Can took Kittleson and his team the better part of two years. “We decided to get a bunch of hardware and sit around my kitchen table for a week and try to build some prototypes,” he explained.

When Kittleson had about 10 Tin Can phones ready, he gave them to his kids and a few of their friends, unsure of if they would feel excited to answer the phone as he did decades earlier. He was pleasantly surprised.

“The excitement was palpable,” he said. “They would freak out when the phone rang, jump over the couch and break things to get to it before it stopped ringing!”

An alternative to screens

Kids today are more exposed to screens than ever. In 2024, half of children ages 8 and younger owned their own mobile phone or tablet and spent nearly 2 ½ hours with screen media a day, according to a recent report from The Common Sense Census.

More schools are making the move to ban cellphones — and research shows the policies could reduce cyberbullying and minimize distractions during class. In Washington, state Superintendent Chris Reykdal asked districts to create a plan to restrict cellphone use in class by the start of the 2025-26 school year.

Seattle parents are following suit at home. Before using Tin Can, Lauren Zemer’s 5- and 8-year-old sons would FaceTime their grandparents — but would repeatedly get distracted by seeing themselves on the screen.

“(The kids) would become hyper and need to touch the screen a million times … I felt like the grandparents were getting this very chaotic experience from the kids,” said Zemer, a therapist living in West Seattle.

When Zemer heard from a friend about a kids phone modeled after the landline, she and other parents rushed to try it out for themselves. “The kids just had a hoot!” she said. “Those phones rang nonstop for the first couple days.”

It reminded Zemer of her own childhood, when she grew up communicating with friends the “old-fashioned” way. She would call her childhood friend Carly to hang out, even for something as mundane as cleaning each others’ bedrooms.

When kids use the phones of their own accord, they don’t have to constantly ask for help setting up playdates, according to Kittleson. It lessens the mental load for busy parents, while reassuring them their kids stay safe, Kittleson and Zemer both agreed.

Creating that sense of independence can often be overlooked in young kids, Zemer realized.

“We infantilize a lot of things for children, and this is a way for children to have real-world responsibilities,” she said.

Since using the Tin Can phones, Zemer’s kids now also have calmer and more meaningful conversations with their grandparents. “I’m proud of the way they communicate better with their grandparents, and enjoy listening to those conversations more,” she said.

Creating a lasting impact

What started as a humble side project has evolved into a growing movement to help kids connect with each other — without exposing them to the entire internet. Since starting Tin Can, Kittleson’s team has hosted pop-ups to spread the word, in addition to parents recommending the phones in online parenting groups. The concept has earned nods from psychologists and phones have been sold in all 50 states.

“We want to make sure that this is something people love for a long time,” Kittleson said.

On a recent Saturday, Zemer’s 8-year-old son, Storm, used Tin Can to call his friend Lola. He wanted to hang out, he told her. But she couldn’t meet up — she had to clean her room. Storm, full of self-determination and autonomy, decided to head over and help his friend.

“They folded laundry, they listened to Taylor Swift and danced,” Zemer said. “They had a spontaneous playdate that wasn’t structured by two parents. I didn’t take them to a park. I didn’t go to Wild Waves. I didn’t have to take them to the zoo. They just had a spontaneous, creative and helpful playdate. (Tin Can) has just changed things tremendously.”