What Is A Dumb Phone For Kids. Can Someone Teach Them How To Use It?
Chet Kittleson, 38, he’s the founder of Tin Can and a father of three, 10, 8, and 5. I suspect he won’t be too fond of my description of the product’s functionality as “monitoring” (monitoring your children is part of a parent’s job) or the product itself as a “toy.” Instead, he thinks of it as something useful: a way for children to talk to Grandma or make plans with friends and to be “part of the world that adults are part of.” When he was a kid, he says, the landline was “arguably the most effective social media ever.” Each house had one. Then came cell phones and smartphones. Direct lines to the Internet. “And somewhere else we decided that the landline was no longer working,” said Kittleson. “In doing so, we ignored the group that benefited the most: children.”
I talk to him via Zoom one afternoon from my home in Los Angeles and his office in Seattle. When I tell her that Amos and Clara have called me more than a dozen times, she doesn’t seem surprised. He says that the movement will start to explode, and after a few weeks the children will mature. “It’s like, oh, okay, I see that I can do important things with this,” he says.
Kittleson, who guesses that most Tin Can users are between the ages of 5 and 13, says he wants to help create a “better childhood” or, as he puts it, “give kids back a sense of independence and self-confidence.” (Mike Duboe, a partner at Greylock Ventures, which led a round that invested $12 million in the company in October, said the same thing.) Another parent, describing the Tin Can using her child’s X, wrote that it “felt like the old days.”
Amos and Clara are not alone, during the holidays, they receive the gift of gab. In late December, frustrated parents filled out the company’s feedback forms and posted on Reddit that their Tin Cans weren’t working. Although Tin Can’s engineers expected an increase in usage during the holidays, the increase in call volume surprised them.
When I ask Kittleson about the holiday meltdown, he dominates. “It was a stressful Christmas,” he admits. (A message on Tin Can’s home page said, “We are investigating a network issue.”) He says future shipments of the product will be disrupted.
And the product is far from perfect: There can be echoes, unstable sound quality, and long pauses. The buttons on the device are hard to press, which can be a challenge for small fingers like Amos. His mother, Rebecca, sometimes has to help him make phone calls. He says: “It takes a little of its independence.
My first phone, like those of other children of my generation, it was my family, a hard plastic piece of mustard that sat on the brown oleum counter next to the kitchen. It held a special place in my imagination—something full of power—but like most phones at the time it was shared among the family and perhaps heard or monitored. It’s also tied to the wall, making it difficult to multitask or move around while on the phone. In fact, Kittleson says one of the inspirations for Tin Can was his frustration when he called his mother on the cell phone. He was, she says, “the worst of all”: the type of person who would run around the house while on the phone, doing laundry or whatever. It’s hard to hear. Easily distracted.
