Elsie Wright spent months campaigning for a phone. Finally, for Christmas, she got one. But it wasn’t what the fifth-grader had in mind.
It was a landline.
American families are leaning in to the low-tech life for their kids, installing home phones to stave off smartphone use. It’s creating some hiccups.
For weeks after getting her phone, Elsie would call friends only to sit in agonizing silence, not knowing what to say.
In Asheville, N.C., Luna James-Martinez, 9, kept hanging up her new Tin Can—a retro-looking, kid-friendly handset—because she thought it was “glitching.”
Her mom, Paula James-Martinez, had to explain what a dial tone was.
Luna struggled with other one-time basics, holding the receiver in front of her face like a smartphone on speaker—making it impossible to hear anyone.
Then there was the issue of etiquette. One of Luna’s friends, unaccustomed to the social boundaries of a more analog era, called 17 times in a day. Luna had to explain to the friend later that calling a couple of times was sufficient.
Still, as long as it’s not ringing off the hook, Luna is enjoying picking up the phone. “There’s a little bit of spontaneity and the unknown,” her mom says of not knowing who’s calling.
Though many telecom companies are shutting off the copper wires that power traditional landlines, a new wave of internet-enabled phones are taking their place. And they’re finding fans among parents who don’t want to rush to hand their kids a smartphone.
Many cite “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt, who blames tech for teen anxiety, as a driving force.
Cory Wright, Elsie’s mother, said the phone allows her daughters to talk with friends and family without unfettered access to the internet.
“I’m 46 years old, and even I get FOMO on Instagram,” she lamented. “Imagine what it’s like if you’re a kid.”
Wright’s 14-year-old nephew was bullied online for a year before he died by suicide, making the negative effects of smartphones and social media all too clear. For her kids, a home phone felt like a safer option—a social network with “training wheels,” she said.
The Tin Can has become many parents’ phone of choice, and the Seattle startup has struggled to keep up with demand. With its buttons, chunky receiver and expanding curly cord, it gives a 1990s look with 2020s functionality. Designers retained another attribute from telephony’s ancient days: There’s no screen, so kids don’t know who’s calling.
The $100 device, which works over Wi-Fi, has a $10 monthly plan for unlimited calls. Parents can manage quiet hours and an approved contacts list from an app, and turn on a shortcut for emergency services. Calls between Tin Cans are free.
Setting up a landline for kids is one thing. Finding friends to call is quite another.
Wright worked with children’s digital-health nonprofit Screen Sanity to turn her daughter’s school in Leawood, Kan., into a massive landline pod. So far, the group has distributed 195 Tin Can phones.
Elsie, after weeks of conversational lulls, started using the phone daily to coordinate French braids with soccer teammates and inquire about practice times.
She’s also engaged in time-honored traditions: recording an outgoing voicemail message, prank calling and fighting with a sibling over who gets to use it.
Next up: ordering pizza. She’s even practiced her script: “Can I please have a large cheese pizza with, um, a lemonade and brownies?”
There are benefits for parents, too—Screen Sanity director Tracy Foster, whose 11-year-old son goes to Elsie’s school, said she no longer has to act as his executive assistant. “Instead of asking me to text his friend’s mom, he called and scored himself a playdate,” she said.
Screen Sanity recommends introducing technology to kids in stages: first, a screen-free landline, then a smartwatch, followed by a stripped-down smartphone with restrictions.
Nostalgia isn’t cheap.
Mathilda Zeller was surprised by the $40 monthly fee for her landline. But it’s already a family staple.
Her youngest, age 6, loves to call her parents’ smartphones “even when we’re home,” the Chicago resident said.
They have no problem hearing her, or her siblings. All of them talk loudly on the handset, which she installed last month.
“They think the person they’re talking to is far away,” Zeller said.
Kristen Sobba installed a landline three years ago in her Overland Park, Kan., home. AT&T charged a $150 installation fee plus $30 a month.
“It would have been cheaper to add a line to our cellphone plan,” she said.
Sobba stuck with it, knowing her then-second-grade son and fourth-grade daughter weren’t getting smartphones any time soon. She created a directory of her daughter’s friends’ numbers, and the girls would call each other to make bike-riding plans.
But the appeal faded around sixth grade. “Her friends got iPads and she started asking for my phone to FaceTime,” Sobba said. Over video calls, the group did their skin-care routines together and worked on dances.
Now, the rising eighth-grader is preparing for her first smartphone this summer. Her best friends are getting one, too. “I don’t want her to feel left out, and want them to learn the ropes together,” Sobba said. “I think they’re ready for it.”
Sobba is keeping the landline until her son, now in fifth grade, gets a phone, though he recently said he’s not keen on owning one. He’s more interested in an even older gadget: a radio to listen to baseball games.
