Chet Kittleson, 38, is the cofounder of Tin Can and a father of three kids, 10, 8, and 5. I suspect he wouldn\u2019t much like my description of the product\u2019s function as \u201cspying\u201d (keeping watch over one\u2019s kids is part of a parent\u2019s job) or the product itself as a \u201ctoy.\u201d He thinks of it, instead, as a utility: a way for kids to talk to Grandma or make plans with friends and to be \u201cpart of the same world that grown-ups are a part of.\u201d When he was a kid, he says, the landline was \u201carguably the most successful social network of all time.\u201d Every house had one. Then came cell phones and smartphones. Direct lines to the internet. \u201cAnd somewhere along the way we decided the landline was obsolete,\u201d Kittleson says. \u201cIn doing that, we overlooked a group that was a major beneficiary of it: kids.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019m talking to him over Zoom one afternoon from my home in Los Angeles and his office in Seattle. When I tell him that Amos and Clara had called me more than two dozen times, he doesn\u2019t seem particularly surprised. At first there\u2019s a burst of activity, he says, and then over the course of a few weeks, the kids mature. \u201cThey’re like, oh, OK, I see that I can actually do things with this that are important,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
Kittleson, who guesses that most Tin Can users are between the ages of 5 and 13, says he wants to help create a \u201cbetter childhood\u201d or, as he puts it, \u201cgiving kids back a sense of independence and confidence.\u201d (Mike Duboe, a partner at Greylock Ventures, which led a round that invested $12 million in the company in October, says something similar.) One parent, describing their kid\u2019s Tin Can use on X, wrote<\/a> that it \u201cfelt like the old days.\u201d<\/p>\n Amos and Clara weren\u2019t the only ones who, over the holidays, got the gift of gab. In late December, frustrated parents flooded the company\u2019s feedback forms and posted on Reddit that their Tin Cans weren\u2019t working. Though the Tin Can engineers had anticipated a surge in usage around the holidays, the hundredfold increase in call volume took them by surprise.<\/p>\n When I ask Kittleson about the holiday meltdown, he winces. \u201cIt was a stressful Christmas,\u201d he concedes. (A message on the Tin Can homepage said, \u201cWe\u2019re investigating an issue impacting the network.\u201d) He says that future shipments of the product will be staggered.<\/p>\n And the product\u2019s 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 challenging to little fingers like Amos\u2019. His mother, Rebecca, sometimes has to help him make calls. \u201cIt takes a little bit out of the independence of it,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n My first phone, like that of other kids in my generation, was my family\u2019s, a mustard yellow piece of hard plastic that sat on the mottled brown linoleum counter adjacent to the kitchen. It held a special place in my imagination\u2014an object full of potential\u2014but like most phones back then it was shared within a family and maybe even overheard or monitored. It was also tethered to a wall, making it difficult to multitask or move around while on a call. Kittleson, in fact, says that one inspiration for Tin Can was his frustration when he called his mother on her cell phone. She was, he says, \u201cthe worst\u201d: the sort of person who ran around the house while on the call, doing laundry or whatnot. Difficult to hear. Easily distracted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chet Kittleson, 38, is the cofounder of Tin Can and a father of three kids, 10, 8, and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":494013,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[166,8284,65304,165,148,12074,74,225610],"class_list":{"0":"post-494012","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mobile","8":"tag-gadgets","9":"tag-kids","10":"tag-longreads","11":"tag-mobile","12":"tag-parenting","13":"tag-phones","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-things-fall-apart"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494012","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=494012"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/494012\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/494013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=494012"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=494012"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=494012"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}