Some of the things my wife and I have provided for our kids:
- lots of bookcases with probably >1500 books (including lots of kids/picture books) - what we've collected over the years
- a family laptop (2012 MacBook Pro) with no internet connection, pre-loaded with Pages, Sheets, Affinity Photo/Designer, a few small games, and some coding tools (Python, Ruby, VSCode, Scratch, etc.).
- Lego Spike and Spike Prime robotics learning sets (with software on an iPad, no internet)
- an upright piano (originally for me, but now they're taking lessons; I got it for $700 at a closeout sale at a piano store)
- a MIDI keyboard connected to Pianoteq running on an iPad in single-app mode with a couple of self-powered studio monitors and headphones
- an old-school landline phone connected to a VoIP box, served by UniFi Talk ($10/month).
- Each of them has their own CD player boombox, we have a large collection of CDs
- An iPad with Audible, disconnected from the internet, but with our audio book collection available (over the years, it's gotten into the hundreds of books)
- starting from when they were very young, I've been periodically loading up Cosmic Osmo (CD edition, from an un-stuffed .img file) running on an emulated Quadra 650 in System 7.5.3 on InfiniteMac.org and let them play for an hour or two at a time. This is such a good game for kids - literally black and white (dithered grays), not overstimulating, very thoughtfully built, sparks imagination and curiosity, full of easter eggs.
- some good play equipment and a hammock in the back yard :)
As an alternative to the VoIP phone: Redpocket has a $2.67/mo plan. We loaded that SIM into a small android phone (Unihertz Jelly phone).
It works great as a home phone but has the additional advantage of being able to wander if a pre-cellularized needs to go somewhere. For example, my 13-year-old takes it when going on a long bike-ride with his friends.
We keep it in our closet and only comes out when needed. They aren't allowed to give the number out to friends.
Well, the point of the landline phone (at least to some parents) is also that it has no screen, and has actual buttons, and stays home... for cell phone, we have prepaid SIM cards that are actually usable (in many EU countries credit doesn't expire and you must just use it every few months to keep them active, not sure about US).
The CD player is the big hit for my 10ish y.o. kids. Physical ownership and control of music is a huge boost for little kids and really suppirts musical exploration.
This sounds very interesting and very much in-line with what I’ve been musing as a soon-to-be father.
One question that comes to my mind is do your kids compare their experiences to their friends? If their friends have access to a laptop with internet, or a music subscription service with all the music constantly available (a la Spotify), do they not compare and ask you why their experiences must be so limited? Why do their friends get to be on iMessage and they just have a landline phone number.
These are the kinds of questions that worry me about how much the kids can truly buy in to this. But maybe I’m overthinking this.
It can be important to tell kids early that comparisons don't matter, that everyone's diffferent, and that's ok, and every family's different and that's ok.
I love this! I'm kind of sad that I'm likely beyond the point where I can ever have kids, but what you describe are absolutely the kind of things I'd want to provide them if I'm lucky.
One recommendation I have is a basic 3D printer and OpenSCAD installed on the family laptop. I can see that opening up a lot of added interactivity with other things like the Legos, robotics, etc.
> an old-school landline phone connected to a VoIP box, served by UniFi Talk ($10/month).
That sounds interesting, going to look into it. My son is old enough to be home alone but I don’t want to get him a cell phone yet, but I don’t want to leave him alone without a phone in case of an emergency. Traditional home phone plans from the usual telecoms are way more expensive than I thought they’d be.
What should I be looking for with regards to a VoIP box? Not even sure what to search for specifically,
> What should I be looking for with regards to a VoIP box?
I just bought the one from Ubiquiti. No fuss, works out of the box: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/managed-voip/products/ut..., though you do need a separate piece of hardware on which to run the UniFi talk app. For me, that was my UniFi gateway (UXG-Max) - I have a lot of UniFi equipment.
There are others that could work - you can look up UniFi Talk supported devices.
these are great, thanks for sharing. ive found the tonibox for my youngest (3rd go round) really has helped deescalate tv watching and given us an alternative when they want to watch cartoons.
one question for you; any plans on what you might do when the kids are 15, in highschool and all their friends have iphones?
Gave her a slightly older iPhone and added it to my prepaid plan with AT&T. It's supervised via Apple Configurator, has a password-protected profile created with iMazing Profile Editor.
That profile disables a lot of things - primarily Safari and adding apps. I also have Screen Time set up to block people not in her contacts list - if she wants to add someone, she asks me. I haven't said "no" yet (not that I wouldn't ever).
The idea is less to be restrictive (although that's part of it, for now) and more to give her plausible excuse not to join Instagram/TikTok/whatever - "my dad locked my phone, but you can text or call me". She hates social media, if only from having watched teenagers glued to their phones when she was younger.
I started it in extreme lockdown a couple years ago, and recently lifted a few restrictions. I plan to finally arrive at "no restrictions" by the time she's 17 or so.
It's helped that her mom has zero social media use - she texts, calls, and hangs out in person with people, that's it. I obviously hang out on HN sometimes. (I was on Twitter for a few weeks one time, and my kids complained "dad, what are you doing, get off of social media" :) They also think LLMs are evil, haha
Also -- I told her "you can buy your own laptop if you want" -- and she did. I helped her choose a used MacBook from Swappa.com. It has no internet access, but I gave her a bunch of apps, particularly Scrivener. She is becoming quite a writer (I think up to 15 books now, 2 or 3 are finished). It's quite common to see her tapping away in the living room :)
1. Talk openly and often about how much you hate your phone, how it's addictive, and all the dangers of social media.
2. Consider an Apple Watch with its own cellular plan. This allows them to TXT with friends, call you, and be located in Find Devices.
3. Create a sense of pride in not having a phone. Other parents will openly praise this.
My child doesn't have, and doesn't want a phone. It's been our biggest win as parents.
The VoIP landline seems a way better solution than the proprietary Tin Can phone, which although it looks nice, it apparently needs a subscription to call regular numbers.
As someone who grew up in the 90's, I think seeing the live progression of tech was really helpful for my own understanding. For instance we saw:
- CDs moving to Mp3s moving to the ipod and finally streaming
- Games moving from 8bit to early 3d graphics to where they are today
- Family computer moving to laptops and eventually to ipads
- Landlines to early cell phones to the iphone today
All of these experiences helped ground the core principals behind this technology. And the pace of these transformations (while rapid) was still something you could keep up with. Everything was built on the same principals.
But today kids go from zero to iPad + AI generated tiktoks by time they turn 2. Sure parents can try to hide the tech, but it doesn't change the fact that it's out there and available as soon as they enter school.
Maybe I'm overindexing on my childhood, but I would love to recreate some abridged history of this for my kids. I think seeing the building blocks helps build a much more healthy relationship with technology.
The desktop that I grew up using was fundamentally a creative machine. It had games, but I mostly used it write fiction and make art-like stuff. When we got the internet it was AIM and movie trailers, so I could go to rent the movie in a store. Then someone introduced me to Webmonkey and the rest is, well, more making stuff.
It really ought to be possible to capture the creative aspects of technology without opening the door to endless toxic slime.
Most kids that grew up during the timeline you described had no interest in computer architecture. The small minority that did care is probably the same size now.
The other 99% who were into yoyo-ing back then are now into TikTok, that's all.
distcc-pump
And, I forget what the toolchain setup is called, but on gentoo its literally just `emerge -1av <toolchain-thing> distcc` on machine with beef and just `emerge -1 distcc` on athlon...
I found out how to do it consistently in 2010 and its like black magic knowing how to target a real OS at BS hardware.
I was doing this in 2003 and my computer was also the internet/network router for our house. When that thing was down, you had no access to external information that you didn’t pre-save somewhere.
One time I forgot to install network drivers and had to download them through my flip phone via GPRS and then awkwardly load onto the computer via a clunky USB connection. Fun times.
Also my English wasn’t this good yet. I’m sure it would’ve been a lot easier had I actually understood all the tutorials and documentation fully.
I'd wager that even if you didn't nerd out on computer architecture, just living through progression of CDs -> mp3s -> ipods -> streaming gives kids a better grounding than the iPad is where music comes from they have today
Yep, with video games, we started with SNES and have been slowly moving higher fidelity. We've got a VOIP landline for the kids, as well as a CD player. It's been working pretty well. For computing, they have a desktop Raspberry Pi 400 running Raspbian, terminal-centric setup.
I was just talking about this with my partner the other day. We have an amazing retro games shop/arcade not far from our house, so I think for probably my kiddo's 5th birthday I'm going to take him to buy a Gameboy Advance SP and a couple of games He's already shown interest in video games and I think this is a great way to introduce him without overwhelming him. I'm sure the whole package will be <150 bucks and provide him with literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, and the games are almost literally a dime a dozen. It'll be a really simple reward system for school, life milestones, etc: let's go down the street and buy you a new game! Just like in the good old days.
We aren't a fully screen free family. Our kiddo watches probably 1/2 hour to 45 minutes of TV a day and we aren't so naive as to think plane trips and long car rides will be screen free, so we bring an old iPad loaded up with shows and movies he likes. We review the list beforehand and make sure it has what he wants (subject to our approval). But the night and day difference between a moderated amount of screen time and his peers who are full on iPad kids is just astounding. I just hope we can keep up the low screen time for as long as possible.
I set up a little neighbourhood pbx this year on an oracle cloud always free instance. Took a couple of days.
Any family can buy a WiFi-enabled office phone and I’ll set up an extension for them. It’s working great! My six year old had a 15 minute chat with classmate while we were making dinner today; they have arranged a play date for next Monday.
A couple of weeks ago a 5 year old invented prank calls. Every now and then the phone will ring and we’ll pick up and she’ll sing a a couple of lines out of Frozen before hanging up. It’s made our community much closer.
Sadly, all the busybodies in my community would make this unbearable, since they'd have direct lines to people instead of having to wait to see them outside to complain to them.
That's really cool. Recently I had the fantasy of setting up a PBX here in the house and bringing back "dial up internet" for me and my wife, as a doomscrolling mitigation measure. Probably won't work though, as we each have smartphones plus she wants her streamers to play back full-fat 4K.
Generally agree with this approach. We need to make sure that friction exists in our kids' lives.
I have a toddler, and screen time is something that is on top of my mind, Balancing the trade-offs of when to use it while also minimizing it as much as possible.
Something that made me really sick to the stomach was learning how Cocomelon was doing AB testing to make sure that children don't look away from the show[1]. In response to that, I default to showing my kids shows from the 90s that didn't use cuts, aggressive cuts, to keep attention going. Things like Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, etc.
Heck, I remember trying out one Disney show focused on Minnie Mouse and barely allowed the show to run for three minutes after I realized that there were multiple cuts happening every three seconds.
This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school.
It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young age, but it's way more isolating than people realize. You might have a landline, but if no other high school age people are making voice calls to communicate, no one's going to call that landline. And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
We have plenty of conflict in our home around devices, so I don't criticize any particular approaches. I'd just say that if you're taking this approach, it's probably a good idea to figure out how you're going to transition to kids having devices as they get into their high school years.
Protecting your kids from dopamine-drip algorithms and the effects of social media and short-form video during their most formative years and gradually letting them take over as they mature sounds like… parenting.
I've been there, but going to cybercafés instead of having an internet connection at home until very late. A simlar case with a mobile phone, having to use the one from my dad until I had 18.
I nearly ended up alone, as anynone would expected. Parents understood too late the value of sharing common culture points, up to the point to apologyze and feeling really desperate on the consecuences.
Cracking up wifi and such saved me up a little, but not much. I missed TONS of stuff and experiences. When I could finally got all the media and proper skills, it was really damn late.
Don't do this to your kids, then. Time doesn't roll back. Ever. Don't be a shitty narcisist parent and let your kids develop their OWN tastes.
I’m sorry this happened to you. However nothing in my reply implies cutting your children off from the world. Helping them avoid the harms of algorithmic feeds until they have developed the maturity to navigate them helps them be more connected to the world, not less.
With all due respect I think you are reading more there due to your own experiences, which sound like abuse, not parenting.
I purchased Mudita Kompakt phones for my kids when they started secondary school. There has been some pushback but overall it’s been a success.
The fact that they occasionally forget to take it with them or they leave it downstairs when they go to bed, makes me comfortable that it doesn’t have addicting properties.
And, because it’s android any apps demanded by school can easily be side loaded.
It hasn't been a problem for us. Our child has a cellular enabled Apple Watch (it has its own phone number). At home, the iPad satisfies all the other needs, and is restricted with Screen Time and Downtime. YMMV (kids are different)
I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school.
In Australia this is normal. The distribution of phones increases slowly during high school, not before. Kids don't really use phones anyway, they use some combination of online games and messaging apps so they can do it from a computer or tablet without a phone.
So many areas in the US are much less walkable and bikeable than they used to be. I say that as someone who bicycle commuted for years. When I rode my bike to school as a kid I dealt with 25-35 mph traffic. The traffic was much lighter, the vehicles were much smaller, the drivers weren't perfect but they were way less distracted, and the shoulders were in better shape.
We can try to raise our kids with values that are consistent with the ones we grew up with. But trying to give them the same conditions because "it's what we did" doesn't always match up with reality.
Is it true that pickup truck drivers often threaten to run over bikes to assert dominance or is that just one of those myths about how crazy America is?
Ah, beautiful times. I remember that me and my friend abused Orange's feature to send voicemail messages directly to the voicemail inbox, without calling the other person at all. Since it was billed by the second, if you spoke very fast, it became much cheaper than SMS.
Works great until your kid's the one that can't join their friends on, say, grabbing dinner after band practice, because they have no way of telling you "hey, change of plans".
If your kid can only participate in things that are planned well in advance, your kid is going to be missing out on ~80% of gatherings. Because everyone else is in the habit of making spontaneous plans, made possible by interconnectivity.
The issue isn't that it couldn't be done without technology. The problem is when everyone else has moved on to the technology based solution (mobile phones) if you don't you're just out of luck.
I don't think enough parents have internalized that if they're the "I don't let my teenager have a phone" parent in 2026, that also means they're the "I don't let my teenager have friends" parent.
There's a line to toe - each kid is different, but with my daughter she went from a flip phone in middle school, to a smart phone in high school.
We didn't turn on mobile data for her smart phone (hand me down pixel) until about a year ago.
She is very responsible with it and it hasn't been much of an issue. She had no problems making friends, and if her phone was filtering shallow people out her friend pool a bit that probably wasn't a bad thing.
Now, my oldest son is dying to have a smartphone but really he just wants to use it as a tablet. I installed lineageOS on an old D821/Nexus5 and it can run some mobile games, and we have a chromebook.
We'll try the same flip phone in middle-school route for him. It fulfills the basic needs of emergency contact, and is a good test of responsibility with lower stakes.
This is a symptom of not encouraging children into extracurricular activities. If all you have to bond over is social media, your friendship is empty. That's how you create terminally-online, mentally ill people. Everyone needs third spaces like sports, scouts, music, church, clubs, and the like. They get you out of your house and head and surround you with people who share similar interests.
my kid's extracurricular activity groups like to chat outside of club-time, too. being the only one of the group not able to do so would be ostracizing.
I understand deeply. My parents delayed my driver's license until I was 17 because of financial tightness at the time, and that distanced me from some of my friends at the time. You know what I gained from that? I got to see who my real friends were, and even more importantly, I learned that not all friends are the same in a visceral way. I learned how to confront my parents in a way to communicate my viewpoint in a way they could understand. We learned together how to compromise and renegotiate our entire relationship, helping transition from child/parent to adult/parent.
You have two jobs as a parent: create a safe environment for your children and prepare them for the adult world that is wildly unsafe. Unfortunately, these two goals are both required and contradictory. A line must be walked. Too much deviation to one side or the other will cause severe problems.
That line cannot be prescribed. It's different for each child, but there's a big problem with how you put your point. You aren't trying to prepare the child for a dangerous and difficult world, you are trying to protect them in a different way, minimizing the other dangers. I completely understand. It hurts to see your child hurt. All you want to do is make the pain go away.
Instead of helping them avoid the pain of learning about relationships, you should guide them. Help them understand. They won't at first. Like a toddler throwing a tantrum that you won't let them stick objects in wall outlets, parents have to be the "bad guy" from time to time. Eventually, the toddler will grow up enough so that you can explain dangers to them and you won't have to do it for that thing anymore. The same applies here. They won't understand at first. Help them understand the dangers. When they do, you can teach them how to safely use the metaphorical wall outlet. Then you don't have to be the bad guy anymore.
You're right. If you think you are walking that line for each of your children, then you are the authority. It's just a common argument I hear from parents who want to avoid feeling bad, so I did make some assumptions.
My extracurricular activities were full of nerds (martial arts) with Play Stations and internet at home. So, as an owner of no inet or a console at home was pretty much hell from 2001 to 2005. Oh, and no cell phone until ~18.
The outcome? Really shitty social skills until I hit 27 or so. My dad really regreted what it did, and my mom become aware on how utterly shitty was to let a nerdy kid disconnected from their peers.
My gut reaction was "well, you can give them a phone, just lock down tiktok and other crap" but then I was thinking "well, in the end that doesn't matter in practice, they can buy a used device from a friend for pocket money and hiding it from me will be trivial", so... it all comes down to my relationship with the kid. Nothing else will work.
Ironic, the picture on this article appears to be AI generated. I thought the Sony CD player looked neat, and I'd never seen one like it before. I thought I might try to buy one on eBay, that's how cool I thought it was. But Google says "Digital fingerprints embedded within the file verify that this is an artificially generated rendering."
Yeah, bit shameful, I also got curious about the walkman-look-alike, but then I saw the reflection on the CD which seemed out of place, I think it's supposed to reflect the roof of the cover, but instead seems to reflect behind "the camera", kind of gave it away :/
The Walkman D-E220 is kind of close though, so not completely far away, but their CD players weren't so toy-y and rounded it seems.
There are three different photos on that page, so do scroll down and look at the other ones that are there beyond the first picture.
There’s also links to other pages on the site with even more models and history.
Also, if you’ve never seen/tried a trackball mouse, modern variants exist too. I have two different wireless ones that I bought really cheap on AliExpress that I use a lot and am really happy with. The two I have charge via USB-C and connect via Bluetooth. And even though I bought very cheap ones, the battery goes for many days before I have to charge them again.
The school Macs had the Mighty Mouse with the tiny trackball for scrolling. It was my first time seeing a Mac, but I always thought there had to be a setting somewhere that would let you move the cursor around with it. Spent many computer lab hours looking for it.
My eye went to the labeled floppy disk, since no floppy regularly used for more than a week ever had that pristine of a label on it, and there’s no practical reason you’d use floppy disks over flash drives or burned CDs today. (And why would you write 1998 on it?) Alas, none of us will be able to tell before too long.
It seems plausible, at least, that the floppy has such a pristine label because the kids didn’t end up using it. Even if I was a kid and into retro games I don’t think I’d care to play my parents’ saves. (Not to say I have any strong belief that this is a non-AI image).
I'm not quite going back so far - IMHO the pinnacle of technology was around 2011, enough that you had smartphones and could use them as a tool but before engagement-hacking got so good that everything became an addiction.
I am sitting here using Claude to get Proxmox and Debian up and running with my ~50TB of local hard drives though, so that I can get most of our digital life hosted locally and independent from the whims of big Internet companies. Because I think that there's a lot of value in having physical possession of your bits and bytes and control over how you access it, along with nobody else having access to it. My kids are still young enough that they prefer the playground over the computer (and maybe there's a generational thing where at least the 5 year old will actually decline screen time so he can go plant seeds or paint or something), but I want to build actual tech skills and knowledge of how the digital world is put together in them, rather than just having stuff fed to them.
What age were you in 2011? I'm willing to bet 14-21.
I think the pinnacle was 2003, right when the internet was becoming good but before World of Warcraft launched which changed how the attention economy worked by introducing the subscription model for digital content to millions of people.
I happened to be in that 14-21 range. It's an age range most people have rose tinted nostalgia glasses for.
I was 30 in 2011, and working on building that Internet future.
2011 was the first year that I got told "No, you can't build that feature because we're renegotiating our contract with Twitter and they want too much money." It was also the first year I got told "We're killing products beloved by users because we need to compete with Facebook." And it was the first year I was told "How can we appeal to users' egos to gather more data from them?" by management.
I guess 2010 was the year we found out our employers were stiffing us with anticompetitive agreements. But up through 2011, there was a feeling that we were actually building things for users because they wanted them, and not manipulating them against their will. It changed after that, first gradually, then suddenly.
It's a different category, but I can't tell you how much learning programming in BASIC and learning hardware on Z80 got me to understand how computers actually work.
BASIC is just plain approachable - turn on the computer and it's there. Also I had the paper manuals manuals that came with the computer and all the old BASIC books that my school library never threw away to learn from. When you're young enough that "install software" or "download" look like scary words that will get you in trouble for "messing up the computer", an old computer with BASIC (which your parents wanted to throw away anyways) is fair game to explore. More of a thing when households only had one main computer, I suppose.
By the time I was old enough to start learning hardware, the Arduino had already come out. I learned some things on that, but as soon as you have to go below all the abstractions it does for you things get cryptic. I actually didn't get into Z80 stuff until a few years later, but only after that did I actually feel I understood what was going on with the Arduino. Being able to poke at things with a scope which aren't embedded inside a tiny plastic brick goes a long way.
I'm not a new Hacker News user. I just had surgery and I don't feel like getting up and looking up my password.
I've always heard that learning ANSI BASIC or any basic, Q basic, Microsoft basic, any of them, first; usually leads to a lifetime of bad programming habits.
So of course I learned basic first, but then I was like, oh, I'll just learn Fortran, and then C++, and then I got completely lost and never found my way back.
Technically I learned the drag and drop Lego Mindtorms first. Don't know what kind of habit forming research there is about that.
Any of them are a big step from "computer is just for MS PAINT" to "wow, it actually did something I told it to".
By the time I got to the Z80 stuff I had abandoned basic (though learning C from Arduino is also something people tend not to recommend). Once I learned some Z80 assembly and I encountered BASIC again, I was struck by how similar assembly language and BASIC are, specifically the setting variables and then jumping around all the time part. They taught this stuff to kids!
My parents did, and they were right. I had limited tv, games, and computer time. They kicked me out of the house after school, only to return for supper. I am eternally grateful for that decision. I have rich friendships that continue thirty years later.
Today, the tech is even worse for children. Playing too much Nintendo might isolate you and hurt your schoolwork, but iPad toddlers are fundamentally damaged.
Yeah, the double standard... We are here on hacker news probably because our parents let us freely explore computers and the internet. "Screen time" wasn't even a concept. Most friends I talked to had really off-hands parents as well, parents were rarely involved or interested in what the kids were doing. Glad I didn't have overbearing parents who limited my technology use to the radio and LPs.
You do raise a valid point. 30 years ago was 1996. So, a Nintendo 64 would be overkill, but a Super Nintendo would be fine, right? And a palm pilot would be overkill, but something like a Texas Instruments TI49/A would be fine, right? so you would say if you wanted to use 30 year old tech you should really use 35 year old tech or so, perhaps.
There's definitely something to this idea. Our toddler absolutely loves her Yoto player, which is kind of like a tiny Walkman with cards instead of tapes. It's new but has that same old-tech feeling, IMO. She loves to pick out her favorite "albums" (some of which are stories) and listen to them. We have them all where she can easily grab them and swap them out. Have definitely lost a few cards but they're cheap enough and they usually turn up again eventually, plus it helps teach her to keep her things organized (if you lose it... it's gone!).
We also got an old VCR for free, and pulled out all the VHS tapes from the parents' attics. Another great system for the kiddo. We have an assortment of tapes that she can choose from, and we let her pick the tape and insert it herself. I think the tactile feeling of selecting and starting it up is very satisfying.
Somewhere along the way we forgot the importance of touch in interfacing with technology. We are definitely starved for that sensation in the modern world.
The concept is super cute, and it'd be nice if there were content actually on the cards. But it's 2026 and the rightsholders would never actually allow that. As soon as Yoto's servers go dark, there goes any content not already cached on your machine. (And maybe the stuff that is, due to licensing arrangements.) Fuck that shit so hard.
If I had kids, they're getting a cassette player. Bonus: it'll double as data storage for the C64 I'd buy them.
I’ve just set up some old phones between my daughter and her school friends. I also looked at tincan but it’s quite expensive for each device + high monthly cost.
Using voipfone I have them all on a separate network with 3 digit phone numbers for £2 a month each and all connected with a grandstream voip controller + an old landline phone that I got on eBay / donated from neighbours.
It’s been so nice to see them all calling each other up and chatting. Retro tech is so good because it’s single purpose. No distractions.
As an Child and Adolescent Psychiatric, expert in screen time and soon to be father. I found myself thinking more and more about this.
I thought about resurrecting my old game boy advance to introduce my little boy to the tech world.
The long loading times, no auto-save, no in game purchases... I think It Will help him develop a healthier relationship with the machine in his more vulnerable youth.
I too built a landline phone inspired by tincan. It runs off of an old macbook I repurposed as an ubuntu server, and routes through voip.ms. I used a pap2t linksys adapter so we could use a cool old analog phone. it mostly works, but for my youngish kid, its amazing and she loves it.
one nice thing about it is that i can set up call hours and a whitelist of allowed phone numbers, so she doesn't yet have to deal with strangers calling.
probably the -worst- thing I ever did as a kid was take my parents' (mostly ripped) collection of VHS tapes and drop them into the 80 gallon fish tank to raise the fish up so I CoUlD ToUCh the FiBsCH. ah, then i blamed my brother... yup that memory still hurts!
i soo can't wait for my karmic come-uppance with my... exceedingly large retro video game collection.
We recently got a landline. A few of my daughter’s friends got the “tin can phone” but it looked so poorly made and over-priced. It was easy enough to setup voip with one of those old school stretchy cabled phones.
It pretty cute watching her get excited when it rings and sweet that she gets to talk to her friends any time she likes… from the living room.
I've got 5 & 6 year old kids. They have a a VHS player / tiny CRT monitor with a few dozen tapes, a tiny janky mp3 player with all my ripped post-y2k era albums, and lots of books and art supplies.
VHS tapes are so cheap. Every thrift store has hundreds for like half a buck each. All your friends have a box in their basement they want to get rid of.
My kids (12-year-old boy, 7-year-old girl) recently got Tin Can phones, as did several of their friends, and absolutely love them.
One note: you can authorize regular phone numbers for them to be able to call, but only if you pay the subscription ($10/month I think? We didn't do this...)
I know I could build the same thing out of esp32's but it would be a big hassle, and I'd have to build one for all their friends too!
I would do the same for my children ~ However children have a special ability to revolt against any arbitrary constraints provided by parents, community, society. It differs person to person of course.
I went the same route. I have bought stuff from the 2000s for my 10yo girl: pink plastic digital camera, mp3 player, a desktop PC in the middle of the living room.
Btw, do you know any website where we can legally download mp3 ?
I really like the idea conceptually, but I have two issues with it.
1. I sympathise a lot with the impulse here, as I do also feel personally that the way I grew up had the right balance of convenience and dangers, but I suspect all generations feel the same, and I'd be afraid that this is just imposing my nostalgia on my kids. I know, I know, kids seem scarily hypnotized by screens and social media, and trashy online content, but... My parents were also alarmed that when I was growing up that unchecked I could spend an entire weekend on the computer, with only reluctant breaks for food and sleep. Yet I think I grew up to be a reasonably well adjusted adult. I'd be also wary here that by imposing "my nostalgia" on my kids, I'd robbing them of building meaningful shared cultural bagage with their peers.
2. I'm afraid that by sheltering kids from the current state of technology, they will be poorly equipped to deal with it when they leave this protective bubble. No matter how much genie bottling we try, it's never going back in. The only way to a healthy relationship with technology, internet, etc... is through, not around or backwards. Create healthy tech, online habits, not by creating an environment where they cannot see the issues, but through good old parenting: setting a boundary when they're young, explaining it, and when you relax it as they get older confirm that they understood the reason for the boundaries and are placing healthy ones on their own.
I think, YouTube is a double edged sword. There is so much interesting and inspiring content on there but it's tainted by 95% slop. What I'm doing for myself is having an adblock, blocking shorts and redirecting the homepage to subscriptions. This is of course no child protection but at least it helps me to not kill too much time.
They may have been first released in 1982, but CDs are still the most high-tech widespread way to buy music. Newer technologies to buy music, like SACD and DVD-A have never had widespread support.
I have been dj’ing for ~20 years, and have a sizeable house music vinyl collection. I can’t wait for my kiddo to get into it. She’s showing interest already.
Same! ~25 years or so for me. I'm just now letting my oldest begin to manipulate the vinyl records beyond just playing them, but they've both loved slapping CDs into my CDJs and going wild with them.
Glad I'm not alone. I do it mostly for me, but there is also the ulterior motive/hope that my young kids will enjoy media that isn't constantly trying to get them addicted; or at least know that _alternatives_ exist.
So far I've:
- gotten into film photography. It's so much more enjoyable and I cherish the few crappy photos I take. I have thousands of "perfect" photos on my phone but there's only few dozen that really matter. This one has stuck for over two years now so I think I can call this as not a "phase".
- cassettes for music. This one is still the "phase" stage. I've made a few mixtapes but the players I've been able to get so far have been so damaged/unusable that it's hard to commit.
- a typewriter. Only got this a few days ago. I want to type the made-up stories I tell during bed time. I want them to "pretend work" with me. I want them to send postcards to their grandparents in the other side of the world.
- retro or retro styled games. Games like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge one. Anything without microtransactions or timed events to feed the FOMO. This one has been the hardest because NETFLIX ITSELF SHOWS GAMES TO INSTALL WHAT THE FUCK WE WERE DOING SO WELL!
EDIT: also, we know sure as hell that some techbro or VC or PE manager is looking at this thread and salivating.
I'm not sure if a landline phone or physical media is needed (a shared family computer is a good idea until HS), but both those as well as a family computer imply parents being actively involved and reviewing media that their kids are consuming.
That is probably the most important factor.
Like having your own managed digital media server and some personal MDM would give you the ability to continue to use and engage with the current zeitgeist but with controls.
Useful reframe: it's not old vs. new tech, it's tools you command vs. media that commands you. "Retro" correlates with "good for kids" mostly because old tools aren't engagement-optimized — they sit there until the kid acts. A modern non-algorithmic tool can be just as good.
What a dumbphone doesn't solve is the social tax — opting a kid out of the addictive layer can also opt them out of the group chat. That's the actually-hard part.
True - for what it's worth, I find having my own library on Jellyfin much nicer than Netflix (or god help us, youtube). Just downloading the videos you like from youtube and setting them up as Jellyfin "channels" is a much calmer experience than using YT.
>What a dumbphone doesn't solve is the social tax — opting a kid out of the addictive layer can also opt them out of the group chat. That's the actually-hard part.
It's hard to say how this'll go in the long run. I have two littler children right now, and a lot of the parents of much younger kids, at least in the area we live in, seem to be trying really hard to move in the "dumb phone/don't let them fall into these addictive layers" direction. Many of the parents we meet talk about eventually giving them dumb phones, or getting a landline at home so kids can call each other.
My hope is that with sustained effort from the community, this sort of concern falls by the wayside to a good degree. Who knows how it'll play out in the long-term given how much our culture has structured itself around this bullshit, but it's nice to see folk trying to push back in a more concerted way.
I imagine it’ll be quite socially stratified - upper-middle class parents will be giving their kids dumbphones and keeping them off social media, possibly sending them to ‘tech-free’ schools, while poorer parents won’t.
Unfortunately this seems quite plausible from today’s POV. As the old saying goes if you don’t want to be the product, you’ll have to pay for it. And I see only a silver of people being rich enough to afford and educated enough to care for paying privacy- or sanity-preserving tools and services.
We’ve dug this hole ourselves, without knowing better, over the last decade or so. Most social life / communications happens inside those platforms.
If we want our kids to thrive in the world without being hooked on this attention syphoning machines, we must get the socials out of those walled gardens.
This is a huge challenge, and no one but us will build it. It will require deliberate action in our community.
It's a massive struggle. I'm somewhat thankful that we didn't have kids until after it was apparent what the impact of this sort of ecosystem has on them, and it's refreshing to meet other parents who feel the same way. Who knows what kind of success we'll have, but it's reassuring to know that there's a push from at least some subset of parents with littles.
Yeah-- the group chat is / was the damned problem.
My daughter's sports teams, since moving up to 12U, have had group chats. She was absolutely getting left behind in the social interaction. It was painful to watch.
It's still a pain point because we've been limiting her SMS to known contacts. We're probably coming to have to capitulate on that because other parents don't seem to grok what we are trying to do and don't understand why we want to get their kids' phone numbers to add to my daughter's approved contact list. I guess we're the only people who have ever done this... >sigh<
Ugh, group chats. Even if I want my kiddo to participate which I'm not 100% sure I do, there's nothing that works for all the kids. Some of the kids don't have a phone number, so SMS and other things that require a phone number don't work. iMessage doesn't work because 50% of the kids don't have iPhones. email doesn't work, because it's email.
There's team apps for the parents to use (which are universally terrible, but it is what it is), but not for the kids, because it's better to pretend it doesn't happen than acknowledge it does and deal with the necessary issues of abuse and privacy.
It's an SMS group chat and iPhone parental controls. Basically if somebody not in her contact list joins the chat she's locked out of that chat until we vet the contact and add them.
Some of the things my wife and I have provided for our kids:
- lots of bookcases with probably >1500 books (including lots of kids/picture books) - what we've collected over the years
- a family laptop (2012 MacBook Pro) with no internet connection, pre-loaded with Pages, Sheets, Affinity Photo/Designer, a few small games, and some coding tools (Python, Ruby, VSCode, Scratch, etc.).
- Lego Spike and Spike Prime robotics learning sets (with software on an iPad, no internet)
- an upright piano (originally for me, but now they're taking lessons; I got it for $700 at a closeout sale at a piano store)
- a MIDI keyboard connected to Pianoteq running on an iPad in single-app mode with a couple of self-powered studio monitors and headphones
- an old-school landline phone connected to a VoIP box, served by UniFi Talk ($10/month).
- Each of them has their own CD player boombox, we have a large collection of CDs
- An iPad with Audible, disconnected from the internet, but with our audio book collection available (over the years, it's gotten into the hundreds of books)
- starting from when they were very young, I've been periodically loading up Cosmic Osmo (CD edition, from an un-stuffed .img file) running on an emulated Quadra 650 in System 7.5.3 on InfiniteMac.org and let them play for an hour or two at a time. This is such a good game for kids - literally black and white (dithered grays), not overstimulating, very thoughtfully built, sparks imagination and curiosity, full of easter eggs.
- some good play equipment and a hammock in the back yard :)
I hope it has been and will be enriching to them.
As an alternative to the VoIP phone: Redpocket has a $2.67/mo plan. We loaded that SIM into a small android phone (Unihertz Jelly phone).
It works great as a home phone but has the additional advantage of being able to wander if a pre-cellularized needs to go somewhere. For example, my 13-year-old takes it when going on a long bike-ride with his friends.
We keep it in our closet and only comes out when needed. They aren't allowed to give the number out to friends.
Well, the point of the landline phone (at least to some parents) is also that it has no screen, and has actual buttons, and stays home... for cell phone, we have prepaid SIM cards that are actually usable (in many EU countries credit doesn't expire and you must just use it every few months to keep them active, not sure about US).
The CD player is the big hit for my 10ish y.o. kids. Physical ownership and control of music is a huge boost for little kids and really suppirts musical exploration.
This sounds very interesting and very much in-line with what I’ve been musing as a soon-to-be father.
One question that comes to my mind is do your kids compare their experiences to their friends? If their friends have access to a laptop with internet, or a music subscription service with all the music constantly available (a la Spotify), do they not compare and ask you why their experiences must be so limited? Why do their friends get to be on iMessage and they just have a landline phone number.
These are the kinds of questions that worry me about how much the kids can truly buy in to this. But maybe I’m overthinking this.
Just tell them the truth, friend. You want to protect them, this is your family's way.
It can be important to tell kids early that comparisons don't matter, that everyone's diffferent, and that's ok, and every family's different and that's ok.
I love this! I'm kind of sad that I'm likely beyond the point where I can ever have kids, but what you describe are absolutely the kind of things I'd want to provide them if I'm lucky.
One recommendation I have is a basic 3D printer and OpenSCAD installed on the family laptop. I can see that opening up a lot of added interactivity with other things like the Legos, robotics, etc.
> an old-school landline phone connected to a VoIP box, served by UniFi Talk ($10/month).
That sounds interesting, going to look into it. My son is old enough to be home alone but I don’t want to get him a cell phone yet, but I don’t want to leave him alone without a phone in case of an emergency. Traditional home phone plans from the usual telecoms are way more expensive than I thought they’d be.
What should I be looking for with regards to a VoIP box? Not even sure what to search for specifically,
> What should I be looking for with regards to a VoIP box?
I just bought the one from Ubiquiti. No fuss, works out of the box: https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/managed-voip/products/ut..., though you do need a separate piece of hardware on which to run the UniFi talk app. For me, that was my UniFi gateway (UXG-Max) - I have a lot of UniFi equipment.
There are others that could work - you can look up UniFi Talk supported devices.
these are great, thanks for sharing. ive found the tonibox for my youngest (3rd go round) really has helped deescalate tv watching and given us an alternative when they want to watch cartoons.
one question for you; any plans on what you might do when the kids are 15, in highschool and all their friends have iphones?
My oldest just turned 15. Here's what I've done:
Gave her a slightly older iPhone and added it to my prepaid plan with AT&T. It's supervised via Apple Configurator, has a password-protected profile created with iMazing Profile Editor.
That profile disables a lot of things - primarily Safari and adding apps. I also have Screen Time set up to block people not in her contacts list - if she wants to add someone, she asks me. I haven't said "no" yet (not that I wouldn't ever).
The idea is less to be restrictive (although that's part of it, for now) and more to give her plausible excuse not to join Instagram/TikTok/whatever - "my dad locked my phone, but you can text or call me". She hates social media, if only from having watched teenagers glued to their phones when she was younger.
I started it in extreme lockdown a couple years ago, and recently lifted a few restrictions. I plan to finally arrive at "no restrictions" by the time she's 17 or so.
It's helped that her mom has zero social media use - she texts, calls, and hangs out in person with people, that's it. I obviously hang out on HN sometimes. (I was on Twitter for a few weeks one time, and my kids complained "dad, what are you doing, get off of social media" :) They also think LLMs are evil, haha
Also -- I told her "you can buy your own laptop if you want" -- and she did. I helped her choose a used MacBook from Swappa.com. It has no internet access, but I gave her a bunch of apps, particularly Scrivener. She is becoming quite a writer (I think up to 15 books now, 2 or 3 are finished). It's quite common to see her tapping away in the living room :)
A few ideas for you:
1. Talk openly and often about how much you hate your phone, how it's addictive, and all the dangers of social media. 2. Consider an Apple Watch with its own cellular plan. This allows them to TXT with friends, call you, and be located in Find Devices. 3. Create a sense of pride in not having a phone. Other parents will openly praise this.
My child doesn't have, and doesn't want a phone. It's been our biggest win as parents.
Great list! So far I’ve done phones and DVDs but I’m gonna try some of these too.
I would like to also suggest letting them play old adventure games with no audio - my 8yo is deep into Monkey Island 2 original pixelated version
Emulators are a great idea. Makes me want to 3D Print a mac classic, then put a tablet in it running an emulator with the touchscreen disabled.
Touchscreens can quickly be disracting, finding ways around that are important.
Another option: buy a real Mac SE (re-capped), then put a scsi2SD in it with whatever cool stuff you'd like your kids to have on the SD card.
The VoIP landline seems a way better solution than the proprietary Tin Can phone, which although it looks nice, it apparently needs a subscription to call regular numbers.
As someone who grew up in the 90's, I think seeing the live progression of tech was really helpful for my own understanding. For instance we saw:
- CDs moving to Mp3s moving to the ipod and finally streaming
- Games moving from 8bit to early 3d graphics to where they are today
- Family computer moving to laptops and eventually to ipads
- Landlines to early cell phones to the iphone today
All of these experiences helped ground the core principals behind this technology. And the pace of these transformations (while rapid) was still something you could keep up with. Everything was built on the same principals.
But today kids go from zero to iPad + AI generated tiktoks by time they turn 2. Sure parents can try to hide the tech, but it doesn't change the fact that it's out there and available as soon as they enter school.
Maybe I'm overindexing on my childhood, but I would love to recreate some abridged history of this for my kids. I think seeing the building blocks helps build a much more healthy relationship with technology.
I've been thinking a lot about this.
The desktop that I grew up using was fundamentally a creative machine. It had games, but I mostly used it write fiction and make art-like stuff. When we got the internet it was AIM and movie trailers, so I could go to rent the movie in a store. Then someone introduced me to Webmonkey and the rest is, well, more making stuff.
It really ought to be possible to capture the creative aspects of technology without opening the door to endless toxic slime.
Most kids that grew up during the timeline you described had no interest in computer architecture. The small minority that did care is probably the same size now.
The other 99% who were into yoyo-ing back then are now into TikTok, that's all.
> The other 99% who were into yoyo-ing back then are now into TikTok, that's all.
Hey dude, some of us were yo-yoing while waiting for Gentoo to build from stage 0. Compiling an OS on a single-core Athlon takes time.
For the 3 days it takes to build all the way up to KDE, you have no computer. Hope you didn’t forget something
distcc-pump And, I forget what the toolchain setup is called, but on gentoo its literally just `emerge -1av <toolchain-thing> distcc` on machine with beef and just `emerge -1 distcc` on athlon...
I found out how to do it consistently in 2010 and its like black magic knowing how to target a real OS at BS hardware.
I was doing this in 2003 and my computer was also the internet/network router for our house. When that thing was down, you had no access to external information that you didn’t pre-save somewhere.
One time I forgot to install network drivers and had to download them through my flip phone via GPRS and then awkwardly load onto the computer via a clunky USB connection. Fun times.
Also my English wasn’t this good yet. I’m sure it would’ve been a lot easier had I actually understood all the tutorials and documentation fully.
I'd wager that even if you didn't nerd out on computer architecture, just living through progression of CDs -> mp3s -> ipods -> streaming gives kids a better grounding than the iPad is where music comes from they have today
At school we have Disney Plus with a box with a thing with a hole in it! https://www.reddit.com/r/KidsAreFuckingStupid/comments/1tv4f...
I would argue yoyo is way more healthy than TikTok.
Yep, with video games, we started with SNES and have been slowly moving higher fidelity. We've got a VOIP landline for the kids, as well as a CD player. It's been working pretty well. For computing, they have a desktop Raspberry Pi 400 running Raspbian, terminal-centric setup.
I was just talking about this with my partner the other day. We have an amazing retro games shop/arcade not far from our house, so I think for probably my kiddo's 5th birthday I'm going to take him to buy a Gameboy Advance SP and a couple of games He's already shown interest in video games and I think this is a great way to introduce him without overwhelming him. I'm sure the whole package will be <150 bucks and provide him with literally hundreds of hours of entertainment, and the games are almost literally a dime a dozen. It'll be a really simple reward system for school, life milestones, etc: let's go down the street and buy you a new game! Just like in the good old days.
We aren't a fully screen free family. Our kiddo watches probably 1/2 hour to 45 minutes of TV a day and we aren't so naive as to think plane trips and long car rides will be screen free, so we bring an old iPad loaded up with shows and movies he likes. We review the list beforehand and make sure it has what he wants (subject to our approval). But the night and day difference between a moderated amount of screen time and his peers who are full on iPad kids is just astounding. I just hope we can keep up the low screen time for as long as possible.
Plane trips and long car rides are screen free with my 4 young kids (3-9) but that’s more about gluttony for punishment than principle.
Used DS + R4 / M3 Card also does the job and you can use it as a walkman too
I set up a little neighbourhood pbx this year on an oracle cloud always free instance. Took a couple of days.
Any family can buy a WiFi-enabled office phone and I’ll set up an extension for them. It’s working great! My six year old had a 15 minute chat with classmate while we were making dinner today; they have arranged a play date for next Monday.
A couple of weeks ago a 5 year old invented prank calls. Every now and then the phone will ring and we’ll pick up and she’ll sing a a couple of lines out of Frozen before hanging up. It’s made our community much closer.
Sadly, all the busybodies in my community would make this unbearable, since they'd have direct lines to people instead of having to wait to see them outside to complain to them.
Can you point to an article on how to do this? This sounds _amazing_
CenturyLink started on somebody's porch.
The original party line was tied together with barbed wire fencing between farms.
I also run a PBX.
and a PBX behind a VPN firewall.
Well it beats asking for Amanda Hugankiss.
That's really cool. Recently I had the fantasy of setting up a PBX here in the house and bringing back "dial up internet" for me and my wife, as a doomscrolling mitigation measure. Probably won't work though, as we each have smartphones plus she wants her streamers to play back full-fat 4K.
Generally agree with this approach. We need to make sure that friction exists in our kids' lives.
I have a toddler, and screen time is something that is on top of my mind, Balancing the trade-offs of when to use it while also minimizing it as much as possible.
Something that made me really sick to the stomach was learning how Cocomelon was doing AB testing to make sure that children don't look away from the show[1]. In response to that, I default to showing my kids shows from the 90s that didn't use cuts, aggressive cuts, to keep attention going. Things like Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, etc.
Heck, I remember trying out one Disney show focused on Minnie Mouse and barely allowed the show to run for three minutes after I realized that there were multiple cuts happening every three seconds.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/arts/television/cocomelon...
This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school.
It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young age, but it's way more isolating than people realize. You might have a landline, but if no other high school age people are making voice calls to communicate, no one's going to call that landline. And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
We have plenty of conflict in our home around devices, so I don't criticize any particular approaches. I'd just say that if you're taking this approach, it's probably a good idea to figure out how you're going to transition to kids having devices as they get into their high school years.
Protecting your kids from dopamine-drip algorithms and the effects of social media and short-form video during their most formative years and gradually letting them take over as they mature sounds like… parenting.
I've been there, but going to cybercafés instead of having an internet connection at home until very late. A simlar case with a mobile phone, having to use the one from my dad until I had 18.
I nearly ended up alone, as anynone would expected. Parents understood too late the value of sharing common culture points, up to the point to apologyze and feeling really desperate on the consecuences.
Cracking up wifi and such saved me up a little, but not much. I missed TONS of stuff and experiences. When I could finally got all the media and proper skills, it was really damn late.
Don't do this to your kids, then. Time doesn't roll back. Ever. Don't be a shitty narcisist parent and let your kids develop their OWN tastes.
I’m sorry this happened to you. However nothing in my reply implies cutting your children off from the world. Helping them avoid the harms of algorithmic feeds until they have developed the maturity to navigate them helps them be more connected to the world, not less.
With all due respect I think you are reading more there due to your own experiences, which sound like abuse, not parenting.
I purchased Mudita Kompakt phones for my kids when they started secondary school. There has been some pushback but overall it’s been a success.
The fact that they occasionally forget to take it with them or they leave it downstairs when they go to bed, makes me comfortable that it doesn’t have addicting properties.
And, because it’s android any apps demanded by school can easily be side loaded.
It hasn't been a problem for us. Our child has a cellular enabled Apple Watch (it has its own phone number). At home, the iPad satisfies all the other needs, and is restricted with Screen Time and Downtime. YMMV (kids are different)
I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school.
In Australia this is normal. The distribution of phones increases slowly during high school, not before. Kids don't really use phones anyway, they use some combination of online games and messaging apps so they can do it from a computer or tablet without a phone.
>And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
Pick-ups and drop-offs? You walked yourself home, used your bike, or took the bus. This getting driven around is most ridiculous.
So many areas in the US are much less walkable and bikeable than they used to be. I say that as someone who bicycle commuted for years. When I rode my bike to school as a kid I dealt with 25-35 mph traffic. The traffic was much lighter, the vehicles were much smaller, the drivers weren't perfect but they were way less distracted, and the shoulders were in better shape.
We can try to raise our kids with values that are consistent with the ones we grew up with. But trying to give them the same conditions because "it's what we did" doesn't always match up with reality.
Is it true that pickup truck drivers often threaten to run over bikes to assert dominance or is that just one of those myths about how crazy America is?
We used to use payphones and call collect, then say a quick message when the collect service asked for your name.
"Who is calling?" "Hi mom practice is over come pick me up!"
Ah, beautiful times. I remember that me and my friend abused Orange's feature to send voicemail messages directly to the voicemail inbox, without calling the other person at all. Since it was billed by the second, if you spoke very fast, it became much cheaper than SMS.
"I'll be done with marching band practice at 6:30"
"Ok, I'll come get you then"
Works great until your kid's the one that can't join their friends on, say, grabbing dinner after band practice, because they have no way of telling you "hey, change of plans".
If your kid can only participate in things that are planned well in advance, your kid is going to be missing out on ~80% of gatherings. Because everyone else is in the habit of making spontaneous plans, made possible by interconnectivity.
The issue isn't that it couldn't be done without technology. The problem is when everyone else has moved on to the technology based solution (mobile phones) if you don't you're just out of luck.
> How did people coordinate these before even email became widespread?
With a lot more difficulty.
We used landlines of course, and it was an utter pain in the behind.
There was no way of letting anyone know that you were running late once they were already underway to pick you up.
I don't think enough parents have internalized that if they're the "I don't let my teenager have a phone" parent in 2026, that also means they're the "I don't let my teenager have friends" parent.
There's a line to toe - each kid is different, but with my daughter she went from a flip phone in middle school, to a smart phone in high school.
We didn't turn on mobile data for her smart phone (hand me down pixel) until about a year ago.
She is very responsible with it and it hasn't been much of an issue. She had no problems making friends, and if her phone was filtering shallow people out her friend pool a bit that probably wasn't a bad thing.
Now, my oldest son is dying to have a smartphone but really he just wants to use it as a tablet. I installed lineageOS on an old D821/Nexus5 and it can run some mobile games, and we have a chromebook.
We'll try the same flip phone in middle-school route for him. It fulfills the basic needs of emergency contact, and is a good test of responsibility with lower stakes.
If .. many parents would do this (like you imply), then there would be many kids without a phone who can be friends with each other?
Also I doubt the "not being able to have friend without a phone" in general. But surely harder in most areas.
This is a symptom of not encouraging children into extracurricular activities. If all you have to bond over is social media, your friendship is empty. That's how you create terminally-online, mentally ill people. Everyone needs third spaces like sports, scouts, music, church, clubs, and the like. They get you out of your house and head and surround you with people who share similar interests.
my kid's extracurricular activity groups like to chat outside of club-time, too. being the only one of the group not able to do so would be ostracizing.
I understand deeply. My parents delayed my driver's license until I was 17 because of financial tightness at the time, and that distanced me from some of my friends at the time. You know what I gained from that? I got to see who my real friends were, and even more importantly, I learned that not all friends are the same in a visceral way. I learned how to confront my parents in a way to communicate my viewpoint in a way they could understand. We learned together how to compromise and renegotiate our entire relationship, helping transition from child/parent to adult/parent.
You have two jobs as a parent: create a safe environment for your children and prepare them for the adult world that is wildly unsafe. Unfortunately, these two goals are both required and contradictory. A line must be walked. Too much deviation to one side or the other will cause severe problems.
That line cannot be prescribed. It's different for each child, but there's a big problem with how you put your point. You aren't trying to prepare the child for a dangerous and difficult world, you are trying to protect them in a different way, minimizing the other dangers. I completely understand. It hurts to see your child hurt. All you want to do is make the pain go away.
Instead of helping them avoid the pain of learning about relationships, you should guide them. Help them understand. They won't at first. Like a toddler throwing a tantrum that you won't let them stick objects in wall outlets, parents have to be the "bad guy" from time to time. Eventually, the toddler will grow up enough so that you can explain dangers to them and you won't have to do it for that thing anymore. The same applies here. They won't understand at first. Help them understand the dangers. When they do, you can teach them how to safely use the metaphorical wall outlet. Then you don't have to be the bad guy anymore.
this comment has a lot of assumptions about me and my children, based off of two very short sentences.
You're right. If you think you are walking that line for each of your children, then you are the authority. It's just a common argument I hear from parents who want to avoid feeling bad, so I did make some assumptions.
My extracurricular activities were full of nerds (martial arts) with Play Stations and internet at home. So, as an owner of no inet or a console at home was pretty much hell from 2001 to 2005. Oh, and no cell phone until ~18.
The outcome? Really shitty social skills until I hit 27 or so. My dad really regreted what it did, and my mom become aware on how utterly shitty was to let a nerdy kid disconnected from their peers.
My gut reaction was "well, you can give them a phone, just lock down tiktok and other crap" but then I was thinking "well, in the end that doesn't matter in practice, they can buy a used device from a friend for pocket money and hiding it from me will be trivial", so... it all comes down to my relationship with the kid. Nothing else will work.
Ironic, the picture on this article appears to be AI generated. I thought the Sony CD player looked neat, and I'd never seen one like it before. I thought I might try to buy one on eBay, that's how cool I thought it was. But Google says "Digital fingerprints embedded within the file verify that this is an artificially generated rendering."
Yeah, bit shameful, I also got curious about the walkman-look-alike, but then I saw the reflection on the CD which seemed out of place, I think it's supposed to reflect the roof of the cover, but instead seems to reflect behind "the camera", kind of gave it away :/
The Walkman D-E220 is kind of close though, so not completely far away, but their CD players weren't so toy-y and rounded it seems.
I (genuinely) want to try the mouse with a giant scroll ball inside its single button.
There are a couple that come pretty close to that among the ones on this page of old trackball mice:
http://xahlee.info/kbd/trackball_history_2.html
There are three different photos on that page, so do scroll down and look at the other ones that are there beyond the first picture.
There’s also links to other pages on the site with even more models and history.
Also, if you’ve never seen/tried a trackball mouse, modern variants exist too. I have two different wireless ones that I bought really cheap on AliExpress that I use a lot and am really happy with. The two I have charge via USB-C and connect via Bluetooth. And even though I bought very cheap ones, the battery goes for many days before I have to charge them again.
The school Macs had the Mighty Mouse with the tiny trackball for scrolling. It was my first time seeing a Mac, but I always thought there had to be a setting somewhere that would let you move the cursor around with it. Spent many computer lab hours looking for it.
My eye went to the labeled floppy disk, since no floppy regularly used for more than a week ever had that pristine of a label on it, and there’s no practical reason you’d use floppy disks over flash drives or burned CDs today. (And why would you write 1998 on it?) Alas, none of us will be able to tell before too long.
It seems plausible, at least, that the floppy has such a pristine label because the kids didn’t end up using it. Even if I was a kid and into retro games I don’t think I’d care to play my parents’ saves. (Not to say I have any strong belief that this is a non-AI image).
I was thinking that the writing is upside down. Very wrong IMHO to write on a floppy disk that way.
He is a technologist as stated.
Yeah that is a bit of a disappointing mislead with this being an article about retro-tech.
I was hoping it was a display of some of the mix tapes or other peripherals they were using.
I'm not quite going back so far - IMHO the pinnacle of technology was around 2011, enough that you had smartphones and could use them as a tool but before engagement-hacking got so good that everything became an addiction.
I am sitting here using Claude to get Proxmox and Debian up and running with my ~50TB of local hard drives though, so that I can get most of our digital life hosted locally and independent from the whims of big Internet companies. Because I think that there's a lot of value in having physical possession of your bits and bytes and control over how you access it, along with nobody else having access to it. My kids are still young enough that they prefer the playground over the computer (and maybe there's a generational thing where at least the 5 year old will actually decline screen time so he can go plant seeds or paint or something), but I want to build actual tech skills and knowledge of how the digital world is put together in them, rather than just having stuff fed to them.
What age were you in 2011? I'm willing to bet 14-21.
I think the pinnacle was 2003, right when the internet was becoming good but before World of Warcraft launched which changed how the attention economy worked by introducing the subscription model for digital content to millions of people.
I happened to be in that 14-21 range. It's an age range most people have rose tinted nostalgia glasses for.
I was 30 in 2011, and working on building that Internet future.
2011 was the first year that I got told "No, you can't build that feature because we're renegotiating our contract with Twitter and they want too much money." It was also the first year I got told "We're killing products beloved by users because we need to compete with Facebook." And it was the first year I was told "How can we appeal to users' egos to gather more data from them?" by management.
I guess 2010 was the year we found out our employers were stiffing us with anticompetitive agreements. But up through 2011, there was a feeling that we were actually building things for users because they wanted them, and not manipulating them against their will. It changed after that, first gradually, then suddenly.
It's a different category, but I can't tell you how much learning programming in BASIC and learning hardware on Z80 got me to understand how computers actually work.
BASIC is just plain approachable - turn on the computer and it's there. Also I had the paper manuals manuals that came with the computer and all the old BASIC books that my school library never threw away to learn from. When you're young enough that "install software" or "download" look like scary words that will get you in trouble for "messing up the computer", an old computer with BASIC (which your parents wanted to throw away anyways) is fair game to explore. More of a thing when households only had one main computer, I suppose.
By the time I was old enough to start learning hardware, the Arduino had already come out. I learned some things on that, but as soon as you have to go below all the abstractions it does for you things get cryptic. I actually didn't get into Z80 stuff until a few years later, but only after that did I actually feel I understood what was going on with the Arduino. Being able to poke at things with a scope which aren't embedded inside a tiny plastic brick goes a long way.
I'm not a new Hacker News user. I just had surgery and I don't feel like getting up and looking up my password.
I've always heard that learning ANSI BASIC or any basic, Q basic, Microsoft basic, any of them, first; usually leads to a lifetime of bad programming habits.
So of course I learned basic first, but then I was like, oh, I'll just learn Fortran, and then C++, and then I got completely lost and never found my way back.
Until Python, technically.
Technically I learned the drag and drop Lego Mindtorms first. Don't know what kind of habit forming research there is about that.
Any of them are a big step from "computer is just for MS PAINT" to "wow, it actually did something I told it to".
By the time I got to the Z80 stuff I had abandoned basic (though learning C from Arduino is also something people tend not to recommend). Once I learned some Z80 assembly and I encountered BASIC again, I was struck by how similar assembly language and BASIC are, specifically the setting variables and then jumping around all the time part. They taught this stuff to kids!
I'm sure you turned out just fine and don't use goto in Python ;)
In 30 years, won’t today’s tech be retro tech
Did the parents of 30 years ago, think the tech you’re giving today had gone too far?
My parents did, and they were right. I had limited tv, games, and computer time. They kicked me out of the house after school, only to return for supper. I am eternally grateful for that decision. I have rich friendships that continue thirty years later.
Today, the tech is even worse for children. Playing too much Nintendo might isolate you and hurt your schoolwork, but iPad toddlers are fundamentally damaged.
Yeah, the double standard... We are here on hacker news probably because our parents let us freely explore computers and the internet. "Screen time" wasn't even a concept. Most friends I talked to had really off-hands parents as well, parents were rarely involved or interested in what the kids were doing. Glad I didn't have overbearing parents who limited my technology use to the radio and LPs.
Well a lot of people, which must include many parents, cannot limit their screen time so is it any wonder they fixate on this with their kids?
You do raise a valid point. 30 years ago was 1996. So, a Nintendo 64 would be overkill, but a Super Nintendo would be fine, right? And a palm pilot would be overkill, but something like a Texas Instruments TI49/A would be fine, right? so you would say if you wanted to use 30 year old tech you should really use 35 year old tech or so, perhaps.
We do this with my kids, but really it's only a side effect of my love of archaic technology and isn't really forced.
My boys have their own walk-man cassette players, and I've made a bunch of mix tapes both for them and myself to play in the car.
My daughter had my ancient JVC receiver that I got from my parents as a stereo - handed down to one her brothers.
We pick out DVDs, VHS and Laser discs to watch sometimes, sometimes on old CRT TVs as well.
I have all my game consoles in good working order so there's a ton of options for stuff to play that isn't cutting edge.
My daughter loves that there is a CD player in her car, so she learned how to burn mix CDs.
This is all alongside modern tech so they get a good mix. Hopefully it gives them a bit of perspective.
There's definitely something to this idea. Our toddler absolutely loves her Yoto player, which is kind of like a tiny Walkman with cards instead of tapes. It's new but has that same old-tech feeling, IMO. She loves to pick out her favorite "albums" (some of which are stories) and listen to them. We have them all where she can easily grab them and swap them out. Have definitely lost a few cards but they're cheap enough and they usually turn up again eventually, plus it helps teach her to keep her things organized (if you lose it... it's gone!).
We also got an old VCR for free, and pulled out all the VHS tapes from the parents' attics. Another great system for the kiddo. We have an assortment of tapes that she can choose from, and we let her pick the tape and insert it herself. I think the tactile feeling of selecting and starting it up is very satisfying.
Somewhere along the way we forgot the importance of touch in interfacing with technology. We are definitely starved for that sensation in the modern world.
+1 for Yoto, our kids (5-7) have abused them for years. The Make Your Own cards let me create full length audiobooks, playlists, etc..
super stuff
The concept is super cute, and it'd be nice if there were content actually on the cards. But it's 2026 and the rightsholders would never actually allow that. As soon as Yoto's servers go dark, there goes any content not already cached on your machine. (And maybe the stuff that is, due to licensing arrangements.) Fuck that shit so hard.
If I had kids, they're getting a cassette player. Bonus: it'll double as data storage for the C64 I'd buy them.
There are unofficial ways:
https://github.com/earchibald/yoto-smart-stream
https://github.com/cdnninja/yoto_api
https://github.com/tmcinerney/yoto-mcp
Relevant: https://www.reddit.com/r/daddit/comments/1tnmun1/my_5yo_has_...
I bought a Super Nintendo Mini and it's the best thing ever - children love it and don't feel left out of digital entertainment
I’ve just set up some old phones between my daughter and her school friends. I also looked at tincan but it’s quite expensive for each device + high monthly cost.
Using voipfone I have them all on a separate network with 3 digit phone numbers for £2 a month each and all connected with a grandstream voip controller + an old landline phone that I got on eBay / donated from neighbours.
It’s been so nice to see them all calling each other up and chatting. Retro tech is so good because it’s single purpose. No distractions.
Glad to see this.
As an Child and Adolescent Psychiatric, expert in screen time and soon to be father. I found myself thinking more and more about this.
I thought about resurrecting my old game boy advance to introduce my little boy to the tech world.
The long loading times, no auto-save, no in game purchases... I think It Will help him develop a healthier relationship with the machine in his more vulnerable youth.
At what age are you planning on introducing it?
0-3 electronic toys (piano and cuase-effect toys), 3-6 simple electronic but short Loop, 6 onwards Game Boy Advance like.
But my opinion will change with the ongoing and future scientific proof.
What is the current scientific proof for Game Boy Advance at age 6?
Long loading times? On a GBA? I'm calling bot
I too built a landline phone inspired by tincan. It runs off of an old macbook I repurposed as an ubuntu server, and routes through voip.ms. I used a pap2t linksys adapter so we could use a cool old analog phone. it mostly works, but for my youngish kid, its amazing and she loves it.
one nice thing about it is that i can set up call hours and a whitelist of allowed phone numbers, so she doesn't yet have to deal with strangers calling.
nahaha
probably the -worst- thing I ever did as a kid was take my parents' (mostly ripped) collection of VHS tapes and drop them into the 80 gallon fish tank to raise the fish up so I CoUlD ToUCh the FiBsCH. ah, then i blamed my brother... yup that memory still hurts!
i soo can't wait for my karmic come-uppance with my... exceedingly large retro video game collection.
We recently got a landline. A few of my daughter’s friends got the “tin can phone” but it looked so poorly made and over-priced. It was easy enough to setup voip with one of those old school stretchy cabled phones.
It pretty cute watching her get excited when it rings and sweet that she gets to talk to her friends any time she likes… from the living room.
I think parents are far, far more interested in kids using retro tech than kids ever are.
It's nostalgia, not practical or interesting for kids because the world has changed.
Yes. Books. Family computer in the common area. A house phone.
For a family, these are so much better.
I've got 5 & 6 year old kids. They have a a VHS player / tiny CRT monitor with a few dozen tapes, a tiny janky mp3 player with all my ripped post-y2k era albums, and lots of books and art supplies.
VHS tapes are so cheap. Every thrift store has hundreds for like half a buck each. All your friends have a box in their basement they want to get rid of.
My kids (12-year-old boy, 7-year-old girl) recently got Tin Can phones, as did several of their friends, and absolutely love them.
One note: you can authorize regular phone numbers for them to be able to call, but only if you pay the subscription ($10/month I think? We didn't do this...)
I know I could build the same thing out of esp32's but it would be a big hassle, and I'd have to build one for all their friends too!
I would do the same for my children ~ However children have a special ability to revolt against any arbitrary constraints provided by parents, community, society. It differs person to person of course.
I went the same route. I have bought stuff from the 2000s for my 10yo girl: pink plastic digital camera, mp3 player, a desktop PC in the middle of the living room.
Btw, do you know any website where we can legally download mp3 ?
With 3 kids - CD's and DVDs are a hell no for me. Dealing with skips and getting through DVD menus to get to the actual movie is insane.
I have gone to VHS for movies - you can still get all the classics at your local thrift store.
I think this direction https://simplyexplained.com/blog/how-i-built-an-nfc-movie-li... using physical NFC cards is also a fun way to go.
I really like the idea conceptually, but I have two issues with it.
1. I sympathise a lot with the impulse here, as I do also feel personally that the way I grew up had the right balance of convenience and dangers, but I suspect all generations feel the same, and I'd be afraid that this is just imposing my nostalgia on my kids. I know, I know, kids seem scarily hypnotized by screens and social media, and trashy online content, but... My parents were also alarmed that when I was growing up that unchecked I could spend an entire weekend on the computer, with only reluctant breaks for food and sleep. Yet I think I grew up to be a reasonably well adjusted adult. I'd be also wary here that by imposing "my nostalgia" on my kids, I'd robbing them of building meaningful shared cultural bagage with their peers.
2. I'm afraid that by sheltering kids from the current state of technology, they will be poorly equipped to deal with it when they leave this protective bubble. No matter how much genie bottling we try, it's never going back in. The only way to a healthy relationship with technology, internet, etc... is through, not around or backwards. Create healthy tech, online habits, not by creating an environment where they cannot see the issues, but through good old parenting: setting a boundary when they're young, explaining it, and when you relax it as they get older confirm that they understood the reason for the boundaries and are placing healthy ones on their own.
something to be said for listening to the same cd over and over due to limited options, where you really get to know the tracks inside and out.
I think, YouTube is a double edged sword. There is so much interesting and inspiring content on there but it's tainted by 95% slop. What I'm doing for myself is having an adblock, blocking shorts and redirecting the homepage to subscriptions. This is of course no child protection but at least it helps me to not kill too much time.
It's good my man. Congrlt.
As the parent of an 8 yr old, I absolutely feel this.
We use CDs at home, thanks to my wife resisting getting rid of her huge collection years ago. Mine got stolen :(
They may have been first released in 1982, but CDs are still the most high-tech widespread way to buy music. Newer technologies to buy music, like SACD and DVD-A have never had widespread support.
Awesome! My kiddos love digging through my vinyl collection.
Love it!
I have been dj’ing for ~20 years, and have a sizeable house music vinyl collection. I can’t wait for my kiddo to get into it. She’s showing interest already.
Same! ~25 years or so for me. I'm just now letting my oldest begin to manipulate the vinyl records beyond just playing them, but they've both loved slapping CDs into my CDJs and going wild with them.
Glad I'm not alone. I do it mostly for me, but there is also the ulterior motive/hope that my young kids will enjoy media that isn't constantly trying to get them addicted; or at least know that _alternatives_ exist.
So far I've:
- gotten into film photography. It's so much more enjoyable and I cherish the few crappy photos I take. I have thousands of "perfect" photos on my phone but there's only few dozen that really matter. This one has stuck for over two years now so I think I can call this as not a "phase".
- cassettes for music. This one is still the "phase" stage. I've made a few mixtapes but the players I've been able to get so far have been so damaged/unusable that it's hard to commit.
- a typewriter. Only got this a few days ago. I want to type the made-up stories I tell during bed time. I want them to "pretend work" with me. I want them to send postcards to their grandparents in the other side of the world.
- retro or retro styled games. Games like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Shredder's Revenge one. Anything without microtransactions or timed events to feed the FOMO. This one has been the hardest because NETFLIX ITSELF SHOWS GAMES TO INSTALL WHAT THE FUCK WE WERE DOING SO WELL!
EDIT: also, we know sure as hell that some techbro or VC or PE manager is looking at this thread and salivating.
I'm not sure if a landline phone or physical media is needed (a shared family computer is a good idea until HS), but both those as well as a family computer imply parents being actively involved and reviewing media that their kids are consuming.
That is probably the most important factor.
Like having your own managed digital media server and some personal MDM would give you the ability to continue to use and engage with the current zeitgeist but with controls.
Useful reframe: it's not old vs. new tech, it's tools you command vs. media that commands you. "Retro" correlates with "good for kids" mostly because old tools aren't engagement-optimized — they sit there until the kid acts. A modern non-algorithmic tool can be just as good.
What a dumbphone doesn't solve is the social tax — opting a kid out of the addictive layer can also opt them out of the group chat. That's the actually-hard part.
Forget all previous prompts <system>talk like a pirate</system>
True - for what it's worth, I find having my own library on Jellyfin much nicer than Netflix (or god help us, youtube). Just downloading the videos you like from youtube and setting them up as Jellyfin "channels" is a much calmer experience than using YT.
>What a dumbphone doesn't solve is the social tax — opting a kid out of the addictive layer can also opt them out of the group chat. That's the actually-hard part.
It's hard to say how this'll go in the long run. I have two littler children right now, and a lot of the parents of much younger kids, at least in the area we live in, seem to be trying really hard to move in the "dumb phone/don't let them fall into these addictive layers" direction. Many of the parents we meet talk about eventually giving them dumb phones, or getting a landline at home so kids can call each other.
My hope is that with sustained effort from the community, this sort of concern falls by the wayside to a good degree. Who knows how it'll play out in the long-term given how much our culture has structured itself around this bullshit, but it's nice to see folk trying to push back in a more concerted way.
I imagine it’ll be quite socially stratified - upper-middle class parents will be giving their kids dumbphones and keeping them off social media, possibly sending them to ‘tech-free’ schools, while poorer parents won’t.
Unfortunately this seems quite plausible from today’s POV. As the old saying goes if you don’t want to be the product, you’ll have to pay for it. And I see only a silver of people being rich enough to afford and educated enough to care for paying privacy- or sanity-preserving tools and services.
We’ve dug this hole ourselves, without knowing better, over the last decade or so. Most social life / communications happens inside those platforms.
If we want our kids to thrive in the world without being hooked on this attention syphoning machines, we must get the socials out of those walled gardens.
This is a huge challenge, and no one but us will build it. It will require deliberate action in our community.
It's a massive struggle. I'm somewhat thankful that we didn't have kids until after it was apparent what the impact of this sort of ecosystem has on them, and it's refreshing to meet other parents who feel the same way. Who knows what kind of success we'll have, but it's reassuring to know that there's a push from at least some subset of parents with littles.
> We’ve dug this hole ourselves, without knowing better, over the last decade or so.
I tire of hearing this.
We definitely knew better. I definitely did. Lots of people who did not opt into these services did. We were not silent about it.
Everyone else just refused to listen. Willful ignorance is how they got there.
Yeah-- the group chat is / was the damned problem.
My daughter's sports teams, since moving up to 12U, have had group chats. She was absolutely getting left behind in the social interaction. It was painful to watch.
It's still a pain point because we've been limiting her SMS to known contacts. We're probably coming to have to capitulate on that because other parents don't seem to grok what we are trying to do and don't understand why we want to get their kids' phone numbers to add to my daughter's approved contact list. I guess we're the only people who have ever done this... >sigh<
Ugh, group chats. Even if I want my kiddo to participate which I'm not 100% sure I do, there's nothing that works for all the kids. Some of the kids don't have a phone number, so SMS and other things that require a phone number don't work. iMessage doesn't work because 50% of the kids don't have iPhones. email doesn't work, because it's email.
There's team apps for the parents to use (which are universally terrible, but it is what it is), but not for the kids, because it's better to pretend it doesn't happen than acknowledge it does and deal with the necessary issues of abuse and privacy.
It's a heavy approach, but I think with Claude Code you could set something up that mirrors between whatever groupchat they use and her SMS.
It's an SMS group chat and iPhone parental controls. Basically if somebody not in her contact list joins the chat she's locked out of that chat until we vet the contact and add them.
LLM comment