Retro-Tech Parenting

EmiliaStar

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.

dlev_pika

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 :(

jumpkick

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."

fantasizr

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.

sidravi1

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.

TimTheTinker

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.

themanmaran

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.

juris

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.

zellyn

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!

ThreatPortSec

It's good my man. Congrlt.

scrappyjoe

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.

nostrademons

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.

myky22

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.

beowulfey

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.

nkg

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 ?

kardianos

Yes. Books. Family computer in the common area. A house phone. For a family, these are so much better.

jephs

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.

alephnerd

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.

japhyr

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.

guizzy

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.