Tin Can Is a Dumb Phone for Kids. Can Someone Teach Them How to Use It?

In late December, the 21st to be exact, my friends Amos and Clara called me 17 times. On December 22 it was eight times. The calls were short—sometimes only 30 to 45 seconds, and they usually arrived when I was doing something important: working, grocery shopping, napping. “Hi Anna,” one or both of them would say. “Hi!” I’d respond. Sometimes I worried that I sounded too eager, or like I was just sitting around waiting for their call. Sometimes I felt a little pathetic.

If anyone else called me that often I’d block their number. But Amos is 6 years old, and Clara is 9, and what happened is that on December 20, for Hanukkah, the siblings got the gift of a newly released, extremely old-school kids’ phone. And for the next week or so, the two of them couldn’t stop calling. And I, for one ...