Retro-Tech Parenting

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.

I guess this is off topic, but my best advice to parents that worry about their kids screen time: Restrict kids screen time hard. My kids are only allowed to watch a movie in the weekend, plus a couple of episodes of a show they enjoy. No ipads, no phones. Fill your home with books and comic magazines, you can buy used ones online for very little money. My kids are 6, 4, and 4 years old. I understand that restricting kids screen time gets harder the older they get. At the same time, they are able to go out to play when they get a bit older.

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.

There's an old saying in biology: "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" [1], which is how the developing embryo of an animal (the ontogeny), goes through stages resembling the evolution of the animal (phylogeny).

I sometimes think that would also be a great way to educate kids when it comes to technology. Start them with simple old tech (sticks, stones, string, camp fires) and gradually add new tech over time, so that by the time they are adults they have a basic knowledge and familiarity with a wide range of technology, not just the current stuff they are surrounded by.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory

I think this is a misguided approach. Obviously children should not be let loose in this current digital world, but the restraints should be a very conservative blacklist, not a whitelist.

For context I was born in 2005, so obviously much later than most people whose childhoods were enriched by technology, but all the same mine was. That is how I know succumbing to the Bad Side of the Internet is not inevitable. As a kid I would spend hours every day on forums, playing games, watching videos, programming, discovering new tech, fiddling with programs, OSs, emulators, hardware, you name it. The most amazing thing about the Internet to me was the infinite possibilities, how any topic I could choose would have endless resources, learning material, and discussions surrounding it. Whenever I got passionate about something, be it programming or space or Android or a band, the Internet was there for me to share that passion with, to learn, grow, explore, embrace, understand!

There still is, in 2026, a Good Side of the Internet (we are currently on it), along the Bad Side. What this post proposes is limiting access to the discovery mechanisms that would allow you to find the Good Side in the first place. By limiting your childrens' access to technology to only things you know are good, you are preventing them from exploring and finding their own interests and passions.

I remember my dad trying to make me fall in love with The Beatles. He loved The Beatles. I sat there quietly on the sofa while he got to relive his adolescence. The experience felt less like discovering something together and more like being a prop in someone else’s nostalgia.

I can’t help getting the same feeling from this blog post. “Look at this amazing CD player!” Cool, Dad. I’m genuinely happy for you. Meanwhile, Katie just got an iPhone 17 in her Easter egg. I'm a dad myself, and I dread the moment my daughters find out about TikTok...

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.

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.

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'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.

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."

My kids are still too young but I constantly worry about how the world will look like in 8-10 years. On a recent trip to Europe we had to rush inside a bar during a storm. The place was packed and the only table available was next to a large party of loud teenagers on some sort of celebration, maybe a birthday. We had no choice but to sit next to them. After a while, probably over an hour, my wife asks me if I have noticed the kids. Obviously I have. But she insisted, “do you see”?. I have no idea what she’s talking about. So I watch them interact for a bit and I get it. Not one single kid had a phone on them. They are all eating, drinking, talking and laughing like if it’s the 90s. That was pretty amazing to see and gave me lots of hope.

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.

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.

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?

Re VoIP phones: don't most home routers come with a phone port that you can just plug a regular old phone handset into? My ISP provides a home phone number with the router and it just works as it aways has. I guess technically it's VoIP now but originally i think they shared the audio line with a splitter?

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.

> I’m starting to fall in love with CDs again.

I visited a long-time friend recently and was surprised that they were using modern LP player for music. But the surprise itself actually turned into curiosity. I got the urge to buy one too, if only to go back to the more-dedicated experience of choosing a disk from a catalog and playing it with explicit intention.

Maybe LPs are too much, but trying physical CDs again sounds like a cool idea. Especially because they can easily be rewritten and maybe I could get kids to create their own "mix tapes".

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.

This was a fun read, as I am planning things for my daughter I love to see other people's ideas. I am actually thinking of using one of my old XP desktops and game tote with offline when she gets older for similar reasons. Watching my nephew with a tablet, I see many bad habits. One thing I appreciate with older tech is the lack of instant gratification so you must learn patience and to think what you really want.

For phone, we might use a Bluetooth to home phone adapter I had got my uncle in the past, not sure yet how things will look in a few years. Then we can have a shared family phone when home was my thought.

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...

Yes. Books. Family computer in the common area. A house phone.

For a family, these are so much better.

> I bought a mini CD boom box for the house. My oldest loves bringing it around to different rooms, plugging it in, and putting in a CD. I bought her the K-Pop Demon Hunters CD for her birthday. The local public library has CDs! CDs are awesome.

Yoto players pretty neatly reproduce the old experience of putting something physical into a player for my toddler. He’ll probably graduate to a CD player when he’s older but right now he can pick from a set of cards and hear music or a story.

Interesting timing.

I am looking to set up a raspi with Debian and running Gizmos and Gadgets, and some other old educational games.

Probably going to use my Callisto 2 case in the short term.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4846997

Considering putting a small launcher together with some images of different games in doxbox for him to play. Maybe some old mac ones too.

When my oldest two kids were tweens, it seemed like the average age of first-cell-phone was about 10 in their social circles.

I didn't want to do that, but not being able to text also amounted to social exclusion, so I got them each a jmp.chat line and they could send and receive texts from the family computer.

Haven't had to do it for my youngest kid yet as the age that her friends are getting cell phones is much older (she's in 7th and less than half of her friends have a phone on them at all times -- though many have a phone to take when they e.g. go on bike rides).

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 have been dying for a landline and making a “booth” with a corded phone in a weird nook of our tiny house. Still have not pulled the trigger because I keep going down a rabbit hole of old payphones vs crazy expensive industrial phones. I am weird about this issue but it is entirely so the kids can be home alone and call us or 911. The thing is out absolutely amazing neighbor tends to fill this gap. She does not babysit but is willing to be “around” just in case. Community matters so much.

Also super happy with the switch ii on our only tv. We know what they are doing and can play with them.

IMHO the intent is good but amalgamating problems causing confusion and strange solutions.

What actually does make "old" tech good?

I'd argue it's agency. It can be the physicality of it too but if so then one has to pinpoint actually what it is, e.g is the presence of CD covers in the living room as reminder that you do have a collection? If so would a poster suffice?

I think kids can absolutely use contemporary tech but it has to be done responsibly.

A smartphone or a laptop is not the problem. The problems are :

- advertisements prompting for "more"

- friction-less unlimited availability

- unmetered unplanned usage

- content that requires no effort, no actual thinking, to consume

but holding the physical medium or have a "retro" look is superficial. It doesn't actually matter.

You can absolutely give a smartphone to a very young kid, say a 5 years old. What you can not do though is hand them that smartphone with installed an app that will provide limitless uncurated videos or games. Give them a phone with a 2hrs long documentary on animals or with challenging pedagogical games and you will see that they enjoy it, for a bit, then have to move on. It's NOT the device, it's the content and the software that makes that content available. I really get tired of "screen" time. No kid get hooked on hard to complete digital homework. They get hooked on apps designed and providing content itself made to be addictive.

It's really not about the shape or age of the device.

PS: I shared some resources at https://forum.techreclaimers.club/d/36-reclaming-for-kids/2 to provide actual alternatives.

I certainly agree here, tech in the wrong hands is danger waiting to be unleashed. As a parent guiding what your child have access to is crucial to their wellbeing.

I don't think kids need 1990s technology. I think they need technology that serves them rather than technology that wants something from 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.

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.

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.

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

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'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.

The VoIP landline seems a way better solution than the proprietary Tin Can phone: while it looks nice, it apparently needs a subscription to call regular numbers... and AFAIK you can't call it from a normal phone (please correct me if I'm wrong!)

I am looking for recommendations for a boombox that is kid friendly and can play CDs. Something not too big but also a bit more resistant. If it can be colorful that is a plus!

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 ?

Time for more anecdotes from people who think they're geniuses, about how socially isolating your children is actually good for them.

Just going to be more of the same shit many of us dealt with in our childhoods, having productive pursuits mocked because the adults think they're the smartest people in the world.

This was an excellent read. I admire the lengths to which the author has gone to enable this experience and then to document and share it. As a new parent myself, Ive been thinking about this. While I don’t have the same affinity to physical media (IMO its plastic waste), I do want to guard the child from the infinite online slop machine; but I also don’t want them to not use technology that may be useful. My approach is to treat them as a human that can make choices based on tradeoffs… critical to this is perhaps some kind of guided experience with tech so that they are aware of it/dont get bedazzled by something they see their friends/clasmates doing. Im not sure what that will look like but I appreciate other parents are thinking along similar lines.

I do think that what exists now by default is just not acceptable… I and my spouse are privileged to understand how tech works, what it can do to someones mind etc. but the vast majority of people probably don’t… and as such a significant % of children are quite likely having a terrible experience…

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.

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 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.

It's good my man. Congrlt.

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.

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 :(

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.

I'm a technologist. In my dayjob I implement digital versions of analog solutions. In my work I get frustrated by the tech. In my work I get frustrated that our own software is difficult to use and buggy. In my freetime I read about how technologists elsewhere are successful at making society uniformly worse. I also read about how other technologists buy new iPhones and throttle them so they won't doomscroll. Then I worry about the kids who just want to play cursed mobile games and watch absolute slop junk AI filth. Then they rage when they get them yanked. Then I think to myself. I'm a technologist. But technology? That is for the peons without self-control or throttled iPhone 17.

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.

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.

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