My Son’s Favorite Screen-Free Activity Is a Cassette Tape
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Most afternoons around 4 o’clock, my 7-year old son disappears into his room and I hear a sound I haven’t heard in 30 years: the clink of a cassette door closing, the hiss of a tape rewinding, and then the crackly, fuzzy, warbly sound of a British man’s voice introducing the title of a story.
Yes, these are audio cassettes, and they have quietly changed what independent play looks like in our house. Like most millennials, I spent my early childhood in a time before Audible, before podcasts, even before MP3s. I had a vast library of children’s tapes, and some of my most comforting memories are of lying on my bed on 110th Street, nodding off to Richard Scarry’s Bedtime Stories.
My kids have full bookshelves and we read together every night before bed. But that is different from what I had with my tapes. Listening to them was something I did on my own without a grown-up in the room. It symbolized independence, privacy, and self-sufficiency, and I wanted him to have that too.
Friends suggested the Yoto, but something about it wasn’t for me. It’s expensive. A full-size player costs $150, and story cards have to be bought individually for around $13 each. And the Yoto is still another smart device, more like a terminal than a toy, and it comes along with (predictably) an optional subscription.
It occurred to me that what I wanted for him actually existed, it just had to be bought secondhand. So I set off on an eBay quest. I thought of all the books I’d loved as a kid and began filling a virtual cart with classics, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Harriet the Spy to Matilda. One by one they arrived in our mailbox, some in chunky plastic clamshells, others in flimsy cardboard sleeves, the rest in clear plastic cases with at least one broken hinge.
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He was hooked. Like Max in Where the Wild Things Are whose bedroom sprouts up a forest, my son found his room turning into a wardrobe to Narnia, a boat ride on Willy Wonka’s chocolate river, a trip to Neverland. And like Max, when the adventure ended, it was time for dinner.
What surprised me was how obsessed he became with the mechanical aspects of the cassettes. It took him a minute to learn which button did what, but I could tell immediately that he loved the feeling of popping open the cassette player and flipping the tape over when one side ended. If a part was too scary, he fast-forwarded it. If he missed something, he would rewind and listen again. I watched as he developed greater fine motor control, patience with small mechanical tasks, and a sense of order, reading labels and counting to make sure the right tapes were in the right boxes in the right order.
It took us a few tries to find the right cassette player. Cheap portable models broke easily and chewed through batteries. A boom box I liked for its 1990s design arrived cute but nonfunctional. Then we found the QFX Retro-38BT, a solar-powered, rechargeable shoe-box tape recorder. It’s a tank and has survived being dropped, stepped on, and carried around the house by its handle. It’s a radio in case he ever wants to listen to a game on WFAN, and it also records, which means one day he can make mixtapes of his own.
There is some science behind why tapes might be good for kids. In a 1988 UCLA cognitive study, researchers found that children who heard a story on audiotape invented more original endings than kids who watched the same story as a cartoon, proving a theory that audio asks kids to put in more “high mental effort” imagining the story visually in their mind.
Like anything with kids, tapes can go from a habit to an obsession, so we try to keep it to an hour a day. After that hour, he comes out of his room, blinking, back from wherever he’s been, and asks what’s for dinner.
Must-Haves for Every Kid’s Cassette Tape Library (According to Me)
Pro tip: The narrators are just as important as the stories! For example, you can listen to Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Kathleen Turner, and Matthew Broderick read D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.
The Roald Dahl Collection, read by the author
Charlotte’s Web, read by E.B. White
Peter Pan, read by Wendy Craig
Ramona the Pest, read by Stockard Channing
The Chronicles of Narnia (Complete Set), read by Ian Richardson
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, read by full cast
Lot of all first five Harry Potter books
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