Just a few weeks ago, my two-year-old, who is absolutely obsessed with mermaids, heard the most iconic one of all, Ariel, for the first time, through her Toniebox. She looked at the red-haired Disney princess figurine sitting pierside atop a splash of water and grinned. Then, she sat her on a squishy little gray piece of tech and heard the most famous song about the mermaid, “Part Of Your World.” She has actually heard it more than once in her life. First, just like with “Elsa and Anna,” it was a delightful surprise—did you know they made a whole movie about her? We had maybe told her ten times over several months, and on our subsequent trip, we let her watch hours of television, so when the time came to watch “Frozen,” she was beyond excited. The exact same thing happened with “Moana,” Blue’s Clues, and even Elmo, who was the only character she totally shocked us by recognizing in the store since we barely watched Sesame Street. To her, it was all beloved toddlers’ characters, from the TV screen and the collection of Tonies she played on her box.
If you have—or happen to know—a toddler, you have probably heard of it, as well. The Toniebox is a German invention that had only hit the US market last September. It looks like a large squishy box of tissues, is, indeed, pillow-soft and cozy to the touch, and has two mismatched “ears” to make it look even more like a lovely animal. What it does is provide a playing surface for actual Tonies—tiny toys shaped like various characters that are then placed atop the kid’s player to enchant the listener with their songs, stories, or both. That is basically the whole concept. Toddlers get to hear all the songs from their favorite childhood shows, old and new, as well as any involving Tim and Astra, Katapult, and any other Canadian band on the market, without any of the pesky screens that have been bothering parents these days.
Christoph Frehsee is talking to me on the street from his home in Santa Cruz, California, and joining me on the Zoom call is his young son. “He has possibly the most incredible collection of tonies around in the world,” he says. The preschool was closed because of a COVID outbreak. Free, an entrepreneur who has worked in fashion and engineering, learned about Toniebox from his mother, who bought one to his older son. According to Frehsee, the fact that such a product comes from his home country is absolutely obvious. “We culturally love audio storytelling in Germany,” he explains. “We all have this memory…parents would have the memory of growing up listening to their favourite children’s books and characters on a tape recorder.”
He tells me that the product was launched in his home country in 2013, and he joined the company in early 2020 as President of Tonies North America and managed the launch of the device in the States. “I joined the company because I truly believe it is such a marvellous product that inspires imagination and actually facilitates child development in a way that screens just don’t,” he says. “So I’d say the optimist one in me was always like, Yeah, that’s a total home run…[but] I really certainly was surprised by the level of organic virality.”
The company was founded by two entrepreneurs-dads, Patric Fassbender and Marcus Stahl, and both Frehsee and his wife received the first Toniebox. Since it made its first product in Europe in 2016, the company has sold seven million tonieboxes around the world and 88 million in May 2024. “It must be all kids in Germany,” Freewith says, even the company’s founders.
Apart from some bureaucratic troubles, we have just started with our ambitions in the US,” he says. “Every second child should have a Toniebox, which should be their own companion.”
But this ambition is quite within the reach of the founders. In a little less than four years, the company has managed to sell more than 1.6 million Tonieboxes.
But the founders of the start-up have not simply profited from the children’s love for uniquely exciting audio stories. The Toniebox has been launched at the time when the parents’ anxiety about the amount of time they and their children spend staring at their screens has reached an all-time high. It seems to grow each passing year. This is a dilemma, the effects of which are inherent to our age, and the research has long confirmed that we get very few benefits from staring at too many screens and babies, either. The American Academy of Pediatrics holds that “very limited or no” screen exposure is right for children under 18 months, and that there should be no solo media use for children under two. After they reach the age of two, they can have up to an hour of AQ day, until they are five years old.
But there’s the recommendations of professionals, and then there’s the reality of American parenthood. In a country with no federally mandated paid leave and soaring childcare costs, screen time is a solution many parents use to fill in the gaps . Not to mention the temptation to use the tablet as a behavioral tool ; some critics even claim that we’re raising a generation of “iPad kids.” In my experience, screen time is one of the aspects of parenting that many of us raising young children worry about most. Check any parenting Facebook group or Reddit forum, and there will be scores of parents discussing their guilt and anxiety about using YouTube so they can finish a work project, or handing their toddler an iPad in the midst of a public tantrum. Meanwhile, the evidence is mounting that all this access to addictive technologies may be having some behavioral effects on the next generation. This week a paper by JAMA Pediatrics revealed: “child tablet use at age 3.5 and 5.5 years was associated with increased [sic] emotional problems at the latter age, including anxiety, depression, anger, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder .” So in short, tablets do make kids act out more.
In September 2020, when many iPads first turned into makeshift nannies, the fortuitous timing might have taken Tonies by the hand in the moment when the country was entering lockdown and they just entered the market. Such an advantage has also been quickly picked up and clarified by the company, which began to actively promote itself as a substitute for turning on the TV or the tablet. Furthermore, the company also highlights the 2023 study by Fundamentally Children as one of the best evidence of its benefits. The study says that 70% of the parents found that using a Toniebox allowed their kids to pay more attention and improve their reading comprehension and vocabulary. This ability to market the product as an entertainment option without a screen also explains, Frehsee says, why so many of its entertainment affiliates, such as Disney, Warner Bros, Marvel, Paramount, Hasbro, Dreamworks, and others, have become involved in the Toniebox project. “I think the rise of audio and the growing concerns about screens is something that they’re highly aware of as well,” he says. “If you depend on screens to broadcast your IP,” and you see another opportunity, they were actually, I felt, really excited about [it].
And Tonies hasn’t skipped a beat in securing rights to children’s programming and characters. There truly is a Tonie for almost everything; according to Frehsee, they’ve heard the entreaties for Bluey, the sole major character who’s not in their pantheon. However, since the company needs to secure two licenses for each Tonie — one for the figurine’s appearance, and one to load it with audio — not every Tonie features the original audio from the movie or show. It’s a common parental complaint you see on the internet, and Frehsee says they always seek out the originals when they can. If a plaything Tonie features a different woman singing the songs Jillian Holtzmann likes in the new Ghostbusters movie, it’s often due to a technicality; no license for an object like a Toniebox existed when the studio put out its music. “Disney gives us something like the same music, but for a different set of rights,” Frehsee said, when discussing the lack of Auliʻi Cravalho’s voice on the Moana Tonie. The intellectual-property negotiations are even more technical than one might assume, and the revenue the Tonies system brings in also has to be divided up between all the participating entities. The content is a mix of just-fun and flashy little-kid shows Paw Patrol, beloved children’s books Eric Carle’s repertoire, Llama Llama Red Pajama, each narrated by a different voice artist, and original productions Tonies can’t be beaten, “potty training Tonie,” and “healthy habits Tonie.” The most popular Tonie in the US is, however, representative of how dominant YouTube is for this generation of little kids. It’s Blippi, the huge YouTuber whose act parents either love or hate and who has a story the Times savored relating. The rest of the top 10 best-selling Tonies fall mostly under the Disney umbrella, if not all: Moana, Elsa from Frozen, Lightning McQueen from Cars, The Lion King, Encanto, PBS Kids’ Daniel Tiger, children’s musician Laurie Berkner, The Little Mermaid, and Mickey Mouse.
However, is listening to a tonie actually better than watching a cartoon on TV or an iPad? I asked Emily Cherkin, a former teacher and educator who now advises parents and schools on responsible digital parenting. She tells us that the questions we should be asking about screen time are not about devising strict rules but rather how to follow a few simple principles that can help us as parents make decisions in our everyday life. “My TL;DR- and actually, it is applicable for all kids but especially for young ones, later is better, less is more, and relationships and skills before screens,” she says.
Both Cherkin and the AAP recommend that parents should be mindful that children do not over consume any entertainment, whether it is delivered through a device or not, and instead spend most of the time doing other activities that support their development. “What kids need is time outside. They need time with tactile, three-dimensional objects,” according to Cherkin. At the same time, children need to have “choices within choices,” It means that if your toddler has to watch a TV show, there is a healthier way to do that,and that’s a Tonie!
