This has worked really well for us. My kids are 11 and 9 and we started with Gizmo watches a couple of years ago, and got them Apple Watches this year (one hand-me-down, one SE). Their friends are starting to get phones, and we're a hard no on phones for kids, but this way they can keep in touch with us and their friends without a phone.
The effect on independence has been interesting. They seem to feel more reassured about venturing farther afield, so they've been riding bikes to shops and restaurants and their friends' houses much more frequently than they did before. (Of course, before they were also younger and there was more covid, but their calls to check in tell me that they like being able to ask a question or keep us up to date on their plans.)
As for durability, I got some chunky hard cases for the watches and there have been no issues. You can also get the "solo loop" band, so they don't have to deal with clasps, and the watches never fall off.
On Amazon, if you search for "Misxi 2 Pack" you'll see the various size/color options. I didn't do much comparison shopping, but they're easy to put on, haven't fallen off, and haven't broken.
Interesting. I've often considered an Apple Watch for my 9 year old, who struggles with (and benefits from) ADHD and thus would benefit from specific features such as the reminders (especially location-specific), alarms, and overall organization capabilities. But I'm hesitant to open that box just yet...
He isn't pining for a smart phone yet, nor do his friends seem to generally own them, so that wouldn't be the motivation but I can understand how it would be a good intermediate step. Gradually increasing access to these technologies and educating them along the way makes sense to me, rather than passing the child the firehose when they turn a certain magical age.
> Family Setup brings a new mode called Schooltime, which will help ensure kids stay focused and attentive while learning at home or in the classroom. During Schooltime, a distinctive yellow circle is displayed on the watch face for teachers and parents to easily recognize, signifying that access to apps is restricted and Do Not Disturb is turned on.
and
> With Family Setup, family members without iPhone can take advantage of the many features and apps on Apple Watch, from making and receiving phone and FaceTime audio calls, to sending and receiving messages and emails, and even connecting with other Apple Watch wearers over Walkie-Talkie. The new Memoji app on Apple Watch allows users to customize a Memoji that can be shared while messaging friends or displayed as a watch face. Parents have the ability to approve all contacts, so kids can safely use the communication features of Apple Watch.
and
> A family member’s location can be shared with their guardian through the Find People app on Apple Watch, and location notifications are more customizable, allowing the guardian to receive an update on their family member’s location for one occasion, or on a recurring or time-based schedule.
I also have a 9 year old w/ ADHD and tried this with the reminders and he just turns them off lol.
It's been great for other things though. Facilitating social connections w/ friends (the cellular watch gets its own number) and the walkie talkie feature is awesome for when he needs to quickly check in for an opinion or if I need for him to come home and don't want to stand on my back porch and yell generally into the neighborhood like a maniac. There even was a mildly scary time this summer where his summer camp called us and said they wanted to confirm we got him early (we hadn't). We were able to shoot them a screenshot of his location data and politely ask them to get it together and they found him swinging on a tire swing at the edge of the camp.
As someone who also has ADHD, reminders without actual motivation is just a function to create shame and anxiety. Every reminder sheet I had in school just felt like more work I couldn't complete.
Only things he has asked for, this is not driven by a need for academic improvement or anything, but a chance to learn tools to improve a known deficit with ADHD that can negatively impact his ability to maintain social connections.
I have replaced my iphone with an Apple watch and I am a professional in my thirties. If i carry a phone i check it constantly. The watch is great for me, and now I hate having to carry a phone (i.e. if i need a certain app, camera, travel or something) and I'd recommend it to most people.
The worst part is when i get a call, i have to decline it, put on my airpods, open the podcast app to make sure my watch is connected to my airpods, and then call back. If I pick up the call immediately i either have to ask them to wait while i put on airpods and sometimes the call is stuck on watch speakers (which is less than ideal, but can be ok) because blue tooth suck. this might sound nightmarish, and it sorta is, but, that is how far I'm willing to go to avoid the internet when I'm out and about.
I own an iPhone SE, it just sits at home in the charger, forwarding calls to my watch. My watches battery goes out late afternoon, where i get home and can charge it. I have replaced my computer with an iPad pro where i answer all my messages.
I have thought about trying to do this, but the part about the battery dying in the late afternoon sounds pretty terrible. If the battery lasted 75-100% longer, I might give it a try.
I also don't love the idea of yet another monthly fee.
A 5-year-old is a bit young, but I wouldn’t be opposed to the idea.
You really can’t do much with just the watch. It gives a way for the patent to track them, and a way to communicate in both emergency and non-emergency situations.
They’re rather expensive and fragile for that purpose, but they’re often on sale through cellular providers as part of a bundle. That’s how my 14-year-old got hers. It’s the $300 version, and was free after rebate when I bought mine, as long as I pay the $5/month for the service. That’s cheaper than a basic GPS tracker, which is what she was asking for. I’m not totally comfortable with her being tracked, but it was her idea; I made sure she knew how to turn it off and made sure we were clear that she wouldn’t be in trouble or even under suspicion if she did. She usually keeps the GPS function off unless she’s at an event or something. That feels like a good compromise.
If nothing else, its high relative value could help teach a younger child responsibility. That’s very dependent on the child, though.
Some of my friends have given their kids FitBits for similar reasons (watch + step tracking + it could be integrated with a phone if the kid has one).
But I don't get the idea of an Apple Watch... I'm a small adult and even with the smallest straps standard Apple Watches are WAY too big for my wrists. How big are these kids?!?
Also... a full Apple Watch seems like an expensive option for kids who might be playing outside. My husband is an athlete and he's actually scratched his watch because it got dropped from waist height while he was getting changed. It's a small scratch, but still... he takes decent care of things, wouldn't a five year old wreck it?
I like the idea of kids having access to tech but an Apple Watch seems like overkill.
We gave one to our 10 year old and earlier to our son when he was 12. It’s great for giving them the freedom to go to friends houses or do an activity for school, but also to find them if they’re running late or they weren’t where they were supposed to be. It’s helped end the stupidity of the play date and let the kids be kids.
I have begrudgingly gotten our kids apple watches for exactly reasons outlined
I am in some latent way, however, concerned with the idea of them wearing a cellular radio directly on their skin all day - I have for the most part avoided any of the EMF/4G/5G handwaving but would love an informed opinion from HN if there is any reason for concern / need to moderate or otherwise?
Don't worry. Theory and experimental evidence both suggest there's no issue with those frequency bands. Those wavelengths can only cause heating, and that's at many orders of magnitude higher power than something used in a watch.
at 2.4 GHz, the wavelength is ~12.5 cm, which isn't going to do anything to anything protein-scale in your body.
Clinical evidence hasn't shown any association between negative health effects and EMF in that spectrum.
The preponderance of conspiracy theory around 5G says more about psychology than physiology.
Does this not jeopardize giving kids their autonomy? Feels like the parents saying yes to this may also be in the life360 or obsessively tracking their kids camp.
Great for peace of mind, not great for building independence in my opinion.
It increases the autonomy. They get to go out and make decisions. And if I need to track them down because they are late for dinner it’s easy. We don’t use it for any draconian purposes.
There's a bunch of comments like this and I don't understand.
The ability to track your kids at any time != "we're constantly tracking our kids". If this is a real concern for you, I think the real problem isn't the technology -- it's you.
> If this is a real concern for you, I think the real problem isn't the technology -- it's you.
Maybe you're right. I think always-connected wearable technology can hurt autonomy.
On one extreme, a strict parent could use this to obsessively track their kid, notify them when they should be home, and use their logged history for whatever reason. Maybe a kid dreads wearing the thing because of their parents.
On another extreme, a lax parent could not give a damn about their kid and just wants the peace of mind that they could if they wanted. Maybe a kid doesn't mind wearing it.
The introduction of wearable technology here adds similar challenges that smartphones do:
Do kids behave differently if they know they can be A) accessible at anytime B) located at anytime C) history logged at all times?
Does that cause them to make different decisions than they would otherwise with no technology? That is what I mean by losing autonomy at the cost of parental/kid peace of mind.
Trust between your kids is most important, but technology is a factor here too.
As a parent of a 15 month old I can absolutely see myself giving them a smart watch instead of a smart phone for keeping in touch when they start school, but I don’t think it’ll be an Apple Watch. I’d want something cheaper and less capable, and preferably made for kids.
Do you mean generally once they’re school aged or while at school? I can’t see a reason a child at school would need to keep in touch with parents while at school. I don’t think I had to call home ever in 14 years of schooling.
Email was 30 years old at that point and was relatively widely used in schools and the workplace so I disagree. Every kid I knew had a Hotmail account and spent hours on MSN Messenger every day.
But my point is more that for a long long time kids have been able to learn independence from family daily at school, in a very safe environment. There’s a lot to lose by availing them of the crutch of constant communication with and tracking by their family.
This is a great idea, because I'll be able to snag a free Apple watch ;)
I regularly have phone watches left at our house by my children's friends and if you walk through the school after hours you'll occasionally find one lying on the floor (in amongst all the discarded clothes). They're too big for active children to want to keep on all day.
I can see why this would benefit some people, if their children have long solo commutes, and I'd trust Apple's privacy features more than most other phone watch manufacturers. But in general I'm more in favour of free-range children and not being able to track where my 9 year old is or have them message me every 10 minutes.
I can imagine the sales-pitch when Apple gets on this for real. Keep your 5-year-old healthy, safe, productive, and up-to-stuff all day long! (Starts at $599)
The concept of tracking is interesting, when my 7yo daughter went on her last school trip we stuck an AirTag in her bag so that we could see if the bus back (about 2.5 hours) was going to be on time. It was super useful and we would do it again, but we wouldn't use one all the time.
AirTag would seem like better idea, though quite useless for people outside US even if I would consider it.
At least here in Europe you can't see that young kids with any watch, it's extremely rare to see kid with those huge bulky watch with GPS even I wouldn't put on my hand (anything thicker than 10mm is crazy), they look literally like they are in home prison.
First piece of electronics my kids will be wearing will be most likely Casio F91W, they already have cheap Chinese clones.
I have a son who is cognitively impaired. I like the idea of being able to track him via GPS. I think this is an inappropriate invasion of a typical child’s life
For parents who are opposed to the technology in the hands of children, any senior phone will do, with a broken keyboard, and the speed dial(s) set to the parent phone(s) - this of course, depends on the age of the child. I agree that a persistent communication channel is a helpful tool to develop independence.
This was honestly the opinion I had for a long time - I held out because the idea of yet another device that need charged annoyed me. Then I started running again and decided to give the apple watch a go, and the charging is surprisingly a non-issue. I take it off before I go to bed and put it on the little charger on my nightstand, and tbh I sometimes see my phone light up with a notification saying that it's fully charged before I've made it to sleep.
There are a few things I'd definitely like to change or tweak[0] but overall I'm surprised how it's become a normal part of my life.
[0] here are the top-of-the head things
- message notifications seem to behave like the device has extremely low resources, so messages (FB messenger) longer than something like 140 chars are truncated and I have to read them on my phone
- when you click a notification that someone sent a picture (through, say, FB messenger) it'll show a full screen image of the person who sent the picture ... not of the actual picture
- syncing up with a friend over walkie talkie or fitness is extremely flakey. I connected with 2 friends for the fitness, and never managed to get the walkie talkie working no matter how much troubleshooting I did
- if i'm listening to music from my watch on my airpods (another bit of kit i hated the idea of but have grown to tolerate) on a run while leaving my phone at home, the music will suddenly cut out from the watch when I return and get in range of my iphone
- as a dev I'd like to fiddle more with it and create watch faces, but as it stands you can only create complications for existing faces
- I have no idea how Apple calculate their VO2 max estimation. It seems utterly random, I've seen mine shoot up during periods when I've been inactive, and I've seen triathlete friends report that they're "below-average" fitness. I feel like I could hand my watch over to an Olympic athlete for a competition and it’d still report mine as 49.6 afterwards
Back in the 90's, when cellphones started to flood Tokyo, my neighbors bought one for their 6 year old son. The Japanese cellphone for kids only had three buttons - call mother, father or grandmother.
I don't have a subscription, so I haven't read any arguments in favor. But I can tell you pretty definitively that this parent (of a 5 year-old, no less) is saying "No".
The effect on independence has been interesting. They seem to feel more reassured about venturing farther afield, so they've been riding bikes to shops and restaurants and their friends' houses much more frequently than they did before. (Of course, before they were also younger and there was more covid, but their calls to check in tell me that they like being able to ask a question or keep us up to date on their plans.)
As for durability, I got some chunky hard cases for the watches and there have been no issues. You can also get the "solo loop" band, so they don't have to deal with clasps, and the watches never fall off.