Find the best smartwatch for your child
ONCE upon a time, only cartoon detectives could make phone calls from their wrists. Now kids as young as five years old are summoning parents from their smartwatches, sending emojis, playing games, and broadcasting their location to family.
Smartwatch technology is also being designed with more safeguards, but experts say parents should carefully consider their options – and ignore cheaper, riskier models – before choosing technology for their kids.
Cyber safety educator Leonie Smith says smartwatches are popular in primary school classrooms.
“Before schools started to shut down, I saw a lot of smartwatches in schools,” she says. “Some children even have Apple Watches, which could be hand-me-downs, but there are others designed just for kids.”
Ms Smith says the devices are commonly used to give parents another way to communicate with their kids, letting them send mum or dad a text when they’ve reached public transport, for example.
But she says children use smartwatches very differently to their parents, using full-sized apps on their small screens and installing games. Models designed for children include the Australian made Spacetalk Kids, which features a “school mode” to limit classroom distractions, the Movetime Family Watch from TCL that comes with a 4G connection and camera, and the more basic VTech Kidizoom watch with games.
Australians snapped up 1.2 million smart devices for their wrists in the last half of 2019, according to Telsyte, and managing director Foad Fadaghi says some made it to the youngest members of households.
Major manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have yet to tap into the kids’ market, he says, as they still require their smartwatches to connect to a phone, making it “a very expensive endeavour for parents”.
But Ms Smith says there are childfriendly smartwatches with built-in connections, models that limit who kids can contact, and that offer restrictions on when they can use the technology. She recommends parents look past cheap, knock-offs that look like they come from big-name phone brands but don’t work as promised.
“Some have location features that don’t work well, and others won’t keep your data safe,” she says.
Charity founder and mother-of-three Kathrine
Peereboom says she bought two smartwatches for her seven-year-old son Oliver who is on the autistic spectrum. An Apple
Watch has alarms the family uses to remind him of tasks, she says, while his VTech
Kidizoom watch offers games to help him stay calm in overwhelming environments.
“The VTech watch is really ageappropriate for Oliver. He’s got memory and educational games he can play, he can take photographs or little videos of himself, and he can look at photos of the family,” she says. “And it means we don’t have to carry around a clunky iPad.”
But Ms Peereboom says the right smartwatch will be different for each child. “You could buy a $200 or a $1500 device but you have to understand what you want to achieve with it.”