Is it time to get your child a smartwatch?
Summary
For parents reluctant to hand a smartphone to their young children, smartwatches are a good – though not perfect – option to stay in touch
It’s a parent’s worst nightmare: losing track of your child at a crowded concert or festival or while sight-seeing during a holiday. Technology can provide a few solutions. Apart from attaching a smart tracker like Apple’s AirTag or Samsung’s SmartTag2 to their backpack, getting children a smartwatch made specifically for them is a good way to stay in touch and be aware of their location. Smartwatches with cellular connections can also be used to make calls directly from the watch without needing a supporting phone.
But why not just get your kids a phone, some of you may be asking. Amid rising concerns about the harmful effects of social media on young children, many parents don’t want to do so till the kids are older, and a smartwatch acts as a bridge.
Options on the table
Noise was one of the first brands in India to introduce smartwatches tailored for children, gaining the first-mover advantage. It has a portfolio of three smartwatches (starting at ₹2,199 with the Champ 2) and is the best-selling brand on Amazon in the kids’ smartwatches category. The company’s biggest competitor in the audio and wearables segment, boAt, has an offering—the boAt Wanderer ( ₹5,999).
Then there’s the imoo Z7 ( ₹14,990), a Chinese brand that is quite popular for its kids’ smartwatches globally. The Z7 packs in cutting-edge health monitoring, activity tracking, HD video calling, precise location tracking, and dual cameras for versatile use. But it comes at a premium, while the user experience feels a bit dated and the companion app is unpolished with iffy English translations.
Fitness trackers for children were launched in the past, including the Fitbit Ace 3 and Garmin vivofit jr. 3, but they lacked calling and location-tracking features. Garmin does offer the well-rounded Garmin Bounce smartwatch for kids and Google too revived the Ace with the new Fitbit Ace LTE as a connected smartwatch for kids, but these aren’t available in India.
Features to look for
“In contrast to smartwatches for adults, which are primarily utilized for fitness tracking and lifestyle needs like health monitoring, the use cases for kids’ smartwatches are entirely different. These are distinctly tailored to cater to every aspect of a child’s needs, with a keen focus on features like parental control, habit-building functionalities, and safety measures," says Gaurav Khatri, co-founder, Noise.
The primary reason for getting a smartwatch is a reliable line of communication with your child—voice and video calls, text messages, and sometimes voice-to-text as well. An important use case is the assistance in emergencies—an SOS button that triggers a message or call to the parents/guardians.
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And, of course, one of the most important objectives of a child’s smartwatch is GPS tracking, to be assured of their safety when they are out for sports, at public spaces, and when you’re travelling. Many of these smartwatches also support geofencing, allowing you to set up a safe zone for your child, like when you are at a park, stepping out of which will send an alert to your phone. Of course, these smartwatches need a SIM/eSIM for calling and GPS tracking.
Many kids’ smartwatches come with solid parental controls, including a listen-in feature or tracking vital signs. If a child has complained about bullying, listening in can help you gauge the situation. If your child is ill, tracking vital signs is a handy feature. Like smartwatches for adults, these also help kids stay active by tracking their steps, heart rate and other metrics.
To build their value proposition, some brands also add fun games and apps for children. However, parents might consider this a negative since one of the reasons for choosing smartwatches over smartphones is to avoid screen time.
Rajat Agarwal, chief marketing officer at a multinational IT corporation, is wary of getting a smartwatch for his 7-year-old due to this. “I think it might distract the child from his learning and playing experiences and push him to indulge with games and other fun thingamajigs on his smartwatch," he says.
Most watches have a time-out feature using which a parent can set school/quiet mode to disable apps, games, and non-emergency calls.
Safety versus privacy
Like most smart devices, smartwatches also continuously collect sensitive data, and there’s always a threat that bad actors can hack into the smartwatch and access private information, including photos and location—in this case, of your child. There’s also the ethical question of whether you should be tracking your child’s whereabouts at all—but that’s for individual parents to figure out along with their children after consulting them.
Data-related privacy concerns are exacerbated by the fact that most smartwatches for children are from lesser-known brands. Apart from lack of trust, there’s also the prejudice against “Chinese brands’’, which is unfortunate but not inaccurate. Children’s smartwatches are big in China—driven by a significant tech adoption culture, limited privacy concerns, and general acceptance of the quirks of a data-driven society. But the West thinks differently.
A 2017 report from the Norwegian Consumer Council found that some smartwatches had major security flaws. The report said that these devices could give parents a false sense of security since some features didn’t work reliably and often the personal data was transmitted without using encryption. In the same year, a German regulator banned the sale of similar watches, describing them as “spying devices".
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Therefore, concerns around smartwatches for children aren’t unfounded. The solution is to buy a children’s smartwatch from a reputed brand and carefully set it up to safeguard personal data, minimize data collection and sharing, and turn off unnecessary extra features.
Many people wonder why mainstream brands like Apple, Samsung, and Google do not venture into the category. According to Navkendar Singh, an analyst at research firm IDC, there has never been enough market outside of China to justify the effort. “For most brands, it would be a distraction to focus on a niche when the volumes are somewhere else," Singh explains. “There aren’t too many people buying expensive smartwatches anyway (the average selling price of smartwatches in India has dropped to just $20.65 per IDC data) and the segment that would buy one for their kids is even slimmer."
For wearable upstarts though, exploring this category is a sign of desperation—as are the new smart rings for fitness tracking. According to latest IDC data, smartwatch shipments declined for the first time since 2018 and these companies are looking for new avenues of growth.
Should I get one for my child?
Of course, a gadget can never replace adult supervision. A smartwatch is not a babysitter, but it does give parents a way to stay connected with an extra layer of security. If chosen and set up well, a smartwatch for your child could be a useful companion in your bag of parenting tools.
Abhishek Baxi is a technology journalist and digital consultant.
Write to us at businessoflife@livemint.com
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