Because of time’s arrow, my daughter, who was once a toddler, is now a preteen. A new question thus arises: When should I let her get a smartphone? This problem isn’t new to me. I have two older kids, now in their 20s. Back in the day, I bought each of them an iPod Touch—essentially, a smartphone without the phone—when they were about her age, and then the full device at around the start of high school. But online life was different then. There was less pressure to be smartphone-connected all the time. Social media wasn’t yet as ubiquitous, or worrisome, as it is today. Now the stakes seem higher.
Today smartphones are as widespread as the concerns about their effects on young people’s brains. Psychologists have written best-selling books about how bad phones are for kids, and many schools have banned their use. Despite all this, no one can dispute the fact that phones and phone apps have entered every aspect of contemporary life. Even Jonathan Haidt, who aims to end the phone-based childhood, floats policies that would allow for a phone-based adolescence. The question is not whether your kid will ever get a smartphone, but rather how to manage its adoption in a way that will preserve the integrity of child, parent, school, and home life. And to that end, I believe I’ve found a good solution: Get your kid a watch.
That idea had not occurred to me until my daughter brought it up. She’d been FaceTiming with a friend who had just received an Apple Watch. Now my daughter wanted one, and it didn’t take long for me to acquiesce. After all, as a small device with fewer features, a smartwatch would have to do less damage than a standard smartphone. Maybe it would also do substantial good. The smartwatch might allow her to connect with friends and family, while keeping her away from social media.
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I ordered her an Apple Watch that very day. In theory I’d been open to another sort of product—a smartwatch that is specifically designed for kids—but the competition barely registered. The market for children’s smartwatches has been flooded for years with garbage. Many products of this type are toys, and crappy ones at that: hunks of cheap plastic with poor displays and valueless software; Dick Tracy novelties for a generation that has never heard of the guy. The next tier up includes more functional devices with network connections, such as the Gizmo Watch. But that product, like many others in the category, caters to adult control. Technically, the Gizmo can be used to exchange text messages and calls, but only with a contact list that is managed by a parent. The device’s main function for a kid is passive: It allows her to be called or texted by her parents, and tracked by them via GPS. This is a house-arrest bracelet, not a smartwatch.
At the risk of devolving into “when I was a kid”–ism, when I was a kid, we learned how to use technologies through actual use. There were few phones or televisions or stereos for kids—instead, just phones, televisions, and stereos. The ownership, location, and operation of these devices was subject to the oversight of parents, who also gave their children direct and deliberate instruction on the devices’ proper use. I was taught how to dial a phone, but also what to say or not say on one, for example. And parents spent considerable thought on questions such as whether telephones should be in children’s rooms. Then, as now, their minds were on potential harms. What’s new today is the sense that nothing can be done to mitigate these harms aside from wholesale prohibition.
If I was going to do this, I wanted to get my daughter a fully operational smartwatch, and not some kiddie version that wouldn’t really help her learn how to navigate the computerized world. To some extent, I wanted her to confront the capabilities, confusions, and risks of online life, so she could learn how to manage them herself. I have owned and used smartwatches for some time, and I surmised that their many limitations compared with smartphones—and the uselessness of most of their apps—would make one a perfect candidate for this process.
We’re Apple users in my house, so the Apple Watch made sense, but similar options are available for Android, including Samsung’s Galaxy watches. The Apple Watch SE was the cheapest option, and as with any Apple Watch, you can set it up for a family member who does not own an iPhone. For that to work, you need to buy the more expensive cellular model, which permits your kid to call, text, and email from almost anywhere. It also lets you track their location. The latter function has a quirk: My kid also has an iPad, and Apple seems to treat that device, which stays home all the time, as her default location. At first I found this defect annoying, but soon I came to appreciate it. I almost never really need to know where she is, and the habitual pursuit of her geospatial data would feel like an invasion of the autonomy that the watch was meant, in part, to increase.
I’ve written in the past about the pleasures of installing a landline—a home phone that could be used by the family as a whole, rather than its individual members. For my daughter, the landline was a source of confidence that she could contact her mother or me, or a neighbor—or, God forbid, an emergency service—if she needed to. Our home phone played a similar role for me as well.
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The smartwatch offers something more. Most communication is not done in emergencies, but in ordinary life: I’m running late or Meet me at the other door or Dinner’s ready. The ability to exchange mundane information from afar—even from across the street at a friend’s house—is part of being a whole person in the world today. Ashley James, the mother of my daughter’s friend, told me that she’s been delighted by her daughter’s usage of the smartwatch: When her daughter sees an Apple News story that she thinks might interest James, for example, she sometimes sends it in a text. James also said that her kid now texts extended-family members, developing connections that might not have materialized otherwise. Just having the device, James told me, makes her daughter feel included in the world of technology “that kids want to be a part of so badly.”
In a way, it is strange to talk about a 10-year-old this way. When I was 10, a newspaper would have been sitting on the breakfast table, and I could have shown an article to my mother at any time. But then life became digitized, and now you need a device of some kind just to see the news. Like it or not, becoming a person in the 2020s means becoming a user of computers. It also means figuring out how to express yourself online.
I’d experienced my own revelation about my daughter once she started using the Apple Watch. Back when she had just her iPad, I’d concluded that she was terrible at texting. We have a family group chat, and she would either respond to messages with a single word, or not respond at all. But after she got her watch and learned to tap out texts across its tiny screen, her messages exploded into wry quips and fully formed ideas. She turned out to be a killer texter. I quickly surmised the prior problem: She mostly uses her iPad to watch streaming shows. All those texts were interrupting her! Imagine if your text messages kept popping up on your television. She was already old enough to express herself online in sophisticated ways, but until she got the smartwatch, she didn’t have the tools to do so.
I have since concluded that the smartwatch is an unalloyed good. James seems to agree. With these devices on our daughters’ wrists, our children feel a part of the world of portable, personal technology, even as the devices offer them just modest access to that world. They’re connected, but also free of the social-media posting and scrolling that is the real cause of anxiety about kids and phones.
I find it startling that Apple and other tech companies haven’t leaned even further into this obvious opportunity, to bill the watch as a sort of training tool for life online. (I did see an advertisement in one of my daughter’s magazines for a children’s-smartwatch brand called Cosmo—described, a little weirdly, as “the perfect first phone.”) What a shame that so much effort is devoted to providing parents with all manner of controls for their kids, but scarce support. The well-timed and thoughtful introduction of a smartwatch could help mitigate concerns about children’s smartphone use while also providing them with a scaffolding on which to learn basic digital-life skills.
For the moment, though, the smartwatch is too often lumped together with the smartphone, as if they were different causes of the same disease. On this logic, many schools ban both. But such prohibitionism is reliant on magical thinking: It assumes that kids of some arbitrary age can be suddenly trusted to use smartphones, so long as they’ve spent their prior years in full digital quarantine. That’s not how things work. Kids must be introduced into connected life, one step at a time.
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