When to give a child their first phone is a complex question, filled with considerations about responsibility, affordability and maintaining a balance between security and freedom in the child’s life. Many parents are divided between the desire to remain in touch with their kids and the reluctance to hand over an expensive smartphone with unrestricted internet access. Apple have positioned the Apple Watch as an answer to this dilemma: all the connectivity of an iPhone, minus the potential risks. Cellular smartwatches can call, text and use the internet just like a smartphone, while the tiny screen leaves little room for social media or mobile gaming. Major players like Garmin and Samsung, as well as specialist kids’ companies like TickTalk have since entered the market as smartwatch usage soars among children and teenagers.
With the release of Apple Watch For Your Kids (formerly known as Family Setup) in 2020, Apple offered parents the ability to set up a cellular Apple Watch and give it to a family member. The watch can then function independently, with no need for a nearby iPhone. As well as the many kid-friendly features under the watch glass, the physical design of the watch also takes younger users into account. A durable, scratch-proof screen and case will weather small bumps or grazes, while the SE and Series 9 are both available with a range of brightly-coloured watch straps, including shorter ones for child-sized wrists. Apple also sell supplementary Watch straps on their website.
Below, we explore the full range of features of Apple Watch For Your Kids mode, and how parents, guardians and children can use tips and tricks to make the most out of their Apple Watch.
Buying an Apple Watch For a Child
Before using Apple Watch For Your Kids, you will need an Apple Watch – specifically, a cellular + GPS model, complete with an Apple Watch plan so your child can stay in contact and use internet-based location services while they’re out and about. Apple Watch For Your Kids will only work on cellular Apple Watch models with an active cellular plan.
We've previously covered which Apple Watch models are best for kids – here is a quick reminder of which Apple Watches support cellular plans.
Any of the following Apple Watch models can be set up in Apple Watch For Your Kids mode:
Cellular Apple Watch Series 4 or later with watchOS 7 or later
Cellular Apple Watch SE 1st gen or later with watchOS 7 or later
Apple Watch Ultra and Ultra 2 with watchOS 7 or later
Adding a Cellular Plan to an Apple Watch
As previously mentioned, Apple Watch for Your Kids requires an Apple Watch cellular plan. These plans can only be purchased from a small number of official Apple Partners, including BetterRoaming. Once you’ve acquired a working Apple Watch, adding a cellular plan only takes a few minutes. Apple Watch plans can be from the same provider as the linked iPhone, or a different provider altogether. The Watch and the controlling iPhone will still work together with different plan providers.
Apple Watch Safety Features for Kids
Emergency SOS
The Emergency SOS button ensures that help is always literally at hand. Any cellular-enabled Apple Watch will be able to use the emergency SOS function – the wearer presses and holds the oblong button at the side of the watch face and selects the SOS option to contact the local emergency services. If any emergency contacts were added when setting up the watch, they will also be notified of the Watch’s location, as well as any changes in location while the SOS call is ongoing. Ideally this feature will never need to be used, but the peace of mind knowing it’s there is an attractive prospect for many parents and guardians.
Fall Detection
Fall detection is a newer Apple Watch feature (available on Ultra, SE and Series 4 and later Apple Watch models) that initiates a twenty-second countdown when it suspects the wearer has suffered a hard fall. If no action is taken during this countdown, the watch will call for an ambulance and notify the owner’s emergency contacts. It’s not 100% accurate and should not act as a substitute for a medical device, but Fall Detection can and has helped people get help when their phone is out of reach. The service is enabled by default for wearers over 55 – any other users will need to switch it on in the settings menu of their watch.
Manage contacts
Manage Contacts is an Apple Watch For Your Kids feature that divides opinion among users – for younger children though, it can be an effective method of safeguarding their online usage, even when they’re out of the house. Essentially, it allows the family organizer to transfer trusted contacts from their own iPhone to the Apple Watch. The watch wearer will then only be able to send and receive calls, texts or messages with these specific contacts. While the benefits are obvious for younger children, older kids and teens may find it overly coddling. The function can be turned on or off in the iPhone Watch app.
Find My People
Find My People is front and centre of the advertising for Apple Watch For Your Kids mode, and for good reason. The ability to monitor their child's location from an iPhone is appealing to many parents – provided the child keeps the watch charged and on their person. Using an Apple Watch as a tracking device also raises questions about personal privacy and parental surveillance. If all parties are happy to use it, however, Find My People can be an easy and intuitive way for Watch wearers to share their location with a person on their contacts list. They simply open the ‘Find People’ app on their phone, select the contact they wish to notify, and send them their location, accurate to within a few meters. The new Apple Watch Series 9 has upped the precision of the tracking software, helping to locate users even in crowded areas.
Apple Watch Features for Parents and Guardians
Schooltime
Schooltime, as the name suggests, is a dedicated feature of Apple Watch For Your Kids designed specifically for school-age children. The premise is simple – the parent or guardian limits almost all functions of the Apple Watch, except for the bare essentials like emergency SOS calling, for a specific window of time. This creates a distraction-free device when kids need to focus, though the watch wearer can also override it whenever they choose.
Can you video call or FaceTime on the Apple Watch?
Another quirk of the Apple Watch that makes it a suitable accessory for younger people is its lack of a camera. The user of the watch can still participate in video calls, such as FaceTime, though they won’t appear onscreen and can’t record their own videos or take photos. This built-in layer of privacy is one less thing for parents and caregivers to worry about when introducing their children to the world of online communication.
Apple Cash Family
With the increasing acceptance of contactless and Apple Pay transactions around the world, Apple Cash Family is a new development that lets family members to send and receive money instantly via iMessage. For kids, this means they can make contactless payments using their Apple Watch, and parents don’t need to hand over cash or a bank card which has the potential to get lost or make purchases online. It’s a simpler way to keep track of family spending, though restricts kids to only being able to spend money in places that accept Apple Pay. Further restrictive measures can be taken by the iPhone organizer, including freezing transactions. Note that Apple Cash Family is currently only available in the USA.
Ask to Buy
Ask to Buy is Apple’s attempt to mitigate a common 21st-century parental issue: children making in-app purchases without realizing they’re spending real money. Both Apple and the developers of these ‘freemium’ apps have come under fire in recent years, culminating in Apple reaching an $87 million settlement with the disgruntled parents of high-spending kids. Compared to a phone or iPad, the Apple Watch is a far less suitable platform for mobile gaming. Plenty of freemium games and apps for the Apple Watch are still available on the Apple Store, however.
Ask to Buy is a more concrete measure that can be turned on in the Settings menu of the controlling iPhone. With Ask to Buy enabled, any in-app purchase, music, movie or app download on one of the linked Apple Watches will first need to be approved by the owner of the iPhone (or ‘family organizer’ as Apple calls them). The result is a pleasingly straightforward (though perhaps overdue) solution that has the potential to save countless future headaches among Apple’s customer base.
Find My Apple Watch
The Apple Watch is a small object, and like any small object, has the potential to get lost often. While parents should make peace with this concept and understand it’s a natural and highly likely result of giving an expensive gadget to a young child, it is sometimes possible to trace a lost Apple device.
Find My Apple Watch is one such feature. Like Find My People, it lets any connected Apple device search for the exact location of the missing watch. The new Apple Watch Series 9 even has a ‘precision finding’ mode. This harnesses the newer models' improved CPUs to create a guided path from the user to their missing Watch. The watch needs to be on and charged for this feature to function.
Practical Apple Watch Tips For Parents and Children
Charging the Watch
Charging an Apple Watch is simple enough: the charger is a neat concave disc that magnetically clips to the back of the Watch. Compared to other smartwatches, the Apple Watch and the SE have a relatively short battery life: around 12-18 hours on a full charge, compared to 36 hours for an Ultra or Ultra 2. This means that children will need to remember to charge their watch at least once a day. For this reason, an Apple Watch shouldn’t be relied on as a sole means of contact or a safety device between family members.
Swimming with an Apple Watch
As a sports-oriented smartwatch, Apple Watches are more than capable of surviving a quick dip in the pool: both the SE and Series 9 are water-resistant to depths of 50 metres. Kids can go for a swim or wear their watches in rainy weather without worrying about water damage. Watches even have a dedicated ‘water lock’ function that prevents the screen from registering any accidental touches while underwater.
Using Apps
While there are many smartwatches aimed at the youth market, only Apple Watches have full access to the thousands of dedicated watch apps in the App Store. We’ve covered the best Apple Watch apps for Kids in detail here. From productivity to creativity, getting active and just having fun, the app store offers thousands of ways for kids to augment their Apple Watches.
