If you were a parent, would you want your child to have a smart watch? Why, or why not? And if yes, then at what age?
In “An Apple Watch for Your 5-Year-Old? More Parents Say Yes,” Kalley Huang and Brian X. Chen write:
Florian Fangohr waffled for about a year over whether to buy an Apple Watch SE as a gift. The smart watch cost $279, and he worried that its recipient would immediately break or lose it. In May, he decided the benefits outweighed the costs and bought the gadget.
The beneficiary: his 8-year-old son, Felix.
Mr. Fangohr, a 47-year-old product designer in Seattle, said he was aware that many people were pessimistic about technology’s
creep into children’s lives. But “within the framework of the watch, I don’t feel scared,” he said. “I want him to explore.”
Felix, a rising third grader, said he actually wanted a smartphone. “But the watch is still really, really nice,” he said.
Across the United States, parents are increasingly buying Apple Watches and strapping them onto the wrists of children as young as 5. The goal: to use the devices as a stopgap cellphone for the kids. With the watch’s cellular abilities, parents can use it to reach and track their children, while the miniature screens mitigate issues like internet addiction.
Children and teenagers appear to have become a disproportionately large market for smart watches as a whole. In a 2020 survey of American teenagers by the investment bank Piper Sandler, 31 percent said they owned a smart watch. That
same year, 21 percent of adults in the United States said they owned one, according to the Pew Research Center.
