My kids’ phones and watches: none of it was what I planned
I’m sitting in my minivan in the soccer complex parking lot right now, killing 20 minutes while Jax finishes his scrimmage, and his Gizmo watch is sitting in the cup holder next to me. He forgot it this morning when I dropped him off, remembered halfway through practice, and yelled across the field to me to come get it out of the car so he could check the time for his next water break. The screen has two big cracks from when he ate it falling off his scooter back in January, and the silicone band is covered in permanent marker doodles of Minecraft creepers. It’s exactly what we ended up with, even though none of this was what I thought we’d do when I first started panicking about kids and gadgets.
I’ve got two, Lila’s 13 in middle school, Jax is 10 in fourth grade. I swore up and down when Lila was little that she wouldn’t get a phone until she was at least 14, that all the tracking garbage was unnecessary, that kids need to be disconnected. Funny how that goes. When Lila started walking to the bus stop alone last year, and staying after school for art club that lets out 45 minutes before I get off work, suddenly I didn’t feel so hot about her having no way to reach me if something went wrong.
I dragged her to Target to look at watches first, right? I’d read all the threads about kid-specific watches, no social media, just calling and texting, perfect for pre-teens. She stood in the electronics aisle, crossed her arms, and told me if I made her get one of those, she’d never wear it. All her friends have Apple Watches, she said, and the kid ones are “for babies that still hold their mom’s hand at the grocery store.” I argued for 10 minutes, got huffy, ended up scrolling Facebook Marketplace on my own phone while she stared at me like I was the most embarrassing person alive. We left with a used Series 3 Apple Watch for $80, a third of the price of the new one, and her phone is just my old iPhone 11 I upgraded from last fall. I wiped it, put a $10 cat case on it, the back is still cracked from when she dropped it at the Olivia Rodrigo concert back in spring, and that’s that.
It’s not what I planned, obviously. I was going to have all these strict parental controls, limit screen time to an hour a day, check her location every time she was out. The first month I had the watch, I refreshed Find My every 10 minutes when she was at a friend’s house. Once I panicked and drove all the way over to the rec center because her location said she was at the skate park three blocks away, and she was supposed to be at a birthday party. Turned out she’d left her watch in her friend’s mom’s car, and everyone thought I was insane. Now I barely open the app. The only time I use the tracking is if she forgets where she left her phone in the house, which happens at least once a day.
For Jax, we did do the Gizmo watch, the one all the parents of little kids rave about. He doesn’t have his own phone yet, which fits with that original stupid rule I made, I guess, but it’s a little fake because he borrows my old iPad for Roblox every day after homework anyway. The Gizmo works, mostly. It can only call and text numbers I approve, which I thought was a big relief until last month when he figured out he could speed dial the local Domino’s, and I came home from work to a large pepperoni pizza sitting on my porch. I had to pay $18 for it, and he just stood there grinning like he’d pulled off the heist of the century.
The worst awkward moment was at my aunt’s 60th birthday dinner a couple weeks ago. I’d set the screen time reminder on the watch, right? So after an hour of playing that dumb dinosaur game he loves, this loud cartoon kid voice blares out of his pocket in the middle of the salad course: “TIME’S UP! PUT THE WATCH DOWN AND GO PLAY OUTSIDE!” The whole table went quiet, my mom gave me that look she gives me when she thinks I’m overmonitoring, and Jax shoved the watch under the table and turned bright red. I wanted to hide too.
I’ve learned a couple stupid little things from all this, I guess. Don’t buy new. All the best stuff we have is hand-me-downs from me and my husband. If it’s already scratched and broken when you give it to them, you don’t have a heart attack every time they drop it in a mud puddle. Jax’s Gizmo was the only new thing I bought, and I already regret it—would’ve saved $100 getting a used one, and it’s already just as beat up as it would’ve been if I bought it secondhand.
Also, all the control stuff is just for you, not for them. I had all these ideas about locking down apps, tracking every move, limiting everything, and what’s the point? Lila figured out how to get around her screen time limit within a week, by asking her friend to share the app she wanted. Most of the time she’s just texting her friends about art homework or making fun of each other’s TikTok drafts, it’s not that deep. I turned off most of the location notifications because they just gave me constant anxiety for no reason.
Sometimes I sit here in the parking lot like this, and I think about when I was Jax’s age. I rode my bike all over town, my mom had no way to reach me, I never had a personal gadget until I was 16. And I turned out fine, right? But then last month, Lila’s bus broke down on the side of the highway on the way home from a field trip, and she called me right away from her watch to come get her, and I was so glad she had it. I don’t know. It’s not good, it’s not bad, it’s just what we have right now.
Jax is banging on the window now, practice is over. He’s gonna remember he left his watch in the cup holder, grab it, and then beg me for a blue raspberry slushie on the way home. None of this is the perfect setup I read about in those mom forums back when I was pregnant. It’s all cracked, it’s all full of unread texts I sent that Jax forgot to open, it’s got random surprise pizza orders and 6am dinosaur alarms and cracked back plates. And it works, for right now. That’s all I’ve got.
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