The messy list of gadgets my kids and I actually use, not the ones I thought we would
I have two kids, 10 and 7, and if you’d asked me three years ago what gadgets I’d be letting them carry around, I would’ve said “absolutely none before high school.” LOL. Here’s what we actually have now, warts and all.
My oldest got his first gadget when he was 8, an Apple Watch SE, hand-me-down from me when I upgraded. All the other parents at his school were getting their kids GPS watches, so I thought this would be perfect — I could see where he was, he could call me if he needed a ride home from soccer practice, it’s all set up with parental controls, right?
Wrong. First, he figured out how to play that stupid Tap Back game with his friend who also had an Apple Watch, and they’d just tap each other back and forth nonstop under their desks at school. His teacher emailed me twice about it. Then there was the trampoline park birthday party incident. I told him to keep it on so I could find him if he wandered off, but he was jumping for two hours and the battery died. I spent 22 minutes (I counted, because I was panicking so bad) checking the app that just kept saying “Location Unavailable,” wandering around the whole park, yelling his name, ready to call 911, and I found him hiding in the back of the ball pit, covered in sprinkles, eating a leftover cupcake he’d found. He didn’t even notice the watch died.
Worst part? A week after that, we were at my grandma’s 80th birthday dinner, and all of a sudden this explicit rap song starts blaring from his wrist. My cousin’s pastor husband was sitting right next to him. Turns out his friend airdropped the whole album to him at recess, and he didn’t know how to turn the volume down. I wanted to crawl under the table.
So after that, we retired the Apple Watch. I swore I wouldn’t get him a phone until he was 12, but that same month his best friend moved three hours away, and he kept crying after school because he couldn’t talk to him anymore. My cousin had an old iPhone SE she was getting rid of, beat to hell, back camera doesn’t work, battery dies after like 6 hours of use, so I took it for free.
It’s worked out way better than I ever expected. I turned off airdrop from anyone not in his contacts, set screen time to an hour and a half on school days, three on weekends. The bad battery means he can’t spend all day glued to it anyway — that was a total happy accident, I didn’t plan that. He uses it mostly to text his old friend, play that retro Super Mario game that doesn’t need Wi-Fi, and take photos of every weird bug and broken bottle he finds on our hikes. I used to nag him for having his phone out when we’re supposed to be “enjoying nature,” but last month I scrolled through his camera roll and found this insane close-up of a monarch caterpillar on our milkweed that I never would’ve stopped to look at that closely. So I don’t nag anymore. Location sharing is always on, but I don’t check it every five minutes like I thought I would. Most of the time I forget it’s even there, until he’s late coming home from the bus stop and I pull it up to see he stopped at the convenience store for a blue raspberry slushie, which he told me he was going to do anyway.
My 7 year old? She’s a different story. I got her one of those $100 Garmin kids watches, the one that’s advertised as indestructible, GPS tracking, water proof, all that. She lost it three days after we got it. She took it off to go down the community park water slide, left it on the bench, and by the time we remembered it 10 minutes later, it was gone. I checked the location app and watched it move all the way across town on the city bus, so I just wrote it off. I was annoyed for a day, then got over it.
I still feel a little guilty sometimes, that she doesn’t have anything. When we go to the mall and she wanders off, my stomach drops for a second, because I can’t pull up my phone and check where she is. But she always turns up two minutes later, usually holding a bag of gummy bears she talked a sales clerk into letting her hold while she looked for me. She knows my phone number by heart, and she knows to ask a woman with kids or a store worker for help if she’s actually lost. And let’s be real — she loses her hoodie, her water bottle, her favorite stuffed animal at least once a week. She’d lose any $100 watch I buy her anyway. It’s just not worth the stress right now.
As for me, my phone’s just my regular iPhone, full of 10,000 blurry photos of the kids, a shared photo album with their grandma that I forget to update for three weeks then dump 27 bad photos into all at once, and I can never remember the screen time passcode when they beg for 10 extra minutes of YouTube Kids after dinner. Half the time I just give in and unlock it.
I went to one of those parent coffee chats last year where everyone was talking about how no kid needs a phone before 13, how all GPS watches are bad for their attention spans, how they just use analog watches and teach their kids to remember where to meet. I left feeling like a terrible, lazy parent for giving my 10 year old a phone two years early. Then the next day, he texted me from the bus saying the bus broke down and it’d be 40 minutes late, so I didn’t have to stand out in the pouring rain waiting for him the whole time. So that’s that.
Last weekend we went to the zoo. Oldest had his phone, took 142 photos of the giraffes. Youngest wandered off before we even got to the lions, I panicked for a minute, remembered I couldn’t track her, then heard her yelling my name from the ice cream stand. She’d convinced the worker she was lost and needed a free scoop of vanilla. I paid, of course, and we all ate ice cream while we watched the elephants. I don’t know if what we’re doing is the right way. Some days I worry he’s on his phone too much. Some days I worry I’m not prepared enough with the youngest. But it’s what works for us right now. No fancy system, no perfect gadgets, just a bunch of hand-me-downs and happy accidents and a lot of panicking that turns out fine in the end. (1182 words)
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