Kid’s Smart Watches

[Christmaspiggyjack]

Hi folks,

I'm looking at smart watches for my eldest son who has recently started to play out on our street. The main purpose is for me to be able to see where he is/potentially call his watch.

I have been looking online and it turns out I don’t have a clue what I’m looking at. I have maybe looked at that many that they’ve all blurred into one.

One of the questions is, do you need to pay a monthly sim/is this totally separate to the watch (I.e-Vodafone) or would it be a subscription through the watch brand. Doesn’t seem that clear when I’ve read up on them 🤔

Really, I’m just looking for parents to tell me if they’ve purchased one, was it any good, what was it etc? Or am I best just not bothering!

Thank you 😊

Our kids have used xplora watches (Xplora | Kids Smartwatch – Xplora UK). They're good enough for us - the kids can make calls to permitted numbers, we can see roughly where they are, we can contact them if we need to and vice versa, and the watch looks unattractive enough to not be of interest / make them a target for theft / mugging. These have a pretty reasonable privacy policy (be wary of the cheap chinese ones on amazon and check you're happy with the privacy policy before using). We don't have any monthly fees for these watches, and just have cheap PAYG SIMs.

Our kids having these watches was a factor in our consideration of when we give them greater independence. For example, we were happy for them to go off together, or for the older one to go alone, to run errands in town (buy a gift for a party, pick up some milk at the supermarket, return and borrow some library books) whilst both at primary school. Typically they'd be out for less than an hour, and they were both confident they could get in touch with us if there were any problems. We've also been pleased to have them for rare occasions when we have been delayed in getting home beyond the time the kids were returning from school - being able to phone them in advance and tell them we were delayed by 5-10 minutes meant they knew what was happening and that things were OK, and that they could hang out with their friends for an extra ten mins before walking home.

This is exactly the info I was looking for - thank you! The Xplora ones were the watches I’d been looking at. Seem to have mixed reviews but what you’re saying is what I’m after.

Thanks again!

It's not an all-singing, all dancing bit of kit, and you could probably spend similar and get a more functional, adult watch, but if you're after something for emergency calls and for your own reassurance that your child has made it to school / got to their friend's house, etc, and don't need particularly high accuracy on the 'safe zones', it's fine. We find the GPS is good enough that we can set the edge of the safe zone to be where we need them to be, which is good enough for our purposes.