Are Smartwatches Safe for Kids? A Complete Safety Guide for Parents

The short answer

Most kids’ smartwatches sold by reputable brands in 2026 are safer for a child than the older alternative — handing them a smartphone — but only if you choose deliberately and configure them with care. The watches built specifically for kids (Xplora, One2Track, Pingonaut, Anio, Garmin Bounce) are designed without app stores, without open internet browsers, and with parent-controlled contact lists. That’s a meaningful safety floor. The risks that remain are real but manageable, and they fall into three buckets.

This guide walks through each bucket honestly, not to scare you out of the category but to give you the evaluation framework I wish I’d had when I started looking.

Bucket 1: Physical safety

This is the bucket parents bring up first, and it’s also the smallest in practice. The concerns worth knowing about:

Radio-frequency exposure

Cellular kids’ smartwatches transmit on the same kind of low-power radio frequencies as a phone. In Europe, the EU SAR limit (Specific Absorption Rate) is 2.0 W/kg averaged over ten grams of tissue, set by the Council Recommendation 1999/519/EC and enforced through the Radio Equipment Directive. Reputable kids’ watches publish their SAR figures in the manual or on the manufacturer’s product page; the figures should clear the EU limit comfortably. Devices sold in the EU also carry the CE mark, which is the manufacturer’s declaration that the device meets these limits among other requirements. Wi-Fi-only models don’t have a cellular radio at all, which is one reason some parents prefer them for younger kids.

What the research currently shows is that there’s no established health risk at the exposure levels these watches produce, but research on long-term exposure in young children specifically is still thin. The Dutch RIVM (Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu) and the WHO both maintain that current limits are protective at typical-use levels. If that uncertainty matters to you, two practical mitigations help: pick a model that uses Wi-Fi instead of cellular when possible, and avoid letting your child sleep with the watch on their wrist (most kids’ watches have a “school mode” or “sleep mode” that disables radios anyway, and you can charge the watch overnight).

Materials and skin contact

A watch is in continuous contact with skin. That matters because:

Bands made of cheap silicone or plastic can trigger contact dermatitis in kids with sensitive skin. If your child reacts to silicone phone cases, swap to a fabric or leather band.
The metal case backing on some lower-tier watches can leach nickel, which is a common allergen. Reputable brands disclose materials; if you can’t find that disclosure, that’s a small but real signal.
Sweat, sunscreen, and chlorine accelerate band degradation. Plan to replace the band every 6–12 months on an active kid; keep the original receipt.

Water resistance

The standard rating to look for is 5 ATM (often labeled “50 m water resistance”), which means the watch will survive showers, swimming, and accidental dunks. 3 ATM is splash-resistant only — fine for hand-washing, not for a pool. IP67 is dust-tight and good for brief immersion but isn’t really pool-rated.

Be aware that water resistance ratings degrade with age and impact. A watch that was 5 ATM new is probably not 5 ATM after eighteen months of being banged into doorframes. Treat the rating as the floor on day one, not a guarantee for the life of the device.

Battery and charging

The lithium-ion battery in a kids’ smartwatch is the same chemistry as in a phone, with the same fire-risk profile if the case is crushed or the cable is damaged. The practical rules: only use the charger that came with the watch (or a manufacturer-approved replacement), don’t let your child chew on the cable (it happens — I’ve seen it), and replace any cable that develops a kink at the connector.

Bucket 2: Digital safety

This is the bucket I wish more parents thought about first, because the digital risks are the ones the watch designers can’t fully eliminate — they require parent configuration to mitigate.

Who can contact your child

The single most important digital safety setting on any kids’ smartwatch is the contact list. On the watches built for this audience (Xplora, One2Track, Pingonaut, Anio, Garmin Bounce), you — the parent — approve every number that can call, text, or video-chat your child. The watch will not accept calls or messages from unknown numbers. That’s a hard wall, not a soft filter.

Generic kids’ watches from unknown brands on Bol.com, Amazon, or AliExpress sometimes don’t have this wall. They allow unrestricted SIM-card calling and can be reached by any number that dials the SIM. Avoid those.

When you set up the watch, plan to add: parent phones, grandparent or caregiver phones, the school office number, and a small handful of close friends (with their parents’ permission). Resist the urge to load every casual contact into the list — the contact list is the safety perimeter.

Location data

A GPS-tracking kids’ watch knows where your child is, all day. That data has to go somewhere, which means a few questions to ask before you commit:

Where is the location data stored, and for how long? (For EU residents, inside the EEA is the cleanest answer under the GDPR — it sidesteps the cross-border-transfer questions that come up with non-EU vendors.)
Who at the company can access it?
Is the data encrypted in transit and at rest?
Can you delete the history on demand? (The GDPR right-to-erasure means yes, in principle, but how easy the brand actually makes it varies a lot.)

Reputable kids’ watch brands answer these questions in plain language in their privacy policy. The German brands in particular (Pingonaut, Anio) market hard on EU-server-side storage and GDPR strictness; the Dutch brand One2Track is a domestic option with the same legal footing. If you can’t find clear answers, that’s a real concern — you’re handing the company a continuous record of your child’s daily movements, and you should know what they do with it.

A few brands are explicit about not selling or sharing location data with third parties for advertising. That’s the floor I’d look for.

Camera and microphone

If the watch has a camera, ask: can someone else trigger it remotely? Some “stealth tracker” features in lower-quality watches let a paired phone activate the camera or microphone without alerting the wearer — which is creepy, and is also exactly the kind of feature that’s been exploited in real-world stalking cases. The kids-focused brands either don’t offer that feature or require visible indication when the mic/camera is active. Buy from those.

Software updates

A connected device that doesn’t get security updates becomes less safe over time, not more. Before you commit to a brand, search “[brand name] firmware updates” and see how often they ship. Brands that ship updates every quarter are giving you better long-term safety than brands that shipped one update at launch and went quiet.

Bucket 3: Behavioral safety

This is the bucket that surprises parents who came in worrying mostly about radiation. It’s also the bucket where the watch design choices matter most.

Less screen than you’d think

A well-designed kids’ smartwatch has dramatically less screen time than a phone for the simple reason that the screen is small, the battery drains under heavy use, and there’s no app store full of attention-engineered apps. Kids fiddle with the watch face, send a few messages, check the time, and put their wrist down. That’s a feature.

It’s also fragile. If you give an older kid a smartwatch with a third-party app marketplace (some Wear OS-based devices marketed for tweens fall in this category), you’ve effectively given them a small, less powerful phone — and the screen-time dynamics of a phone follow.

The WHO’s guidance on physical activity and sedentary behaviour for children, alongside guidance from the Dutch Jeugdgezondheidszorg (JGZ) and the American Academy of Pediatrics, all emphasize the type of screen activity more than raw minutes. Two-way communication with parents and grandparents is interactive, age-appropriate, and developmentally fine. Passive video consumption is the part to limit. A watch that does the first and not the second is, structurally, a healthier device than a watch that does both.

School day disruption

Most schools have policies about devices in class. A kids’ watch with a “school mode” — radios off during configured school hours, only the time visible — keeps your child compliant without you needing to manage it daily. This is one of the small features that pays for itself in the first month of use.

If the watch you’re considering doesn’t have school mode (or whatever the brand-specific equivalent is called), that’s a usability red flag for school-age kids. Push back hard or pick something else.

Social pressure

A smartwatch is visible. That’s the point — you want your child to be reachable. But it also means other kids see it, ask about it, and form opinions. A few real things I’ve heard from other parents:

Younger kids sometimes want to message friends who don’t have watches; the friend’s parent has to be willing to add a number to their kid’s watch (or be the gateway from a phone). Plan for this conversation before you give the watch as a gift.
Older kids sometimes feel “babied” by a watch when their peers have phones. This is a developmental conversation, not a watch problem — but it’s why the watch’s age range matters more than its feature list.
A flashy watch can become a target on a playground. Most kids’ watch designs are deliberately understated for this reason. If you’re choosing between two, pick the less ostentatious.

How to evaluate any kids’ watch on safety

Here’s the checklist I run through whenever I look at a new model:

Physical

Published SAR figure (cellular models) and CE mark
Documented case and band materials
5 ATM water resistance (or 3 ATM with explicit non-swim use case)
Charger included; cable strain relief looks substantial

Digital

Parent-approved contact list with hard wall on unknown numbers
Privacy policy spells out where location data is stored, who accesses it, retention period — ideally EEA-based for EU buyers
No remote-triggerable camera or mic without on-watch indicator
Recent firmware update history (within last 6 months)

Behavioral

No app store / no open browser
School-mode / quiet-hours feature
Notification volume modest enough not to disrupt class if school mode fails
Watch-face options age-appropriate (no fashion-aspirational adult faces marketed to 7-year-olds)

A watch that clears all of these is in the safety zone for a 5–13-year-old. A watch that misses two or three is one I’d skip — the savings on a cheaper model aren’t worth re-doing the evaluation later when you discover the gap.

What this guide isn’t telling you

A few honest limits on the guide above:

I’m not a pediatrician. Where I cite WHO, JGZ, or AAP guidance, or EU SAR rules, those are anchored in published, public sources. Where I’m describing trade-offs and parent experience, that’s pattern-matching from research and conversations, not clinical advice. If your child has specific medical considerations (a pacemaker, severe contact allergies, sensory differences that make wearable tech hard), check with your huisarts or kinderarts.
The safest watch is the one whose safety you actively manage. No model is “safe and forget.” The contact list, the location-sharing settings, the firmware updates, and the school-mode hours all need a parent at the wheel. A watch you don’t configure is less safe than a cheaper watch you do.
Safety changes over time. A model that was state-of-the-art on contact filtering in 2024 may have been overtaken by 2026. The category is evolving fast. Use this checklist on the model you’re considering today, not the model your friend bought two years ago.

If you’ve worked through the three buckets and you’re still on the fence, that’s reasonable — a smartwatch is real responsibility, both yours and your child’s. The next post in this series, Best Age for First Smartwatch, walks through the developmental signals to look for so the when is as deliberate as the which.