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The short answer

Are smartwatches safe for kids? Mostly yes, with caveats that deserve your attention. The watches built specifically for children (Xplora, One2Track, Pingonaut, Anio, Garmin Bounce) ship without app stores or open browsers, and the contact list is controlled by you. Compared to handing your eight-year-old an old phone, that is a much better starting point.

But “safe” isn’t a yes or no question here. When I started researching this category I kept finding the same three groups of concerns, so that’s how I’ve organised this guide: physical safety, digital safety, and what I’d call behavioral safety. A watch can pass one and fail another.

Bucket 1: Physical safety

This is what parents usually ask about first. In practice it turns out to be the smallest bucket, but let’s take it seriously anyway.

Radio-frequency exposure

Cellular kids’ watches transmit on the same low-power frequencies as phones. The EU limit for SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) is 2.0 W/kg averaged over ten grams of tissue. It comes from Council Recommendation 1999/519/EC and gets enforced through the Radio Equipment Directive. Any decent brand publishes its SAR figure in the manual or on the product page, and devices sold here carry the CE mark. Wi-Fi-only models skip the cellular radio entirely, which is partly why some parents of younger kids prefer them.

What does the research say? At these exposure levels, no established health risk. Research on long-term exposure in young children specifically is thinner than anyone would like, though. Both the Dutch RIVM and the WHO consider the current limits protective at typical use. If the remaining uncertainty bothers you, two cheap mitigations: choose Wi-Fi over cellular where you can, and don’t let your child sleep wearing the watch. Charge it overnight instead. Most models have a sleep or school mode that switches the radios off anyway.

Materials and skin contact

A watch sits on skin all day, every day. Cheap silicone bands can set off contact dermatitis in sensitive kids. If your child reacts to silicone phone cases, go straight to a fabric band. Nickel in the case backing of budget watches is another common culprit. Good brands tell you what the watch is made of. When a brand won’t say, I read that as a signal.

One more thing from experience: sweat, sunscreen and chlorine eat bands. On an active kid, plan on replacing the band every six to twelve months and don’t be surprised when it happens sooner.

Water resistance

Look for 5 ATM, sometimes written as 50 m. That survives showers, swimming lessons and the inevitable dunk. 3 ATM is splash resistance only, fine for hand washing and rain but not a pool. IP67 means dust-tight plus brief immersion, which sounds similar but isn’t really a swimming rating.

Ratings also age. A watch that was 5 ATM out of the box has been banged into doorframes a few hundred times by month eighteen. Treat the printed rating as day-one performance, not a lifetime promise.

Battery and charging

Same lithium-ion chemistry as a phone, same rules. Use the charger that came in the box or an approved replacement. Replace any cable that develops a kink at the connector. And keep cables away from teeth. I wish that warning were unnecessary.

Bucket 2: Digital safety

I’d argue this bucket should come first in your thinking, because these are the risks the manufacturer can’t fully solve for you. They need a parent doing the configuring.

Who can contact your child

The single most important setting on any kids’ smartwatch is the contact list. On the kid-focused brands, every number that can call, message or video-chat your child is one you approved. Unknown numbers simply don’t get through.

The generic watches you’ll find from no-name brands on Bol.com, Amazon or AliExpress don’t always have that wall. Some accept calls from any number that dials the SIM. I would not put one of those on a child’s wrist.

When you do the setup, add the parents’ phones, grandparents or caregivers, the school office, and a few close friends (ask their parents first). Then stop. It’s tempting to load in every contact you have, but the short list is the entire point.

Location data

A GPS watch knows where your child is all day, and that data goes to a server somewhere. Before committing to a brand, I’d want answers to four questions. Where is location data stored, and for how long? Who at the company can see it? Is it encrypted in transit and at rest? Can you actually delete the history, not just in GDPR theory but with a button that works?

For families in the EU, storage inside the EEA is the cleanest answer, since it avoids the cross-border transfer mess entirely. The German brands lean into this hard in their marketing (Pingonaut and Anio both advertise EU servers), and One2Track is Dutch with the same legal footing. If a brand’s privacy policy is vague about any of this, take that seriously. You’d be handing them a continuous record of your child’s movements.

Some brands state plainly that they never sell or share location data for advertising. That’s the floor I look for.

Camera and microphone

If there’s a camera, find out whether anyone can trigger it remotely. A few cheap watches have so-called stealth monitoring features that let a paired phone switch on the mic or camera without the wearer knowing. Features like that have shown up in real stalking cases, and the reputable kids’ brands either don’t offer them or force a visible indicator on the watch. Buy accordingly.

Software updates

A connected device that stops getting security patches gets less safe every month it’s worn. Search “[brand] firmware update” before you buy and look at the dates. Quarterly updates are a good sign. One update at launch followed by silence is not.

Bucket 3: Behavioral safety

This is the bucket that catches parents off guard, usually the ones who arrived worrying about radiation.

Less screen than you’d think

A well-designed kids’ watch involves surprisingly little screen time. The screen is tiny, the battery hates heavy use, and there’s no app store engineered to hold attention. Kids check the time, send a voice message, fiddle with the watch face, and move on with their day.

That advantage is fragile, though. Give a tween a Wear OS device with a real app marketplace and you’ve handed them a small phone, with all the screen-time dynamics that follow. The WHO, the Dutch JGZ and the American Academy of Pediatrics all land in roughly the same place on this: the type of screen activity matters more than the raw minutes. Calling grandma is interactive and developmentally fine. Passive video is the part to limit. A watch that enables the first without the second is structurally the healthier device.

School day disruption

Most schools have device policies now. A watch with a school mode (radios off during set hours, just a clock face showing) keeps your kid compliant without daily nagging from you. Of all the small features in this category, this one earns its keep fastest. If a model aimed at school-age kids doesn’t have it, I’d move on.

Social pressure

A watch is visible, which is the point, but it also means classmates see it. Things other parents have told me: younger kids want to message friends who don’t have watches, and that requires the friend’s parent to cooperate, so have that conversation before the gift gets unwrapped. Older kids can feel babied by a watch when their friends carry phones. That one is a development conversation, not a product flaw. And a flashy watch can attract the wrong kind of playground attention, which is why most kids’ models look deliberately plain. Given two options, pick the plainer one.

How to evaluate any kids’ watch on safety

My working checklist, the one I run against every new model:

Physical. Published SAR figure and CE mark. Documented case and band materials. 5 ATM water resistance, or 3 ATM if swimming is genuinely off the table. A charger in the box with decent strain relief on the cable.

Digital. Parent-approved contact list that hard-blocks unknown numbers. A privacy policy that names the storage location (ideally EEA), the retention period and who has access. No remotely triggered camera or mic without an on-watch indicator. A firmware update shipped within the last six months.

Behavioral. No app store, no open browser. School mode or equivalent quiet hours. Age-appropriate watch faces rather than adult fashion faces marketed at seven-year-olds.

A watch that clears the whole list is a reasonable choice for ages 5 to 13. A watch that misses two or three items isn’t worth the discount, because you’ll end up redoing this whole evaluation in a year.

What this guide isn’t telling you

Some limits worth stating plainly.

I’m not a pediatrician. The WHO, JGZ and AAP references above come from published guidance, and the SAR rules from EU law. The trade-offs and anecdotes come from research and conversations with other parents, which is not the same as clinical advice. If your child has specific medical considerations, a pacemaker, severe contact allergies, sensory differences that make wearables difficult, talk to your huisarts or kinderarts first.

The safest watch is the one you actively manage. None of these devices are safe-and-forget. The contact list, location settings, firmware updates and school-mode hours all need a parent at the wheel. An expensive watch you never configured is less safe than a cheap one you did.

And safety moves. The best contact filtering of 2024 may be mid-pack in 2026. Run the checklist against the model in front of you today, not the one your friend bought two years ago.

Still on the fence after all three buckets? That’s a fair place to be. A smartwatch is real responsibility for both of you. The next post in this series, Best Age for First Smartwatch, looks at the developmental signals that tell you when your child is ready, so the timing gets as much thought as the model.