Written by Kalley Huang and Brian X. Chen
Florian Fangohr waffled for about a year over whether to buy an Apple Watch SE as a gift. The smartwatch cost $279, and he worried that its recipient would immediately break or lose it. In May, he decided the benefits outweighed the costs and bought the gadget.
The beneficiary: his 8-year-old son, Felix.
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Fangohr, a 47-year-old product designer in Seattle, said he was aware that many people were pessimistic about technology’s creep into children’s lives. But “within the framework of the watch, I don’t feel scared,” he said. “I want him to explore.”
Felix, a rising third grader, said he actually wanted a smartphone.
“But the watch is still really, really nice,” he said.
Across the United States, parents are increasingly buying Apple Watches and strapping them onto the wrists of children as young as 5. The goal: to use the devices as a stopgap cellphone for the kids. With the watch’s cellular abilities, parents can use it to reach and track their children, while the miniature screens mitigate issues like internet addiction.
Children and teenagers appear to have become a disproportionately large market for smartwatches as a whole. In a 2020 survey of American teenagers by the investment bank Piper Sandler, 31% said they owned a smartwatch. That same year, 21% of adults in the United States said they owned one, according to the Pew Research Center.
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The use of smartwatches as a children’s gadget shows how the audience for a consumer technology product can morph in unexpected ways. It has also given new life to the Apple Watch, which was ..
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