Earlier than I would have liked, but on the other hand… I’m excited?
Call me a bad dad, I guess, because I’ve just ordered phones for my preteen kids. They’re not even out of single digits yet, but… well, let me explain.
Since moving to Berlin, we’ve been impressed with the way young kids make their own way around town. Walking and riding to and from school, picking up a few small grocery items, or wandering off to the park with friends – all the things we used to do as kids, but that are far less common in Australia these days.
Down under, modern media and urban legends have made us so hyper aware of the potential dangers, be it stranger danger or severe injury, that we can’t bear the idea of letting our kids out on their own until they reach a more mature and capable age.
For the most part, the actual dangers are probably far less prominent than we tell ourselves, but it’s hard to ignore the voice in the back of your head – let alone the judgement from society.
Here in Berlin, where kids are broadly expected to be more responsible from a younger age, it’s so much more common to see them out on their own.
My wife and I want that for our kids (hell, why else did we come here?), but we’re struggling to let go of that western-born terror of the risks, so we want at the very least to make sure we can track them and that we can all contact each other as needed.
Obviously a smart tag takes care of the former, and we’ll likely continue to use that approach as a backup, but the latter is important too.
I kicked off that task by looking at the small handful of LTE-enabled smartwatches made for kids, but… as a major gadgethead myself, I find them all terrible. Because they’re not consumer flagships with expensive micronised tech inside, they’re all chunky as hell, and slow, and under-featured, and poorly protected from water.
That’s all fine, of course. They’re only for kids, and they’re bound to get banged around or left behind, and kids shouldn’t expect flagship performance and features.
But I do. For my own interaction with my kids, I do. I feel like that’s a detail these watch brands forget. You can’t type on these things – it’s always just voice messages and emojis. You can’t send images to your kids, and only some of them have cameras, and of course that also makes them even chunkier.
All of this bugs me, and there’s no damn middle ground. There are no ‘slightly’ more expensive and smaller and more capable watches that aren’t an Apple Watch or one of the various middle-tier Android watches.
Funnily enough, an Apple Watch would be ideal in some ways, except that I’m an Android user. Apple allows you to set up an Apple Watch for your kids, connecting them to your iPhone, and enabling cellular connectivity if you’re on the right type of carrier plan.
You can’t do that with Android – Wear OS simply doesn’t offer it as a feature – and so getting the kids Android watches would mean they’d be wearing watches synced to my own Google account rather than their own.
That’s not a huge problem, but I still consider it less than ideal.
The solution
I went with phones instead. The Samsung Galaxy A55, to be exact. It reviews well, and I have an S24 Ultra, so I’m very familiar (and happy) with Samsung’s One UI version of Android.
They’re expensive phones, normally priced at around $850 AUD (€510), but they were 30% off on Amazon so that made it a little easier to stomach. There are cheaper options in the Samsung line, which would have been more sensible, but… well, I’m a crazy guy.
So, now I have everything I want from connectivity with my kids: proper texting, proper photo sharing, excellent parental device management through Google Family Link, cameras for my kids to enjoy and maybe even embrace as a hobby, access to the Google Play store and all the apps I want my kids to have (and none that I don’t approve first).
They won’t be for games – they have Samsung tablets and a Switch at home – but they’ll have their library app (we’re still connected with our municipal library back in Australia), and Google Play Books, the notes app, a drawing app, and so on.
So… I’m pretty happy with this outcome. Let’s see how it goes. I may live to regret it, especially with the many valid concerns about kids having phones at such a young age – but I do believe the negative effects can be very significantly mitigated with proper oversight, which I’ve managed fine so far with their tablets.
Time will tell. Am I a bad dad? Tell me in the comments – but hey, do please be considerate.
Leave a Reply