Smartwatches for kids: Safety tool or surveillance normalizer?

A parent sits down to make a choice that feels impossible: a smartphone for an eleven-year-old feels too much, but complete disconnection feels reckless. The compromise arrives in the form of a smartwatch—a device stripped down to its essentials. No camera. No social media. Just the ability to call home and be called, plus a map showing where the child is at any given moment.

The Ally watch, made by Wexford-based Tunstall Emergency Response in partnership with Dublin technology company Pandu, costs €200 upfront with a €12 monthly SIM card fee. It has a single button on the side. Press it, and the watch dials the primary emergency contact—typically a parent. If that call goes unanswered, it moves down a preset list. The watch accepts incoming calls too, so parents can check in. It tracks steps, monitors heart rate, and includes GPS location sharing through a smartphone app. There's fall detection built in, though it can be disabled. The device was originally designed with elderly users in mind, people who might need help in an emergency, but it's found a second market among parents of younger children.

The appeal is clear: a child gains independence and outdoor freedom while remaining reachable. But the technology carries a question that doesn't have a simple answer. Dr. Colman Noctor, a child psychotherapist and mental health lecturer at SETU Waterford, doesn't dismiss the watch as harmful. He acknowledges that constant location tracking through a wearable is fundamentally different from handing a child a smartphone. The risks aren't equivalent. But he names what troubles him: the normalization of surveillance itself.

Noctor frames the concern not as an immediate problem but as a trajectory. A child who wears a tracking device at eleven, he explains, grows into a teenager at sixteen. By then, friends want to track her. Companies want to track her. Data brokers want her geolocation, her purchases, her financial transactions. The watch isn't the danger—it's the first step down a path where being monitored becomes ordinary, expected, unremarkable. The real work, he suggests, happens in conversation. Parents need to tell their children explicitly: this is about safety, not surveillance. This is about giving you more freedom, not less. And critically, children need to understand that they should never allow anyone else to track them.

Noctor also points to something often overlooked: the same device means different things to different children. A smartwatch that counts steps and monitors heart rate might be useful for a child trying to build healthy habits. Put that same watch on a child with an eating disorder, and it becomes something else entirely—a tool that reinforces harmful patterns. The device's capacity matters less than the vulnerability of the person wearing it.

But Noctor doesn't argue against the watch. Instead, he reframes what makes it worthwhile. If the device allows a child to spend hours outside with friends, playing in real spaces, talking face-to-face, then it's doing something valuable. In a culture where outdoor play and unstructured time with peers are disappearing, anything that encourages that trade-off is worth considering. The cost-benefit analysis tilts toward the watch—not because tracking is harmless, but because the alternative, a child confined indoors, is worse.

The parent takes this advice seriously. There's a conversation with the daughter about what the watch means, about safety versus surveillance, about protecting her own privacy. And the daughter? She enjoys her hours on the nearby green, knowing she can reach her parent instantly if she needs to. The watch becomes what it was designed to be: not a leash, but a bridge between independence and connection.