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#kids#where#phone#watch#apple#device#don#erica#notification#kid
Discussion (44 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
It's a kid tracker / ankle bracelet in an attractive form factor.
I was a kid in the 80s, city fringe, single parent who worked until 5:30. Honestly nobody had any idea where me & my friends were a lot of the time. Totally acceptable in that era.
The main worry I have about tech like this is, at what saturation of deployment does the norm shift such that it's irresponsible NOT to electronically track your kids whenever they leave the house?
There was a case recently where parents were charged with felony involuntary manslaughter, and felony child neglect because they let their 10 and 7 year cross the street unsupervised and a car hit them and the 7 year old died. As a parent if that’s the reality I definitely hesitate to allow my son out unsupervised when he’s a bit older. I can’t imagine losing your son in an accident and then have the state come down on you while you’re still grieving.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/06/opinion/children-traffic-...
It is a different world now. Not everyone cares about the tracking, though it is nice to have for younger kids who may go on a field trip or with a group of friends and get separated or any number of normal situations.
What’s become the “irresponsible norm” is to not give your kids a phone, which is crazy, because it’s just giving tech companies the ability to manipulate kids.
(disclosure: my 8 and 10 year old have them, works great for everyone involved)
It ends up being less "tracker" and more "if they really really need me they can get me". It's win win - they get to do more, and I get to feel better.
I'm kind of annoyed with "schooltime" on the phone, it has a fixed (boring) watch face, it doesn't actually stop a kid from exiting schooltime, they just have to press a button and we can see if she did it in the app. It's also either on on a weekly schedule or totally off, so she has to whine at me to turn off schooltime on holidays and then it's easy to forget to turn it back on. There's also no provision for multiple family members to manage kid watches. I set up her watch so my wife can't also manage it. Also, there's no way for me to install apps. I'd really like to install Home Assistant on her watch so she can unlock doors, but...I can't. Can't be done.
Overall I'd say they built out a nice system for a while and then...stopped. I bet there's a PM at Apple that had the rest of the features all ready to go and then got moved off onto the Vision Pro or something. Every now and then they're talking to their old teammate and they sigh about what it could have been. I'll buy them a beer sometime.
Also do you need an iPhone to manage the kid's Apple Watch or can you do this with a PC (web UI somewhere? apple.com?) or Android device etc? This is very important, if they're billing it as a safety device for kids, interacting with/reading data from the safety device should NOT require a _specific model_ of separate device. I should be able to do it from anywhere.
And we have an iPad Air for educational work, which get used daily. It's not about the money per se.
Additionally Apple isn't very good in proper parental controls compared to family link on Android. Abysmal at best. So, why would I buy another Apple product with probably the same bad UX for me as a parent?
Not gonna happen.
I see, either everything one here goes to preppy schools, in a perfect Montessori world, vs others working three jobs to pay mortgage and 2 cars.
And the solution is apple watch.
Now I try to avoid the temptation of control, I have the tools and the skills to easily do it, and it's a daily struggle to say "let them go"
Furthermore, my parents couldn’t track me, but I guarantee if I came home 2 hours later than I said I would I was getting grounded unless I had a REALLY good excuse.
Bad things can and do happen to children, but nearly not as much to warrant tracking them. Even if it were, I'd be reluctant to say that this is okay
Yes its unlikely something bad would happen. It's also unlikely that you would get into a life threatening car accident. But you still wear a seatbelt. Why? Because it's the precautionary principle, pretty much common sense.
Yes in the past we let children wander, but if you asked those parents in the past if there was some very low cost way to afford additional security like knowing where your 10 year old is, they would obviously take it. But for some reason people take the wrong lessons from the past.
Anyway I agree with you in general! But don’t forget that everyone has a different relationship with their kids and each kid is different. Believe it or not, not every teenager goes through a rebellious phase. some kids might actually appreciate a watch like this because mom and dad will pester them less and be less anxious in general.
Of course the main issue is the person purchasing the watch is the parent, and some parents don’t really respect their children’s feelings. It can definitely be a problem so I hear what you’re saying. It can be used in a way that takes away their freedom. That’s not cool.
another consideration: this device can be a bridge from a dumb phone to a smart-ish device, a device that’s not an actual smart phone.
When I click on that square it says:
> See everyone’s location using the Find My app. And receive alerts when they arrive at their destination or get home. Parents can also get alerts when their child leaves a location, like school.
So the image shows a notification, but it claims to be possible to inspect their location at any time too.
Is it? I would think that the useful notification would be “Erica didn’t make it to school safely”. A notification that kids are where they are expected to be will needlessly distract parents many millions of times, and may cause anxiety every time it’s a few minutes late. I think it would be a net loss to society.
Luckily, I don’t think that image shows a notification. AFAICT, it’s a response from a user actively asking their phone where that watch is.
That’s an excellent point actually. 100%. I don’t think FindMy can support something like that today which is unfortunate. I think the parent could create an ios shortcut that runs at a certain time every day, but that’s a lot of work lol.
> Luckily, I don’t think that image shows a notification.
It certainly does. It even say “time sensitive”, which is how ios annotates important notifications for a few years now. The FindMy app can also answer the “where is erica?” question (through siri), so i can see why it’s confusing.
What do you mean exactly? Is it really a "bridge from/to" or rather a "compromise between"?
Thank you for the comment. I did notice that it was a notification, though.
It is an useful feature, but I don't think this is a good trade-off. Some Erica's might skip school and do some dumb and unsafe things, but I think this bit of privacy and autonomy is actually necessary for a good life
I’m not prescribing how others should run their families or what a good life means. :)
For example my kid is still young. I absolutely plan to use FindMy for peace of mind. Not to spy on them daily, but to quickly check where they are if they’re running 30 min or 60 min behind schedule. Like if they said they’d be home by x time. When they get older (maybe 14?) i’d flip it around and encourage them to disable location sharing with me most of the time, for privacy and autonomy, and ask them to intentionally use the “share location for 1 hour” feature when they want me to know their location. Like when they are in an uber, or walking home late at night from a friends house, etc.
We bought cheapo dumb phones for our kids and they'd never remember to take them with them, but once we were forced to get them smart phones suddenly that was never a problem.
And by forced I mean the endless wearing down of the whining and crying and petulance because all their friends had smartphones. Ugh, one of many occasions where I failed as a parent.