“It felt like I was opening Pandora’s box, when it wasn’t absolutely necessary,” he says of purchasing a smartwatch. (Still, she hasn’t completely given up on technology. Her daughter now rides her bike with a Wi-Fi-only tablet, connects it to the Internet when she arrives at a friend’s house, and messages her mother on Facebook Messenger Kids to inform you. she arrived safely.)
The potential drawbacks of using smartwatches go beyond stunting character growth. Although smartwatches are virtually unexplored in academic research and will require more study before anyone can conclusively say how they may affect children and childhood, it is clear that screens, in general, can cause harm to children, argues Perry of Children and Screens.
“They interfere with many aspects of child development,” he says, listing a few examples: cognitive development, language development, social-emotional and behavioral development, and mental health.
It is true that the screen of a smart watch is much smaller than that of a phone. Its functionalities are more limited. Some of the “irresistible” qualities of other devices are missing from smartwatches, Perry admits. And while most kids’ smartwatches come with games, they can be difficult to use and may discourage kids from playing for long periods of time or even not playing at all.
Still, that doesn’t make smartwatches safe from some of the addictive and distracting tendencies of phones, experts say. The watches vibrate, ring and ping with notifications. They, like other devices, are built with a persuasive design.
“The evidence is very clear that notifications (the visual cues to look at the clock) are really disruptive and provide a real distraction from something else the child should be doing,” Perry says.
Teachers and school leaders would attest to this.
“They’re disruptive and distracting,” says Joseph, the district leader in Maine. “All of this just interferes with what teachers are trying to do.”
She doesn’t consider watches and phones to be completely different from each other, especially in middle school and high school settings where, increasingly, students have both devices with them during the school day. A phone can be tucked away out of sight, but the watch on a student’s wrist will still vibrate with news alerts, incoming text messages and photos, social media notifications, and the like.
The Joseph School District, RSU 1, which encompasses a small coastal region of Maine, updated their device policy over the summer, at a time when many schools and districts opted to do the same. Except, unlike RSU 1, most districts are focused strictly on the potential harms of smartphones, several people shared in interviews. Their revised policies may not even mention smartwatches, creating a loophole for those devices.