Law

Children's smart watches should return to a safety oriented approach

2026-01-28   

Nowadays, some children's smartwatches are increasingly showing a trend towards "mobile phone" features, such as adding friends through "touch", liking on the homepage circle, and developing virtual pets. This tool, originally intended to safeguard security, is gradually being transformed into a complex "mini phone", which not only causes problems such as addiction and comparison, but also breeds gray industry chains and information security risks. When the small watch face becomes a "virtual social battlefield" for children, how to define boundaries, purify the ecology, and return to safety has become an urgent growth challenge that needs to be solved. The deviation of children's watches from "mobile phone" is actually a mismatch between the expansion of product functions and the growth patterns of children. At the behavioral level, overloaded social entertainment functions continuously erode children's focus and time management abilities; At the level of values, the social mechanism centered on likes and virtual badges invisibly binds children's self-worth to virtual symbols too early, promoting a trend of comparison and weakening their willingness to engage in real-life interactions; At the security level, functional vulnerabilities give rise to multiple hidden dangers, directly threatening the physical and mental health of minors. Behind the chaos lies the short-sighted pursuit of profit by enterprises, the long-term absence of industry standards, and the alienation and exploitation of children's social needs. Some manufacturers, in order to compete for the market, deviate from the original intention of "safety first" and blindly stack social, entertainment, consumption and other functions, treating the children's market as a traffic depression and ignoring social responsibility and legal red lines. At the same time, the industry has long lacked mandatory national standards, resulting in regulatory gaps in information security, functional boundaries, and anti addiction, leading to chaos. From a psychological perspective, children's natural social needs are guided towards virtual dependence by electronic products, especially in situations where there is insufficient physical companionship, making them more susceptible to "digital addiction". Not long ago, the mandatory national standard "Safety Technical Requirements for Children's Watches" was released, providing a key pivot for industry governance. This standard sets red lines from the dimensions of physical security, information security, and anti addiction, explicitly prohibiting the pre installation of applications that affect children's physical and mental health, strengthening parental control permissions, and requiring the establishment of exclusive content pools suitable for children, providing a basis for product "load reduction" and ecological purification. The standard life lies in execution. Regulatory authorities should take this as an opportunity to promote dynamic supervision throughout the entire chain: strict compliance review of front-end products, urging enterprises to eliminate suggestive designs; Severely crack down on gray products such as backend likes and account sales, cracking surveillance, etc., cut off the interest chain, and form an effective deterrent. To bring children's smartwatches back to the safety standard, it is particularly necessary for regulators, businesses, families, schools, and all sectors of society to form a collaborative governance force. Production enterprises should abandon the logic of "functional competition", adhere to the principle of "child friendliness", focus on core security functions such as positioning and emergency calls, and effectively fulfill their main responsibility for protecting minors' networks. Home and school should work together to enrich the real-life growth environment for children: parents should not only make good use of management tools, but also provide companionship and diverse offline activities to help children establish real social bonds and a sense of achievement; Schools should strengthen online literacy education and cultivate children's rational social concepts and information discernment abilities. When the real world is filled and warm enough, virtual symbols will lose their excessive appeal. The value of technological products lies not in the complexity of their functions, but in whether they truly safeguard their growth. In the wave of digitization, we do not need to reject the integration of technology into childhood, but we must adhere to the fundamental principle of 'maximizing children's interests'. Only by developing with strict standards and norms, guiding corporate behavior with responsibility ethics, and solidifying the foundation of growth with warm companionship, can children's watches break free from the trend of "mobile phone" and truly become reliable partners for children's safe and healthy growth. (New Society)

Edit:Yiyi Responsible editor:Jiajia

Source:legaldaily

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