Location sharing, crash detection and driving safety — and the balance between oversight and autonomy. Often the phone in their pocket already does it. Here's when it doesn't.
For most families with a teenager, the honest answer is that you don't need a new device. A teen who already carries a phone has location sharing, crash detection and emergency SOS built in, at no extra cost. The questions worth spending time on are how you use them and what you agree with your teenager — both of which matter more to the outcome than any hardware.
Before comparing products, check what's sitting unused on the device they carry everywhere.
| Need | Built-in answer | Cost | When a separate device helps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Know where they are | Find My (Apple) or Google Maps location sharing / Family Link | Free | Rarely. Mainly if the phone is routinely dead or left behind. |
| Car crash alert | Crash Detection on iPhone 14 and later, recent Apple Watch, and Pixel | Free | If they drive and don't carry a recent phone. |
| Emergency SOS | Hold side buttons on any modern phone or smartwatch | Free | Watch is faster to reach than a pocketed phone. |
| Driving behaviour | Apple/Android driving-focus modes; insurer telematics apps | Free or insurer-linked | Insurer programmes can cut premiums — but read the data terms. |
| Screen time limits | Screen Time (iOS) or Family Link (Android) | Free | Almost never. Paid parental control apps collect far more. |
The genuine case for a smartwatch at this age is usually not safety. It's sport, sleep, notifications without the phone, or swimming — ordinary reasons to want a watch. That's fine. It just isn't the same purchase as a safety device, and it shouldn't be sold to you as one.
Crash Detection genuinely works, and it has summoned help for people who couldn't. It also misfires in ways worth knowing about before you rely on it.
Apple's implementation has repeatedly triggered on skiing falls and rollercoasters. One Colorado dispatch centre, Summit County 911, fielded 71 automated crash alerts from phones and watches at four ski areas. Dispatchers in Ohio reported the same pattern from an amusement park. Apple has acknowledged the problem and tuned the algorithm, but the physics are hard: a heavy fall and a low-speed collision look similar to an accelerometer.
What this means practically: teach your teenager what the alert screen looks like and how to cancel it, and know that an unanswered alert may send responders to a mountainside. Useful feature, imperfect sensor — treat it as a backstop, not a guarantee.
This is the part product pages never discuss, and it's the part that determines whether tracking helps or backfires. Roughly half of US parents report using location-tracking apps on their adolescents, so the research base is now reasonably solid.
The practical implication: if you use location sharing, make it mutual and make it known. Covert tracking is the version most likely to damage the relationship, and it's also the version most likely to be discovered.
Two cellular watches can look identical and be very different underneath. One sold through a mobile operator has passed PTCRB certification and that operator's own testing and data-handling requirements. One bought on a marketplace has usually cleared only FCC radio authorisation — the legal minimum, which says nothing about encryption, data retention or who holds the data. Nothing on the box distinguishes them. How to tell the difference →
Teen tracking mostly runs through apps rather than dedicated hardware, which moves the risk from the device to the data.
The clearest case is Life360. A 2021 investigation by The Markup found the app — then used by around 33 million people and marketed for tracking children — was selling precise location data to roughly a dozen data brokers. The company stopped selling to most of them a month later, moving to aggregated data with one partner while continuing to supply precise location to Arity, an Allstate company. A class action followed, and US regulators approached the company for information about its data practices.
The lesson isn't "avoid one app." It's that a free or cheap family-safety service has to make money somewhere, and continuous location on millions of teenagers is a saleable asset. Before installing anything, read what the privacy policy says about sale, sharing and retention — and prefer the platform's own built-in sharing, which isn't monetised that way.
The device restrictions covering younger children apply just as much to secondary schools. As of December 2025, 35 states and Washington, D.C. have laws or policies on student device use, many written bell-to-bell and many naming smartwatches alongside phones. A watch bought so a teenager can be reached during the day may well have to be off for that whole day.
Assessments for this segment will cover the built-in platform tools alongside paid alternatives, with each app's data practices — retention, sharing, sale — stated plainly. The weekly brief is where they land first.
No prevention claims. No app or device prevents a collision, an assault or any other harm. Location sharing and crash detection can shorten the time before someone gets help. That is a real benefit, and it is a different claim.