How kids’ smartwatches led to anxiety, addiction, and crime
The world needs to learn from China’s bad example.
Should kids wear a smartwatch? Strapping a tracker to a child’s wrist appeals to parents, especially if it also allows communication. It’s comforting to be able to check kids’ location and reach them at any time.
Watches are potentially much better for kids than carrying a smartphone. But in the US, smartphones are clearly the more popular choice. Being able to track and contact kids is a big reason for parents to give their child a phone.
So parents have a choice: smartwatch or phone? Most pick the phone. Only around 7% of American kids under 12 wear a smartwatch.
Despite the generally emerging consensus that smartphones are bad for kids under 12 and social networks harmful before the age of 16, kids are still carrying them. According to Pew Research, around 23% of American children 12 or younger own their own smartphone. Nearly 10% of kids under the age of 8 have their own phone.
Experts say the risks for children owning and using smartphones include worsened mental health, anxiety, sleep problems, low self-esteem, social isolation, attention problems, higher risk for cyberbullying, and less emotional resilience.
The simple truth is that by trying to protect kids from harm with a smartphone, parents are actually putting them at risk for other harms.
Also: The reason smartphones beat watches in the US is clear. Kids really want phones, mainly for social networking and messaging apps, and beg their parents for one. American kids don’t beg their parents for a smartwatch.
Smartwatches provide a solution for parents: They enable them to reach and track, without the risks of a smartphone. But that’s not how it works in China.
The Chinese smartwatch problem
Smartwatches for kids in China are very popular. Some 170 million children between the ages of 5 and 12 — around one-third — wear smartwatches.
The most popular brand by far is a company called Xiaotiancai (pronounced shau-tien-tsai), which means “Little Genius.” (It’s a brand under the BBK Electronics group that also owns smartphone makers Vivo and Oppo.)
Xiaotiancai found the key to making smartwatches liked by kids: social networking. The watches let users capture contacts or “friend” other kids by tapping them together. It also offers “micro-chatting” — a closed WhatsApp-like messaging platform.
Over time, Xiaotiancai added game-like features: levels that go up with use, points for adding friends, badge systems, and public measures of likes and popularity that work like visible rankings in a game. Around 2021, the company raised the maximum user level from 26 to 60, and by 2023 some users were posting screenshots of having reached level 60, celebrating the achievement just like gamers celebrate reaching a final tier.
That mix of communication and gamification has turned the watches into a new kind of high-pressure social space. Xiaotiancai’s “watch circles” let children post updates and see their friends’ status messages on the tiny screen, much like a simple Instagram or WeChat feed made just for kids.
Likes act like a type of currency: children compare total likes on their homepages, compete to raise their counts, and talk about “big shots” whose accounts have huge amounts like 600,000 to over 2 million likes. By 2021, having tens of thousands could put someone in “big shot” territory; by the mid-2020s the unofficial threshold had climbed to about 600,000 to 800,000 likes or more, reflecting both the growing user base and the escalation of competition. Kids track “lists” of big shots, sharing names of top users—often junior high or high school students between about 11 and 17 years old—whose accounts are treated like celebrities within the watch ecosystem.
Not having a Xiaotiancai watch can mean being left out of social circles in the same way that not having an iPhone — showing up as a green bubble on the iMessage platform — can be socially stigmatizing in American high schools.
The social hierarchy is not only visible on the watch but also shows up in real life: those with high like counts and “big shot” status are seen as popular, while children with low numbers feel left out, anxious, or pressured to chase higher metrics.
Some kids go online to ask strangers to help her increase their numbers, and many spend all their free time working hard to get more likes.
This need to be seen and to fit in has created room for a whole underground industry. On popular online shopping sites like Taobao and the secondhand marketplace Xianyu, sellers openly offer services linked to Xiaotiancai accounts: selling fully built-up accounts with large like totals, selling automated “bots” that can drive up likes, and offering “account management” where someone runs a child’s account for a weekly fee to raise its rank.
For some Chinese kids, this has become a way to make money. A Shanghai teenager known in these circles as a “big shot” named Qian Mo reportedly made over $8,000 in one year by selling bots that boost likes and related services.
Participants have even created their own jargon to describe their practices. “Brushing” means adding someone as a friend, liking their homepage a lot, then deleting them right away, a quick swap of attention without any real connection. A “backdoor” friend is someone you promise not to delete even after many likes are exchanged. Rules like “no freeloading” punish kids who try to benefit from a group’s friend network without contributing their own likes, reinforcing a quasi‑market logic inside what looks like a school-age social graph.
Alongside the “homepage circle” where likes and status matter most, other subcultures have formed, including a “hacking circle” of kids who tinker with the watch operating system to break through parental controls. Some in the hacking circle post tutorials online on how to “flash” the watch to bypass restrictions and effectively turn the device into a small smartphone that can install broader apps, a practice that continually adapts as the manufacturer updates its firmware.
The hacking circle produced figures like an anonymous technician known by the initials HL, seen as a top “expert” able to exploit bugs in Xiaotiancai’s closed system and develop powerful bots for inflating likes. According to stories from teens in the trade, HL’s “homepage bot” became one of the most popular tools on the market, sold through layers of agents that took commissions on each sale.
Qian Mo told the Chinese media she fell into conflict with her agents, who allegedly spread rumors that she was cheating clients, leading to harassment and abuse from other users. Other kids have impersonated big shots to defraud buyers, for example by pretending to be Qian Mo and selling fake services, or by borrowing money from multiple contacts under false pretenses and then disappearing.
Parents who discover this world often feel blindsided, because the watch appears to be a contained, child‑friendly device. Some have reported disputes over secret spending, where their children used parents’ linked payment accounts to buy bots or services to boost likes without permission.
A Beijing mother named Jin Ceyuan told Sixth Tone that every hour her child spends staring at the watch comes at the expense of learning, play, and family time, calling the device “a thief of childhood.”
Xiaotiancai has responded to parental pushback by saying that many of its social features can be disabled and that parents can configure the device more strictly.
The smartwatch conundrum
Parents find themselves in a tough spot. They might know that some smartwatches on the market are much safer for kids than smartphones. (The top brands available in the US are Verizon Gizmo Watch 3, TickTalk 5, COSMO JrTrack 5, myFirst Fone R2, Gabb Watch 3e, Bark Watch, Garmin Bounce, Fitbit/Google Ace LTE, Xplora X6 Play, and others.)
But kids don’t want them as much as they want smartphones. And if kids aren’t excited by some killer app on the watches, they won’t wear them even if parents buy them and make them put them on before leaving the house.
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What this really shows is that we can’t build a sealed, “safe” world for kids—not with phones, not with watches, not with whatever comes next. The same forces eventually show up: comparison, popularity, being measured and ranked. We’re not choosing between danger and protection so much as choosing whether we raise children who can see the system for what it is.
That’s why I appreciate what my child’s school is doing with Chatter Box. It’s an open-source voice assistant the students actually build and program themselves. They aren’t just users—they’re the ones deciding how it listens, what data it collects, and what it responds to. And once they’ve had that experience, it’s a very small step to understanding algorithms built for engagement, how platforms tune themselves to hook you, and how “likes” or “popularity metrics” aren’t reflections of who you are—they’re tools designed to influence your behavior.
When kids know how the machinery works, it loses its magic. Social media stops being something to chase or fear and becomes just another system they can understand, question, and navigate on their own terms.
We can’t keep technology away from childhood. But we can raise kids who are literate enough not to be shaped by it without their consent.