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It often seems that analog wristwatches have gone the way of the landline, the film camera, and the crowded indoor restaurant. And while you may be resigned to telling time with your phone, there’s still a chance for your kid to get a kick out of an old-school analog watch. Kids watches are not only a very cool accessory (and one with a low risk of getting lost, since they’re tethered to their hands), but the best kids watches help children understand the progression of their day in hours and minutes, and help them learn the fundamentals of telling time in a much more direct way than a  smartphone or digital clock.

Kids start grasping the concept of time (though it remains somewhat abstract) around the first grade, and time becomes continually integrated into their daily lives. To help them make the connection, look for a kids watch with a face that’s big, bright, and easy to read. A band that’s cool and on-trend doesn’t hurt either.

So the next time you tell your kid they have six minutes until their Zoom class starts, they’ll know that you’re talking about something concrete, instead of some ephemeral concept, and you won’t have to nag to get things running on schedule. Just kidding: You’ll still have to nag.

CONNECTING EVERY POSSIBLE device in our lives to the internet has always represented a security risk. But that risk is far more pronounced when it involves a smartwatch strapped to your child's wrist. Now, even after years of warnings about the security failings of many of those devices, one group of researchers has shown that several remain appallingly easy for hackers to abuse.

In a paper published late last month, researchers at the Münster University of Applied Sciences in Germany detailed their testing of the security of six brands of smartwatches marketed for kids. They're designed to send and receive voice and text messages, and let parents track their child's location from a smartphone app. The researchers found that hackers could abuse those features to track a target child's location using the watch's GPS in five out of the six brands of watch they tested. Several of the watches had even more severe vulnerabilities, allowing hackers to send voice and text messages to children that appear to come from their parents, to intercept communications between parents and children, and even to record audio from a child's surroundings and eavesdrop on them. The Münster researchers shared their findings with the smartwatch companies in April, but say that several of the bugs they disclosed have yet to be fixed.