Here's a Simple Parental Lock for Your Apple Watch - MacRumors
Skip to Content

Here's a Simple Parental Lock for Your Apple Watch

by

Anyone who looks after children knows how fascinating an illuminated display is to a baby or toddler. When it's an interactive touchscreen that's strapped to your wrist, the intrigue

improvised parental lock apple watch
If your Apple Watch has proven a bit too attractive to little fingers and you're worried they'll unintentionally send a message, mess up your notification settings, or worse, here's a quick trick that you can use whenever their interest is piqued.

It only takes a second to perform, and with a little luck, it will make your smartwatch a little less interesting – until they get old enough to figure out how to reverse what you've done!

  1. Bring up the Control Center on your ‌Apple Watch by pressing the Side button.
  2. Tap the Water Lock icon (it looks like a water droplet).
    water lock

And that's it! Of course, we're improvising here by using the Water Lock feature, which is intended to be used when you're swimming (it locks the screen so you can swim without water activating it). But it works great as a quick parental lock, too, because your watch remains unresponsive to taps by tots for as long as it's enabled.

It's also easily turned off – if you know how. Simply press and hold the Digital Crown. You'll see an animation on the screen indicating that the speaker is being cleared of water after your "swim." Keep turning it until you hear the beeping tone rise in pitch, and your Apple Watch touchscreen will return to its normal responsive state.
Apple Watch

If your little one got bored and is having a nap, just be sure to disable the Water Lock feature in another room, as it can be a bit noisy.

Popular Stories

iPhone 18 Pro Deep Red Feature

iPhone 18 Pro Launching Later This Year With These 12 New Features

Wednesday March 18, 2026 7:39 am PDT by
While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are not expected to launch for another six months or so, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices. It was initially reported that the iPhone 18 Pro models would have fully under-screen Face ID, with only a front camera visible in the top-left corner of the screen. However, the latest rumors indicate that only one Face ID component...
Apple Logo Sketch Feature

Apple Has Now Unveiled Eight New Products This Month

Tuesday March 17, 2026 9:25 am PDT by
Apple has unveiled a whopping eight new products so far this March, including an iPhone 17e, iPad Air models with the M4 chip, MacBook Air models with the M5 chip, MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, an updated Studio Display, a higher-end Studio Display XDR, and now the AirPods Max 2 this week. iPhone 17e features the same overall design as the iPhone 16e, but it gains Apple's...
ios 26 4 yellow

Here Are Apple's Release Notes for iOS 26.4

Wednesday March 18, 2026 11:56 am PDT by
Apple provided developers and public beta testers with the release candidate versions of iOS 26.4 and iPadOS 26.4, which means we're going to see a public launch as soon as next week. The RC versions of the software include Apple's official release notes, giving us final details on what's included in the update. Apple Music - Playlist Playground (beta) generates a playlist from your...