How to Improvise a Parental Lock For Your Apple Watch

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, you can easily multiply that intrigue by a factor of ten!

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: Swipe up on a watch face, or when in an app, press the bottom edge of the screen then drag up the Control Center.
2. Tap the Water Lock icon (it looks like a water droplet).
   

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 for as long as it's enabled.

It's also easily turned off – if you know how. Simply turn 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.

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's kind of noisy.