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!

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: 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).
    Apple Watch

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 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's kind of noisy.

Popular Stories

maxresdefault

Apple Announces 'Let Loose' Event on May 7 Amid Rumors of New iPads

Tuesday April 23, 2024 7:11 am PDT by
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple Silicon AI Optimized Feature Siri

Apple Releases Open Source AI Models That Run On-Device

Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
iOS 18 Siri Integrated Feature

iOS 18 Rumored to Add These 10 New Features to Your iPhone

Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Apple Vision Pro Dual Loop Band Orange Feature 2

Apple Cuts Vision Pro Shipments as Demand Falls 'Sharply Beyond Expectations'

Tuesday April 23, 2024 9:44 am PDT by
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
iPad And Calculator App Feature 1

Apple Finally Plans to Release a Calculator App for iPad Later This Year

Tuesday April 23, 2024 9:08 am PDT by
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...