Trying to get your kid into watches – without putting them off

Shane Hegarty

My 8-year-old daughter has taken to wearing my G-Shock to school. The watch sits on her wrist like a rubber brick. The strap is pulled tight to the last hole, so it loops all the way around until the end sticks up like a black tongue.

It’s about the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.

She wears it because a boy in her class turned up with a kids’ digital watch. She asked for one too, trying the G-Shock for size and deciding that would do nicely. Wearing the G-Shock lends a certain “that’s not a knife, that’s a knife” vibe to things.

“Has anyone at school asked you about your watch?” I ask her.

“Nah,” she says.

Get used to it.

In a world in which most people don’t care about the watches you wear, or your interest in them, I’ve a sense that their kids are often the repository of many watch collectors’ fragile hopes and need to share (often literally) their obsession.

I see people who have bought a watch to mark the birth of their child, intending to one day pass it on in the spirit of the famous Patek ad. Boy, I hope that works out for them. What if you hand your first born that watch – on a big day of their lives, or the last day of yours – and they snort in uncertain gratitude and quietly stick that precious piece in a drawer?

Maybe they won’t care. Or maybe they’ll already be wearing a smartwatch so they’re all good, thanks. Or maybe they just won’t like the watch you bought 21 years ago no matter how much you tell them that having Snoopy on the dial is a really good thing and not like having Mickey Mouse hands and, listen, just stick don’t it on eBay or wherever ok?

My four kids are all too aware of my intent to inculcate them in the ways of the watch. I’ve probably had more conversations with them about watches than I have with anyone else. And by conversations, I mean unprompted TED talks in which they’re not allowed leave until they’ve acknowledged the patina on a dial or the turn of a column wheel through a caseback.

“See the way the light catches the gilt edges of the hands?” I’ll ask.

“If I say yes, will you let me go to the toilet?” they’ll respond.

But I do glimpse sparks of appreciation, most obviously when I’m not trying to force things.

My 16-year-old holds a genuine interest in mechanical watches and particularly likes my oversized but charismatic 1970s Omega Speedsonic. Nevertheless, his ambition to own a Nautilus outstrips his pocket money earning power.

But I’ve learned that when I ask him if he’d like to wear a watch today, or suggest buying one for him, the idea is quickly brushed off. He’ll get his own someday, he says. And I back away for fear of pushing it too far. He gets watches, even if he doesn’t yet wear them.

I find hope in the way my other kids occasionally listen to the ticking of a movement, or in how they wear their own small, cartoon-dial, plastic watches. Or I see it in the way they occasionally wander to the watchbox to pick out a favourite.

That latter behaviour is fraught with danger. One daughter – then 9 – last year burst into a room with my Polerouter flopping on her wrist while declaring “this is shiny”. Coaxing her over so I could remove the delicate piece was the closest I will ever get to bomb disposal.

I gently explained that the watch was all original after nearly 60 years and that daddy was very keen to keep it that way.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

All I can hope is that I’ve given her and her siblings a head start should they ever want to understand. And if all goes well then maybe, someday, they too will bore their kids about watches, just as their old man did to them.