Your handle says it all and I'm sure you don't have kids either - put your tinfoil hat back on and go back to your Y2k bunker mate!
Funny. I was pretty sure I had two kids, both grade school age. Neither one has a phone, though we're reaching a point where I'll probably put a SIM card in a flip phone I have laying around (not my daily carry one, another one I'd experimented with - wasn't suited to daily carry, but is fine for family use) for them to share as needed. It wouldn't be bad to have a "house line" either that people can give out if they're over at our house with phones silenced or turned off - "In case you really need me, this # will ring through" sort of thing like we all used to do.
I'm trying to think of kids/teens in my general social circles that have cell phones, and I really can only think of one. Even the teenagers I know (young to mid teens) don't have their own phones, they use the "family phone" if needed when they're out and about. I'm sure a few others have them, but they don't pull them out on any regular basis. I'd guess that most of the >16 year olds I know have their own phone, but certainly not all. Smartwatches are a tiny bit more common, but I mostly see them on adults.
I certainly don't feel the need to track my kids constantly, and I think it's exceedingly unhealthy for kids to grow up in that sort of environment, where it's simply expected that they're always tracked, monitored, logged, behaviorally collected, and that sort of rubbish. I try to poison my kids against that - "Spot the couples on a date at restaurants staring at their phones instead of interacting with each other" is a fun hobby, and we're very much a paper book sort of family. I've been moving away from the e-ink readers as well over time, back to paper form books.
In any case, I don't think a watch remains as bad as a phone, but to give kids a watch as a gateway drug into a phone ecosystem seems absurd to me. The data is long since in on the impacts of phones on teenagers, and it's an absolute horror show of a train wreck. I have great hope that the generation currently growing into teenagers will (and is) rejecting that sort of rubbish, having seen what it did to the previous generation, and also to the boomer relatives who have turned into disturbing zombie screen slaves.