What to look for when buying your kids headphones?

The best type of headphones for kids and teens don't just sound good. They need to be volume limited too.

It’s hard to find a decent pair of safe headphones for kids from reliable brands and affordable prices. And what does volume limited mean anyways?

So - last year we had a mum contact us. But she wasn't the first.

She called up to ask where to buy the best and safest earphones for her kids, before they left for their holiday.

The family happened to be frequent travellers and did quite a bit of flying too. But the mum just didn't know where to go to ind a decent and affordable pair of safe and reliable headphones for her little girl of 6 and her almost teenage son of 12 years old.

She just wanted to know where to find a decent pair of safe headphones for her kids. And didn't want to buy something from Bose or those expensive ones.

Thats one of the reasons the Cactus Watch family decided to make the call.

We were going to produce our very own range of safe volume limiting headphones and earphones for kids, teens and tweens. Just like we made the decision to bring out our kids smart watch range.

At first it was a bit of a challenge to be honest - as there were many factors in deciding how to go about producing our headphones.

We had questions like: Do we need to take music genre in to consideration? Do we focus on good quality for listening to the wiggles on an iPad? Will the headphones be mainly used at school? Should they be custom designed for travelling long distances? How strong do they need to be? How old should the kids be to wear the headphones? And how do we make our headphones safe?

Safety. That was our entire focus. Protecting the ears of our kids. The level of audio safety, and prevention of hearing loss caused by high volume levels.

We know young kids and children have delicate hearing which needs to be protected from loud noises (unlike our clubbing teens. So volume limited features was the focus we were going to take and prioritise.

Right from the start we had a universal agreement that our headphones would be tailored around safety - and complimented with style and comfort without compromising on sound. Because we know how fussy kids can be - and we weren't interested in producing cheap rubbish that will be used twice.

So the research took quite a while.

We spent time visiting schools, talking to kids, trying out many different styles of headphones with different designs and engineering - and visited many different headphone factories. It was a bigger job than we thought.

All headphones from the top famous brands out there have the price tags for fussy adults - and the audio is not even great - let alone safe for ones ears.

So we spent the past year doing the work required, and managed to find and design exactly what we wanted. And we believe our headphones for children and teens have been a great success.

We came up with a product that sounds good, are totally safe, and affordable too.

If you’re paying super cheap prices for headphones - the chances are they’re not safe for the ears, and it’s not an investment we’d recommend. Go for something with comfort and care - and you’ll see the difference immediately.