You can track the watch as long as it is the vicinity of an internet enabled device on the Find My network.
Also worth noting is that real-time position updates will only happen with an active network connection on the device itself. Otherwise, you’ll just get the last-known position.
Plus, there are two tracking methods. One is FindMy, which is, by nature and design, intermittent on devices without a network connection. If an Apple device with an active network connection comes into range of a trackable device long enough to (securely, anonymously) talk to each other, the location will update. The other is “share my location,” which is an active live update that requires your watch and / or phone to have a working network connection.
I don’t think you’d find FindMy very useful for knowing where your child is for the purposes of coordinating pickups. Its intended use case is to … well … find something you lost. It’ll get you close to the last known location, at which point you can either use precision Bluetooth tracking to actually find it (if the device supports it) or have it play a sound. Think, “I dropped my wallet in the parking lot,” not, “Let me know when my kid is a mile away from the bus stop.”
What I would recommend instead would be to get a cellular-enabled watch for the child and set it up as a child account under your own account. Your child will then have a quite capable mobile phone which will work great for calls and messaging (and, oh-by-the-way, location tracking), but which won’t work at all for TikTok and similar social media (which is presumably what you’re looking to avoid). It’s also a speakerphone (with no other option), so there’s no incentive to have inappropriate conversations with it (at least, not within earshot of others).
Cheers,
b&
P.S. I’m highly skeptical of the modern expectation of parents tracking children at all times, but that’s a different topic, for when you get off my lawn. b&
