Parents Keep Making Two Google Accounts For Their Kids Because of a Deeply Silly Restriction. I'm One of Them.

It's an easy mistake to make. In this case, Google makes something frustrating, while Apple and Microsoft make it profoundly easy.

Photo by Christian Wiediger on Unsplash

One of the first suggested searches for “turn google account into” is “into child account.” Huh. The resulting is threads with parents frustrated, without a solution.

• ‘It should not be a big deal to make it work.”

• “Had same problem and accidently got my son's account deleted along with all his stuff.”

• “Why make it so hard, when Microsoft makes it so easy?”

The problem is simple: with Google, a “normal” account cannot become a “child” account managed using the Family Link services that I was just praising on here!

Instead, you have parents trying to trick Google’s services and watching accounts get banned and losing data. Or making a “normal” account managed by Family Link, but without the benefits that come from the age range services that Google also offers.

The vast majority of these parents arrived here the exact same way that I did. My oldest has two email addresses through Google’s Gmail services—entirely by accident.

It’s silly, but it goes back to an error I made when my daughter was born that doesn’t feel like my fault! Like a lot of parents, I registered an email address with their name.

1. Email might be less important, but they might want one with their name!

2. I knew that, eventually, I’d need to register accounts for her under something.

3. My wife and I have Gmail accounts, so we can make her part of our family.

Reasonable, right? Well…it was until YouTube—real YouTube—entered our lives.

Even if your house is full of Apple devices, it’s impossible to avoid Google. They own YouTube! Every parent will grapple with YouTube. Watch it less, watch it more, watch it with restrictions, without restrictions. YouTube comes for every parent.

A huge part of Crossplay is talking through the complications of digital lives for children and adults, and trying to navigate how platforms handle them. It’s Apple accounts talking to Google talking to talking to Microsoft. It’s a lot to juggle.

The irony, of course, is that Apple and Microsoft make this easy. You simply change the ages of the child, sometimes requiring approval by the child or parent. All done!

You do not have this option with Google.

All platforms have friction. I wrote, for example, how Apple handles the simple act of locking a child’s device, like an iPad. In short, you can’t! At least, not without jumping through a lot of hoops buried settings, whereas Google’s Family Link app is simple.

I click a button, the device locks. Not so with a child’s age, however.

Photo by Igor Starkov on Unsplash

For years, my oldest was content with YouTube Kids. There’s been plenty written about YouTube Kids’s issues and it’s still not without weirdness, but that’s mostly what I’ve seen these days: weirdness, not harm. Which is all to say that when I need my children to be mindlessly distracted, they often spend time on YouTube Kids.

Eventually, my oldest started running into problems. She’d enjoy a creator, only to find you couldn’t access many of their videos on YouTube Kids. In theory that’s great, because it’s allowing some videos and filtering out others! But when I’d done enough research to determine a creator was fine, I wanted to give her permission to watch them, and the solution to that problem meant graduating my oldest to “real” YouTube.

I use “real” in quotes because even regular YouTube offers layers of control to parents, notably filtering videos based on age ranges. This all required a child Google account, but I shouldn’t have a problem! I got my kid an account years ago, right?!

But it wasn’t the correct account. Again: Google allows a “child” account to become an “adult” account over time, but you can’t turn an “adult” account into a “child” account.

How many duplicate emails exist in Google’s database because of this? It’s silly.]

Once it’s set up properly, YouTube and Google offer layers of appreciated nuance. Her account has her birthday, telling the companies she is eight years old, but “real” YouTube doesn’t have age filters until age nine. Rather than tell me and my child no, I simply have to acknowledge that I’m allowing her into a bracket that’s older. Voila.

Truthfully, if my daughter ends up with an email address she cares about, it will probably not be one I registered for her. It’ll be more personal and arcane, because what is youth on the internet, if not picking a nickname that haunts you for decades?

Have a story idea? Want to share a tip? Got a funny parenting story? Drop Patrick an email.

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Also:

• My online nickname as a kid was “eXtremer.” Yes, with a capital X. The worst. Thankfully, someone gave me the nick name “exxy” and I transitioned to that.

• I still wish YouTube sent me a weekly/montly report of what my child was watching. If you’re an engineer that wants to help me develop a hack to somehow make this happen, because Google does let you access watch data, reach out.

• I keep waiting for my oldest to get really into a specific creator on YouTube, but that hasn’t happened yet. How has that experience gone for your own kids?