If you have a Family Account through Google, you might assume you can control what your child can see or do on their device. You can, but, as it happens, only up to a certain point. When your kid turns 13, Google will send them an email, letting them know they can choose to disable your supervision over their account. You get an email too, but they don’t need your permission to lock you out of their device. Once they decide they’re ready for a relatively complete Google Account experience, it’s their choice to make.
Despite being Google’s official policy, this situation was not common knowledge. Following a relatively viral LinkedIn post about the subject, parents were peeved at the notion of Google deciding that their 13 year old was ready to be unsupervised on the internet. Google’s Family Account does allow kids to stay on supervised plans after they turn 13, but they can choose to remove the supervision at any point, which largely defeats the purpose. Unless your child really respects your rules, they likely won’t keep their account locked down when they don’t have to.
Parents can still supervise their 13 year olds’ Google Accounts
Luckily for parents, that’s now changing. In a separate LinkedIn post, Google’s Kate Charlet announced that under a planned policy update, minors will need to get their parents’ permission before disabling supervision. (Charlet also referred to turning 13 as the “age of digital consent,” which seems to me to be an extremely strange way to say “old enough to have an unsupervised Google Account.”)
When I reached out to Google about the changes, the company told me that the policy should now be adjusted. As such, 13-year-olds shouldn’t be able to remove supervision without permission. That said, Google’s support documents have not yet been updated, so it might take some time to fully roll out.
Speaking of Google’s former support documents, the company notes that when kids did choose to remove permissions, their device would lock up temporarily. When I asked Google about this, I was told that due to the change in policy, device lock is no longer a feature. However, it’s still unclear to me how this feature worked when kids could remove permissions on their own: Did parents have to manually unlock the device for their kids? Would devices unlock after a set period of time? I’ve reached back out to Google about these questions, though they might not matter once teens need their parents’ permission.
What does this mean for my child’s Google Account?
As I explain in my post here, removing supervision takes a lot of controls away from parents, and gives teens a lot more responsibility. Parents can’t control screen time, manage payment cards and transactions, and can’t block standard YouTube in favor of YouTube Kids. In addition, kids can choose to stop sharing their location with you if they want to.
But now that parents have the authority here, these controls can continue for your 13-year-old. If you want them to keep their location turned on, they won’t have the option to turn it off; if you want to monitor their transactions, they can’t stop you; if you don’t want them having a credit card, they won’t be able to add one—at least, until you manually disable supervision on your end.
It’s a good thing that Google is giving families more options, and it joins other big tech companies, like Meta, doing the same.