How to set up Google Family Link, and what it will not do

Family Link is the thing most Android families should try before paying for anything, and a surprising number never switch it on. It costs nothing, it takes about twenty minutes, and for a child under roughly eleven it usually covers more than parents expect.

What follows is the order that avoids the two setup dead ends — creating the child account on the wrong device, and discovering at the end that the phone you bought cannot be supervised.

Before you start

Google states the requirements plainly, and it is worth checking them rather than finding out halfway through.

You need to be 18 or older, or the applicable age in your country, with a Google account of your own. You need an Android phone running 6.0 or later, an iPhone or iPad on iOS 16 or later, or a Chromebook that supports Android apps. Your child needs a Google account and an Android device on 6.0 or later, or a Chromebook on Chrome OS 71 or later.

The requirement that catches people out: you and your child must live in the same country. Family Link is also not available in every country or region.

Setting it up, in order

Install Family Link on your phone first

Not the child’s. The parent app is the control surface, and starting there means the child’s account gets created inside your family group rather than as an orphan you have to migrate later.

Create or add your child’s Google account

Google allows accounts for children under 13, or the applicable local age, created and supervised through Family Link. If your child already has an account you made for them on a tablet, you can add that one instead of starting again.

Sign in on the child’s device

If the phone is already set up with another account, you will get a cleaner result from a factory reset than from adding a second account alongside it.

Set the daily limit and bedtime

In the Family Link app, select your child at the top left, then open Screen time → Time limits. Turn on the daily limit. Choose the weekly schedule and enter the time for each day, or apply one figure to every day of the week.

Start tighter than feels generous. Loosening a limit reads to a child as progress; tightening one is an argument every time.

Add per-app limits

Under Screen time → Time limits → App limits you can cap or block individual apps. This is the control that does the most work, because the problem is rarely “the phone” and usually one or two specific apps.

Turn on location, if you want it

Tap Location → Set up location, select your children, then Turn on. Google notes that location requires the device to be powered on, recently active, and connected to the internet — so a flat battery looks identical to a child who has left their phone somewhere.

Lock down the Play Store separately

This one lives outside Family Link’s main screens and is the most commonly missed step. In the Google Play app, tap the profile icon, then Settings → Family → Content restrictions → Go to parental controls → Set up a parental controls PIN.

Choose a PIN your child does not know and has not watched you type. Without it, the content filters you set can be turned off by the person they apply to.

The four things it will not do

Google is unusually direct about the boundaries, and they matter more than the feature list.

It cannot supervise an iPhone, an iPad, or any computer that is not a Chromebook. A household with an Android phone and a shared iPad needs a second tool for the iPad, or a different approach entirely.

It does not read messages. The dashboard shows apps and time, not conversations — which is a deliberate design choice and also the gap where the serious harms now sit. We wrote about that separately in what parental controls actually block.

It stops being mandatory at a certain age. Google states that children over the applicable age in your country can choose to manage their own account. Supervision after that point is something your child agrees to, not something you impose, which is worth knowing well before the birthday rather than on it.

Google Workspace for Education accounts cannot be managed through Family Link at all, so a school-issued account is outside this system.

If it turns out to be enough

That is a real outcome and a common one. Family Link plus a Play Store PIN plus a rule about where the phone sleeps covers a lot of ground for a younger child, and it costs nothing.

The reason families outgrow it is usually not a missing feature. It is that the child gets older, the restrictions stay the same shape, and nobody built a path from locked down to trusted. That is a different problem from the one a settings menu solves.