With Family Link, which is free and already on the phone. It takes about fifteen minutes and five taps to start, and the setup is the easy part. What takes longer is understanding what it does not do, because Google publishes that list and almost nobody reads it.
The five steps. Do this on your child’s phone, with your child there, because they have to agree to it on screen.
- On your child’s device, open Settings.
- Tap Google, then All services.
- Under “Kids & Family”, tap Parental controls.
- At the lower right, tap Let’s do this.
- Tap the account name you want to supervise.
Then install Family Link on your own phone, from Google Play or the App Store. You manage everything from there, or from a browser, and you do not need the app at all if you would rather use the web.
What it controls. Screen time limits and a bedtime, per device. Which apps can be installed and which are blocked. Approval for Google Play purchases. Location of Android devices. Filters on Chrome, Search and Play. YouTube channel activity. Account settings.
What it cannot do
This list is Google’s, not ours. It is published on the same help page as the setup instructions, and it is the part worth reading twice. With supervision switched on, a parent cannot:
- see your child’s screen remotely
- see their past searches
- see their Chrome browsing history
- see their YouTube watch history
- check or reset their account password
- read their emails or messages
- listen to their calls
- set a new screen lock on their device
Family Link decides what a child can reach and for how long. It does not tell you what they did. Parents who install it expecting a log of the day are installing the wrong thing, and the disappointment usually arrives weeks later.
Supervision used to stop at 13. It does not any more.
For years, a child who turned 13 could switch parental supervision off on their own, and Google emailed them shortly before their birthday to tell them so. In October a US child rights group, the Digital Childhood Institute, put a fifty-page complaint to the Federal Trade Commission about it, after its president posted the email Google had sent her 12-year-old son. The story broke in January 2026 and Google reversed the policy within days.
The position now, in Google’s words: “Teens who are over the age of 13 (or applicable age of consent in your country) and under the age of 18 need parental approval to stop supervision. As a parent, you can stop supervision for them at any time.”
One thing to be straight about: Google’s help pages have not fully caught up with its own change. The page that explains how to add supervision still lists “block your child from stopping supervision” among the things parents cannot do, and still says you can stop supervision “once your child reaches 13”. Both of those sit on the same page as the approval rule. The FAQ is the newer statement, and Google said the change would roll out globally, but it gave no completion date — so if your child is near 13, check the setting yourself rather than trusting either page.
It does not work on an iPhone, an iPad or a laptop
Google states it plainly: “iPhones, iPads, and computers other than Chromebooks can’t be supervised with Family Link.” Your child can still sign in to their Google account on those devices, and you keep some control over YouTube and Search, but app management, Chrome filtering and screen time limits do not apply there at all.
So a household with an Android phone and a school-issued laptop has covered one of them. The devices that can be supervised are Android 5.0 and up, Chromebooks on Chrome OS 71 and up, and the Fitbit Ace LTE. That is the whole list.
Purchase approval has a gap too. It covers purchases made through Google Play’s billing system. Anything billed another way is outside it.
And the filters are filters, not a wall. Google’s own words: Family Link “does not block inappropriate content”, the settings “provide you with filtering options”, and “these filters are not perfect, so explicit, graphic, or other content you may not want your child to see makes it through sometimes”.
What this means for you right now
Set it up anyway. Fifteen minutes for app approval, a bedtime and a screen time limit is worth having, and it is free. Do it with your child in the room, because they have to consent on screen and a child who was ambushed by it will spend the next month trying to get out.
Then decide what you are actually trying to do. If you want to know what your child is seeing, Family Link will not tell you, and no setting inside it will. That is a conversation, not a control panel.
And if there is an iPad or a laptop in the house, write it down as uncovered. The single most common mistake we see is a parent who set Family Link up on the phone, saw it working, and assumed the household was done.
The iPhone equivalent, which is a different system entirely, is here.
Google documentation checked 9 October 2026. Setup steps, device list and the list of what parents cannot do are quoted from Google’s own help pages on that date.
Sources:
- Google For Families Help — Add & manage supervision on a current Google Account
- Google For Families Help — Get started with Family Link
- Google For Families Help — Learn which devices can be supervised
- Google — Family Link FAQ
- Al Jazeera, 14 January 2026 — Child rights org says Google undermines parental control of child accounts
