Family Link Setup Guide

Before you open the app

Do this with your kid at the table. Not after they go to bed. A supervised account they find on their own is a fight; a supervised account they watched you build is a rule. It costs nothing to do it this way, and it changes how the whole thing lands.

Have both devices in front of you — yours and theirs — and about fifteen minutes.

The five screens, in one sitting

1. 1
   Create the supervised account

   In the Family Link app, add your child and create or convert their Google account. This is the step everything else depends on, and it is the one most families stop halfway through.

2. 2
   Link the device

   Sign in to that account on your kid's phone, tablet or Chromebook. The device has to be linked before any setting below can reach it.

3. 3
   Turn on app approvals

   Every new install asks you first. Together with downtime, this is most of the value in the whole product.

4. 4
   Set screen time and downtime

   A daily limit if you want one, and a downtime window that ends the day. Downtime is what holds the bedtime rule at eleven at night, when you are asleep.

5. 5
   Set content filters

   Filters for Google Play, Search and Chrome. Turn them on — then read the next section before you decide what they have covered.

What Family Link does not cover

Family Link governs a device and an account. A website is neither of those things. Chrome's filter is doing its best against a web that changes every day, and Google says so in the setting itself.

That matters more for AI than for almost anything else, because most AI does not arrive as an app you approve. It arrives as a page that loads. No install means no approval, which means there is nothing for app approvals to catch.

Google's own assistant is a separate switch inside this same account, and it deserves its own sitting rather than a line here.

Why most screen rules stop working at 11pm

Almost every parent already has rules. Keeping them is the part that breaks, and it usually breaks for a reason that has nothing to do with discipline.

Pew Research Center found that 86% of parents of kids 12 and under have rules about screens, and 19% stick to them all the time. That gap is not a discipline problem. It is a staffing problem — you cannot be in the room every time.

Which is what this tool actually is. Not surveillance. Staffing. Downtime holds the bedtime rule while you are asleep; app approvals hold the install rule while you are at work. The rules were already yours. This is what makes them true when you are not standing there.

Source: Pew Research Center, October 2025, n=3,054 parents of children 12 and under.

Tell your kid what you can see

Say both halves. You can see what they install and how long they are on it. You cannot read their messages. Kids assume the worst about monitoring unless you tell them otherwise, and the honest version is far less alarming than the one they are imagining.

Three things to do this week

• •Create the supervised account tonight, with your kid at the table. Fifteen minutes, and everything else depends on it.
• •Turn on app approvals and set downtime. Two screens, five minutes, and they are the two that do the most work.
• •Tell your kid what you can see and what you cannot — both halves, in one sentence.

Common questions

• Apple and Microsoft controls too — if there is an iPhone, an iPad or a Windows laptop in the house as well
• The 8 family AI rules — Family Link governs the device; this is the half it cannot govern