Category: Child safety

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Google Family Link: After Unlocking your child’s device with parental access, how do you re-lock it?

I have been using Google Family Link recently in order to keep my child’s mobile phone online while safeguarding it against mature content.

Sometimes I have logged in to the device using the parent access code and that has brought up a question that doesn’t seem to have great answers in the manual of this software: How does one logout from the child’s device after accessing it with the family link parent code?

Here’s the answer: in order to quit accessing the child’s device as a parent, go to the Google Family Link app on the parent’s device and right beneath the circular image on the top, there should be your child’s device listed. Click on the name of the device and click on “lock”. Now the device should only be available if there is screen time left and the time is withing the allowed time limits.

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How to allow a specific app on your child’s device using Google Family Link

I have set the app age restriction on my child’s device to PEGI 3 to make sure only the most child friendly content is available. There is one exception though, my child really loves Sim City Build It which is PEGI 7 and I was okay with making an exception for that specific game.

How to actually accomplish a special exception to the general age restriction rule was not so obvious however. I thought that I could just login with the parental access code and override the limits as the parent, but Play store was still complaining about Sim City being limited by the age restriction.

The only solution I eventually found for this problem was to login to Family Link on my own device (or alternatively just using the internet browser on a desktop computer) and then temporarily change the age restriction to PEGI 7. This can be done under controls –> content restrictions –> Google Play.

After that I was able to install the app, then immediately set the age restriction back to PEGI 3. The app is still working even after dropping the age restriction back to 3, so this ended up solving the issue.