Google Family Link: A Complete Setup Guide for Parents

What Family Link is — and isn’t

Most parents come to Family Link with a single worried question — “how do I get some control over this phone?” — and a vague fear that the answer is something close to spying. It helps to start by clearing that up. Google Family Link is Google’s free parental-controls service: an app on your own phone, plus a web dashboard at families.google.com/familylink, that lets you create or supervise your child’s Google Account, approve the apps they install, filter some of what they see, set limits on screen time, and locate their device. It is the Google corner of the built-in operating-system controls every phone already ships with — gathered into one place you can reach from anywhere.

Just as important is what it is not. Family Link does not let you read your teenager’s text messages, direct messages, or the chats inside their apps, and it does not record their screen. It is a set of account and device controls, not a surveillance feed. And it has one hard boundary worth knowing before you spend any time on it: its real powers work on Android phones, Android tablets, and Chromebooks — not on an iPhone you hand your teen. More on that below.

Because it is built in and costs nothing, Family Link is the natural place to begin before you consider paying for anything. For most families the free, native controls — set thoughtfully — cover the great majority of what they need, and a dedicated parental-control app only earns its place if a real gap remains once you have set this up properly.

Setting it up: accounts and devices

Before you start, it is worth gathering what setup actually requires, because two of the requirements trip people up. On your side, you need your own Google Account, you need to be 18 or older (or the adult age in your country), and — this is the one people miss — you must live in the same country as your child. You install the Family Link app from Google Play on Android, or from the App Store on an iPhone or iPad, or you simply open familylink.google.com in a browser. On your teen’s side, they need a Google Account and a device Family Link can actually supervise.

iPhones, iPads, and computers other than Chromebooks can’t be supervised with Family Link.

— Google Family Link Help, “Get started with Family Link”

There are two ways in, and which one you use depends on your teenager’s age. You can create a brand-new Google Account for a younger child, or you can add supervision to the account your teen already has. For a 13-to-17-year-old who has used a phone for years, you will almost always do the second — and that path requires your teen’s agreement, given on their own device. You cannot quietly attach supervision to a teenager’s existing account from across the house; they have to say yes.

1. Install Family Link and sign in as yourself. On your phone, open the app and sign in with your own Google Account. Tap to add a child and choose Get started.
2. Create or choose the account. Create a new account for a younger child, or enter your teen’s existing Google address to send a supervision request. Creating a new account for a child under 13 (or the applicable age in your country) needs verifiable parental consent — commonly a small temporary authorization placed on your card to confirm it is valid. You are not charged a fee, and the hold is usually released within 48 hours.
3. Sign in and link the devices. On your teen’s Android phone, tablet, or Chromebook, have them sign in with their Google Account and accept supervision. The two devices are linked, usually by entering a code shown on one screen onto the other.
4. Grant permissions and set your first controls. Approve the permissions Family Link asks for on your teen’s device, then choose your starting settings. Every one of them can be changed later, so you don’t have to get them perfect now.

The whole process takes around fifteen minutes, and the single best decision you can make is to do it sitting next to your teenager rather than behind their back. We come back to why in doing it with your teen, but the short version is that a setup your teen watched and understood survives; one they discover later rarely does.

Approving apps and filtering content

Once the link is live, the first cluster of settings most parents reach for is about apps and content. Family Link lets you require your approval before your teen installs anything new from the Google Play Store, lets you set maturity ratings so age-inappropriate titles don’t appear, and lets you block an app that is already installed if it becomes a problem. You can also see which apps they have and how much each is used.

Alongside app control sit Google’s content filters. None of them is a perfect wall, but together they raise the floor across the services teenagers use most:

It is worth being clear-eyed about the limits even here, because over-trusting the filters is how parents get surprised. Family Link’s web filtering is built around Chrome; a different browser can slip past it, and Google itself warns the filters are not perfect. And no filter reaches inside a social app — it can block or time-limit TikTok or Instagram, but it cannot change what the feed serves once your teen is in it. That deeper problem of what the algorithm delivers is the subject of the pillar on harmful content and the feed.

Screen time, Downtime and app limits

The feature most parents actually open Family Link for is screen time, and it gives you three distinct tools rather than one blunt switch. Used together they let you shape when and how the phone is used, not just how long.

Here the technology is the easy part; the relationship is the hard part. A limit your teenager had no say in becomes something to resent and route around, while a number you agreed together tends to hold. That is less a Family Link setting than a parenting habit, and it is exactly what the pillar’s age-by-age approach is built around — fewer, firmer limits for a younger teen, loosened deliberately as they earn the room.

Location and finding the device

Family Link can show you where your teen’s supervised Android device is, on a map, provided the device is switched on, connected to the internet, and has location turned on. It is genuinely useful for the ordinary worries — a teen who hasn’t arrived, a phone left behind somewhere — and you can even set alerts for when the device arrives at or leaves a saved place. It is worth understanding for what it is: a view of the phone’s last known place, not a live leash. A flat battery, no signal, or a phone left at a friend’s house all defeat it, and none of those means anything is wrong.

The one rule that matters with location is openness. Tell your teenager it is on and why. A teenager who knows the phone can be located experiences it as a safety net; a teenager who discovers it was on secretly experiences it as a betrayal, and the cost to trust usually outweighs anything the feature gave you. The same logic runs through your teen’s wider privacy and location footprint, and through the transparent-monitoring principle the pillar sets out.

A teen is not a small child

Family Link was built to cover a huge age range, from a six-year-old’s first tablet to a seventeen-year-old’s phone, and the single most common mistake is to apply a small child’s lockdown to a teenager. The settings that protect an eight-year-old will, on a fifteen-year-old, read as distrust — and a teen who feels infantilised is a teen who starts looking for the way around. The skill is matching the controls to the age.

There is also a fact about teenagers and Google Accounts that changes how supervision works, and it surprises many parents. Once your teen reaches the age at which they can manage their own account — 13 in the US, higher in some countries — they can switch supervision off themselves, at any time. Google emails you when they do, but you cannot block it or turn it back on without sending a fresh invitation they have to accept. (Below that age it is different: a younger child can’t remove supervision, and the only way to end it is to delete the account.) From 13 onward, in other words, supervising a teenager is something you do with their agreement, not something you can impose — which is the whole premise of the pillar’s age-by-age framing.

What Family Link can’t do

A setup guide that only lists features sets parents up to be blindsided, so it is worth naming the gaps plainly. Family Link is a good tool with real edges, and the most dangerous mistake is to assume that because it is installed, the problem is solved.

The blind spot that catches families hardest is the first one. Because Family Link never shows message content, the place where most of the real harm to teenagers happens — private chats, group threads, DMs — is exactly where it is silent. That is by design, and it is why cyberbullying and online harassment have to be met with conversation and platform reporting tools, not with a controls app. If, after setting Family Link up well, a genuine gap remains, the pillar’s guide to choosing a dedicated app is the honest next step — but it really is a last layer, not a first one.

Doing it with your teen — and stepping back

Everything above is the easy half. The half that decides whether Family Link helps or backfires is how you introduce it. For a younger child, controls are simply part of the furniture. For a teenager, they are a statement about how much you trust them — and the way to keep that statement a kind one is to set the controls up openly, explain what each does and what it doesn’t, and make clear that this is about safety, not suspicion. A teen who helped configure their own limits is far more likely to keep them than one who found out by accident — and, as we saw, a teenager old enough to manage their own account can simply switch supervision off, so their buy-in is not optional.

And from the first day, plan to remove it. Parental controls are scaffolding, not a permanent fixture: the entire point is to come down, piece by piece, as your teenager grows into the judgment to manage themselves. By the later teen years most of these settings should be easing off, so that a young adult leaves home able to self-regulate — not suddenly unsupervised for the first time at eighteen. The pillar covers that handover in detail in when and how to step back.

Family Link, set thoughtfully on the right device and loosened over time, is one of the most useful free tools a parent of a teenager has. But it was never meant to do the part that matters most. The lasting protection is a teenager who believes they can bring you a problem without losing their phone — and no setting in any app can install that. It comes from the conversations the controls are only there to support.

Frequently asked questions