Multiple Children

The account is the family. Inside it, each child is a profile holding a name, a birthday, a set of rules, one or more paired devices, and their own stream of activity. Nothing crosses between profiles: a bedtime you set for one child does not touch another, a saved place can apply to one child and not the rest, and an app blocked for the youngest stays available to the eldest.

Adding a child after the first is the same short form: name, birthday, then a pairing code for their phone. There is no separate account to create and no charge per head on the free tier. Families with four children use the same panel as families with one.

The dashboard is built for the plural case. It opens on a row of children rather than a single child’s data, each showing today’s screen time, their last known location, and whether their device is reporting normally. You pick the child you are interested in and go deeper. You never have to hunt for a switcher hidden in a corner.

• One login, one price, as many children as you have.
• Rules, places, filters and alerts all set per child.
• Several devices per child, listed under that child.
• A dashboard that starts with everyone, not one person.

A nine year old benefits from firm structure. A short weekday allowance, a bedtime that ends the day cleanly, a strict web filter, and arrival alerts at school are all reasonable, and at that age they are usually accepted without much argument because the rest of life works the same way. The tool is doing what a parent in the next room would do.

A fifteen year old is a different problem entirely. They are two or three years from managing their own time with nobody checking, and the job has shifted from control to coaching. A filter tuned for a primary school child will block homework research, and a bedtime lock at nine will simply teach them that the interesting part of the internet is the part you reach on somebody else’s phone.

Applying one rule set across multiple children fails in both directions at once. The younger child gets limits too loose to be useful, and the older one gets limits so tight that circumventing them becomes the obvious project. In our experience, the accounts that stop being used after a month are almost always the ones where every child was given identical settings.

The practical version is straightforward. Younger children: tighter time, stricter filtering, more alerts, more visible structure. Older children: longer allowances, filtering reduced to what you would defend out loud, few alerts, and location kept for reassurance rather than checking. Same app, deliberately different shape.

When you add a second or third child, the panel offers to start from an existing profile. Choose the sibling closest in age, and the new child inherits their screen time schedule, bedtime, app limits, filter level and saved places in one action. It saves ten minutes of clicking and, more usefully, it saves you forgetting a setting you carefully thought about the first time.

The important part is what comes next. A copy is a starting point, not a decision. Open the new profile immediately and walk through four things: the daily allowance, the bedtime, the filter level, and which alerts are on. Two years of age difference usually means at least an hour of allowance, half an hour of bedtime, and one filter category.

Places are the exception worth handling separately. Home is shared by everyone, but school often is not, and a club or a friend’s street usually belongs to one child alone. A copied profile brings the whole list across, so delete the places that do not apply rather than leaving alerts firing for a child who has never been there.

Children rarely have exactly one device. There is the phone, the tablet used mostly in the evening, and sometimes an older handset kept on wifi for games. Each of these pairs with its own code and appears under that child, so the tablet has its own health check and its own permission status while the rules stay attached to the person.

Screen time is where this matters most. A limit set for a child counts across every device they own, which is the only version that makes any sense. Two hours a day means two hours a day, not two hours on the phone followed by two more on the tablet while the panel cheerfully reports that both limits were respected.

Reporting varies by device and it is worth knowing why. A wifi only tablet cannot contribute useful location data when it is out of the house, so places and the live map lean on whichever device carries a SIM. The device list shows what each one is doing and when it last reported, so a tablet that has been face down under a bed for a week is obvious rather than mysterious.

Retiring a device is a single action. Unpair it and it stops reporting immediately, its history stays with the child, and the app on that handset returns to the inert state it was in before pairing. Passing a phone down means unpairing it from one child and pairing it to another with a fresh code.

Every notification leads with the child’s name and, where it matters, the device. “Maya, phone: arrived at School, 08:14” tells you who and what before you have finished reading. Alerts are set per child as well as per place, so a younger child can have arrival and departure alerts at school while an older one has none, and the ones you have switched off simply never appear.

Volume is the other half of that. With three children and every alert enabled you would be reading forty notifications a day inside a week and ignoring all of them by the second. Turn alerts on for the child who genuinely needs them, use quiet hours everywhere, and let the dashboard summary cover the rest. A small number of messages you read beats a large number you swipe away.

Then there is the conversation that arrives in every family with multiple children, usually at dinner, usually as “why does she get more”. The honest answer is that she is older, and the useful version is to name the specific thing that changed and when the same thing will change for them. Vague fairness arguments go nowhere. A stated rule with a date attached ends the discussion.

The child app helps here in a way that surprises people. Because each child can see their own limits written down, differences are facts rather than suspicions, and a younger child who can read “bedtime 20:30, changes at your next birthday” argues far less than one who only knows their sibling stayed up later. Visible rules are easier to defend than invisible ones.

Rules go stale quietly. Nobody notices the moment a bedtime became too early or a filter started blocking legitimate schoolwork, because the failure looks like a child complaining and complaints are easy to dismiss. With multiple children the drift is worse, because the profile you tuned two years ago is still running while the person it describes has changed completely.

So the panel prompts you around each birthday with a specific suggestion rather than a general nudge: extend the allowance by half an hour, move bedtime later, drop a filter category. Accept it, change it, or dismiss it. The point is that the review happens at all.

Loosening early is better than loosening late. A limit relaxed because a child earned it is a reward and reinforces the arrangement. The identical limit relaxed after three weeks of arguing is a defeat, and it teaches them that pressure works better than trustworthiness. The same half hour, spent very differently.

Eventually a child should leave the arrangement altogether. Somewhere around sixteen or seventeen, most families reduce to location sharing only, then stop. Unpairing is one action, the app returns to doing nothing, and the child ends up managing their own time with several years of visible practice behind them. That is the outcome we are aiming at, and it is a great deal easier to reach when every child was on rules that fitted them.