Handing Over the Phone

Setting a Child Up on Your Phone

When you add a child from your account, KidMoat asks where they'll use it. Choose this phone, and setup finishes immediately — there's no code to scan and no second device involved. Your phone is now a shared device.

Handing It Over

From your parent Home, open the profile switcher. It lists you (Parent) plus every child who is set up on this specific phone — a child set up on a phone of their own doesn't appear here, because they aren't on this device. Tap a child's name and the phone becomes theirs: no PIN, no confirmation step. Entering a child's restricted mode is treated as harmless, so nothing stands in the way of it.

Taking It Back

Inside child mode there's a control to switch back to parent mode. Tapping it asks for your PIN. Type it correctly and the phone returns to parent mode immediately — there is no timer and no session length; the phone stays in child mode until a parent ends it with the PIN.

The PIN belongs to you personally, not to the family — each parent sets their own, and it's mandatory once set: there's no way to remove it, only change it. If you get it wrong enough times in a row, the exit is locked out for a short cooldown before you can try again.

If You Can't Enter the PIN

If the PIN can't be checked at all — the phone is offline and hasn't synced a PIN to check against, or no PIN has been set up for your account yet — KidMoat doesn't treat that as a wrong PIN. It offers to verify you a different way: signing in to your parent account. That only unlocks the phone if the account you sign in with belongs to the same family as the active child; a stranger's account, or the wrong family's, is refused and the phone stays in child mode.

While the Phone Is Theirs

A few things follow from the phone switching modes rather than switching hands entirely:

• Your child sees their own screen time, their own rules, and their own rewards — not yours.
• There's no "ask for more time" request to send from a shared phone. If your child needs more time, the practical route is asking you directly, since you're usually nearby holding the phone's other half of the conversation.
• Some things that work on a child's own phone don't run on a shared one at all — see Privacy on a Shared Phone for exactly what's affected and why.