WhatsApp recently announced the arrival of a new mode of use designed for younger people: accounts managed by a parent intended for children aged at least 13 (or the minimum age required in their country). With this feature you can configure the app so that your children’s experience is limited to basic activities. The declared objective is to allow pre-adolescents to use a tool that is now central to the daily communication of many families, while maintaining a more structured and surgical level of supervision. Let’s see how WhatsApp accounts managed by parents work and how to configure them step-by-step.
What are WhatsApp accounts managed by parents for?
The innovation introduced by the Meta messaging platform arises from the fact that WhatsApp has become a very widespread solution in family communication: it is used by parents and children to update each other on daily events, to coordinate school activities, and so on. In this context, the introduction of parent-controlled accounts represents an attempt to adapt the app to the needs of families with younger children. Parental control settings (tools that allow adults to monitor or limit certain digital functions of minors) allow parents and legal guardians to limit their children’s use of the account. To go into more detail, the WhatsApp team explains:
After setup, these accounts are controlled by the parent or guardian, who can decide who can contact the account and which groups they can join. Additionally, parents can control message requests from unknown contacts and manage account privacy settings.
At the same time, the security structure of the platform does not change: conversations remain protected by end-to-end encryption, the security system that makes messages readable only by the devices involved in the chat. This means that not even the platform itself can access the content of the conversations.
How to set up a parent account on WhatsApp
To set up an account of this type we must start from an essential technical requirement: both the parent’s and child’s phones must have the latest version of WhatsApp installed, available for Android and iPhone. The first step consists in installing WhatsApp on the child’s phone. During the initial procedure we must choose the language and we accept the conditions of use by tapping the Accept and continue option. At this point, instead of creating a standard account, you need to select the items Other options > Create an account managed by a parent. Next you need to register the phone number associated with the boy’s device, enter his date of birth, confirm his age and tap Continue.
Once this first phase has been completed, you need to connect the child’s account to your own, i.e. the parent’s account. If the previous steps have been carried out correctly, a QR code should have appeared on the boy’s phone which must be framed with the camera of his device. After opening the link associated with the QR code, you need to tap on Accept and continue, then you need to confirm that you are of age and create a six-digit PIN. The PIN will obviously be used to access the control settings of the minor’s account. The code remains reserved for the adult and should not be shared with the child, because it is the tool that allows you to change the rules for using the minor’s WhatsApp account. Finally, you need to confirm the PIN, tap Next, then Finish and follow any instructions that appear on the screen to finalize the procedure.
At this point you need to go back to your child’s phone to enter the code you just created and finalize the account setup. From this moment the minor’s account is operational: the child can customize their profile with name and image, while the parent maintains access to the control settings.
The management possibilities offered by the system mainly concern communication with other users. As parents or guardians we can decide who can contact the child’s account, check chat requests from unknown numbers and decide which groups can be joined. This aspect is important because groups represent one of the main ways of interacting on WhatsApp: they are collective chats in which multiple people share messages, images or files. Through parental control we can therefore limit the child’s participation in known contexts, such as family or school groups.
We would like to point out that the introduction of parent-managed accounts is still being released and at the moment you may not yet be able to see this setting on your version of WhatsApp.
