How to Set Up a Mac or iPad for a Child or an Older Relative

I set up two devices in the same week last year: an iPad for my seven-year-old niece, and an iPad for my father, who is seventy-eight and had finally admitted his old phone was too small to read. Same Settings app, same hour of fiddling, completely opposite goals. For the child, almost every change I made was a fence — a limit, a filter, a thing she couldn’t do yet. For my father, almost every change was the reverse — taking clutter away, making targets bigger, removing the dozen ways an iPad can quietly confuse someone who didn’t grow up with one. Both handovers worked. But treating them as the same task is the mistake that leaves a child with too much freedom and an older relative drowning in features nobody switched off.

So this is two setups, told apart on purpose. The child build is about building an account and then sensibly fencing it. The older-relative build is about subtraction. There’s a shared safety layer at the end that both genuinely need, and that’s the part most people forget on both devices.

For a child: build the account first

Do not just hand over a device signed into your own account with “I’ll keep an eye on it.” The whole system of controls only works when the child has their own child account, because that’s what lets you manage the thing remotely from your own phone instead of confiscating it every time.

Related reading

On your device, open Settings → your name → Family Sharing → Add Member → Create a Child Account (on a Mac it’s System Settings → Family). You’ll set their date of birth — this matters, because age drives a lot of the default protections — and Apple walks you through the rest. The single most useful switch in here is Ask to Buy: with it on, every download and purchase, even a free app, pings your phone for a yes or no. It’s the difference between a managed device and a slot machine.

Once the child account exists and is signed in on their device, you control the interesting parts from your own.

Screen Time is the whole toolbox

Nearly everything you’ll want for a child lives under Screen Time, and you can reach the child’s settings from your device under Settings → Screen Time → your child’s name once they’re in your family. Four things are worth your time; the rest is garnish.

Downtime schedules the hours the device mostly locks itself — overnight, school time — leaving only the apps and calls you allow. App Limits caps categories or specific apps by the day, so “thirty minutes of games” stops being a negotiation and becomes a thing the iPad enforces without you. Content & Privacy Restrictions is the big one: web content filtering, App Store age ratings, blocks on explicit music and books, and a lock on changes to accounts and privacy so a curious child can’t simply undo your work. And Communication Safety, which is on by default for child accounts, blurs nude images in Messages and a few other apps before they’re shown, with an age-appropriate warning rather than a lecture.

Set a Screen Time passcode that the child doesn’t know and that’s different from the device passcode. If they learn it, every fence above comes down at once.

The flow below is the order I actually do it in, for either kind of person, so nothing gets skipped.

Related reading

For an older relative: take things away, don’t add them

Here’s where instincts go wrong. The temptation is to “help” by installing apps and showing off features. Resist it. The single biggest favour you can do an older relative is make the device do less, more obviously.

If they find a normal iPhone or iPad genuinely overwhelming — too many icons, too much that responds to an accidental touch — the strongest tool Apple makes is Assistive Access, under Settings → Accessibility → Assistive Access. It rebuilds the entire interface into a handful of huge, high-contrast buttons: Calls, Messages, Camera, Photos, Music, and not much else. You choose which apps appear and how they look, then enter the mode. It is a dramatic simplification, and for someone who only wants to call family, see photos, and send the occasional message, it turns a confusing slab of glass into an appliance. To leave it, you triple-click the side button and enter a passcode, so they can’t fall out of it by accident.

If that’s too much and they just need things clearer, stay in the normal interface and do four things. In Settings → Display & Brightness → Text Size (and Accessibility → Display & Text Size for the larger range) push the text up and turn on Bold Text. Switch on Increase Contrast and consider Reduce Transparency so the pretty translucent menus stop being soup. Then physically tidy the Home Screen yourself: delete or hide every app they’ll never open, drag the four or five that matter onto the first screen, and bin the rest into a folder out of sight. A Home Screen with six apps on it is a different, kinder device than one with sixty.

The safety layer both of them need

This is the part everyone skips because it’s boring and nobody enjoys imagining the day it matters. Do it anyway, on both devices.

Medical ID lives in the Health app under the person’s photo, or via Settings → Health → Medical ID. Fill in conditions, allergies, medications, and emergency contacts, and turn on Show When Locked so paramedics can see it without the passcode. Emergency SOS (Settings → Emergency SOS) calls the emergency services when the side button is held or pressed five times, and messages those contacts with a location. On a recent iPhone or Apple Watch, Crash and Fall Detection can do this automatically — worth confirming it’s on, especially for an older relative living alone.

Related reading

Find My matters for both, in different keys: a child you want to be able to locate, and an older relative who might want to share their location with you for reassurance rather than surveillance — agree which it is. And Check In, inside Messages, lets either of them tell you they’re heading somewhere and have the phone notify you automatically when they arrive, or if they stall on the way. It’s quietly one of the best things Apple has added for families who worry.

What I tell people on the way out the door

The temptation, once you’ve spent an hour in Settings, is to hand the device over with a tour of everything you changed. Don’t. For a child, explain the two or three rules the device will now enforce and walk away — the fences do the rest. For an older relative, show them exactly the three things they actually want to do, slowly, twice, and write them down. The setup you’ve just done is mostly invisible by design, and that’s the point: a good handover ends with the person using the device, not memorising it. Get the account right for the child, get the clutter gone for the relative, get Medical ID and Find My on for both, and you’ve done the version of this that still holds up six months later when nobody remembers the settings but everything quietly keeps working.