How To: Converting Adult accounts to Child accounts for Family Sharing

According to this tweet on twitter (and retweeted by an Apple employee) you can convert an adult Apple ID in to a child Apple ID by resetting the Date of Birth to 1/1/2001.

Here is the tweet:

“PSA: If your kids have “adult” accounts, you can turn them into “child” accounts for Family Sharing by resetting their DoB to 1/1/2001.”

This should allow you to add your children, who already have regular Apple ID accounts, to your Family Sharing account with the restrictions and benefits of a child account.

I don't know what the full procedure is beyond that. I guess that once you make the DoB change you can add the account to a Family Sharing account and it will be seen as a Child account with all restrictions in place. Once that is complete you should be able to change it again to the child’s real DoB so that the child account restrictions expire at the proper time.

I'm hoping Apple will post a proper guide for this procedure.

To make the change you need to log-in to the My Apple ID web site and make the change there. The Data of Birth settings are found under Password and Security. You will need to answer the security question(s) first before you can make the changes.

Be aware I haven’t tried this yet so YMMV. (I do have to perform this change for my niece and her family but don't know when that will be.)

If you try this please post your experience with it for the benefit of others.

UPDATE: Apparently if you change the the DoB again, to the child’s real DoB, the account will refer back to an adult account. So, if you want to relax the restrictions on the account you need to do them manually by changing the DoB manually at the appropriate time for that child.

Message was edited by: Gino Cerullo