I set up my kids apple id's last year - now that we are family sharing they are showing up as adults. How do i fix this?

As far as I know only the family organiser can create child ids as part of the family - I don't think that you can change existing accounts to be child accounts, they will remain as adults.

Child accounts : Family Sharing and Apple IDs for kids

You can change the birthdate on the adult account so that the child shows up as age 13. Go to manage account, then security questions, then scroll to bottom to change birthdate. It won't work if you change to ages under 13.

But you cannot create a new CHILD ID is there email address is locked to an adult account. There is no way to DELETE and existing account. So their actual email address is TRAPPED TO AN ADULT ACCOUNT.

You can try contacting iTunes Support and see if they will delete the account - if they do then any downloads that have been done on the account will be deleted

You should not have to do this because Apple says that you can turn on Ask to Buy for any child, not only those under 13. However, there does not appear to be anyway to categorize a teenager as a "child" for family sharing purposes. It seems like a design flaw. There ought to be a second categoryy. Something like "teen" so that parents can include them in family share and still have "ask to buy" or other restrictions/control.

I was able to change the birthdate on my currently 13 year old daughter (will be 14 in a few days) by making her a year older (when I selected her ACTUAL birth year and tried to save it, I received an error, which leads me to believe that her correct birthdate was set up in the first place). Once I made her 14, the Ask to Buy option appeared in the Manage Family section...

Progress, I thought... When I clicked on "Ask to Buy", I received the following message:

"XXXX is sharing purchases from an account also used by another family member. Ask to Buy can be enabled only on accounts that are not shared."

We all shared my account previously and I'm in the process of unlinking them... So maybe this will fix itself when I get through all the devices.

After I did the above (making my child 14, but less than 18), which listed them with their age and not as an Adult, I was able to fix the "Ask to Buy" issue by deleting them from the Family account and re-adding them. During the adding process, I was able to turn on "Ask to Buy".

Hope this helps! Definitely appears to be a bug in Apple's system with older accounts (original child account was a "me.com" account), it seems they automatically treat them as adults even when they are under age 18.

It's not a bug, only under-13s are treated as child accounts

My daughters actual birth year is 2001 and she was listed as an Adult with no "Ask to Buy" option. I change her birth year to 2000, making her a year older and she is now listed as Age 14 with the "Ask to Buy" option available. Certainly seems like a bug to me...