Sometimes kids can discover the Screen Time PIN, sometimes they can guess it, although as you can imagine that’s pretty difficult to do.
When the Send Reminder button is pressed on the Screen Time PIN screen an email is sent to your inbox with the PIN in it. This is designed to help parents that have forgotten their PIN, but it can be a loophole for clever kids who find ways of opening their parent’s email inbox.
What can I do?
If you suspect this has happened to you there are a few steps that you can go through to help keep your PIN secure:
- Have a chat with your kids, we always recommend this as a first step even if it doesn’t always help.
- We’ve found that the passwords are usually discovered from shared devices in the house where you’re still logged into your email account. So you can try:
- Keeping yourself logged out of Gmail accounts on devices that your kids have access to.
- Adding a screen lock to your device to prevent people accessing it. Check out this page to see how to do that.
- If you want to be super secure set up extra security on your Google Account. You can add another step for verification before you log in, also you can see what devices and when people are accessing your account.
- After you’ve made sure that you share devices and your own device is secure then change the PIN on your child’s device. Check out this FAQ to see how to do that.
Are you still having problems? Then get in touch with our support team and we’ll see if we can help you figure out how your password is being discovered.