Google Family Link won’t unlock your child’s device

You’re on a holiday with your mobile home, no WiFi, lots and lots of stuff to play with for your kids. Board games, books, toys, climbing equipment, swimming pools. So what do they want? Their tablet or mobile phone, obviously.

Same here.

So at the end of the day, our kids are usually allowed to spend a little time on their devices. Being a responsible parent using Google Family Link, you add some bonus time, or try to unlock the device, which somehow doesn’t work. The device doesn’t have WiFi, so the Google Family server can’t reach your child’s device to tell it: hey, it’s okay, you can unlock now.

Normally we just enter the parent code, and then it’s unlocked for the rest of the day. This usually works even when WiFi is unavailable. Except this time, that didn’t work either. I guess the parent codes are being refreshed once in a while when the device has internet access. Maybe if a device hasn’t been connected to the internet for a while, it is unable to refresh these parent codes?

Anyways, rebooting the device didn’t help either. What options do you have left, when you cannot do anything because the tablet is locked?

Mobile hot spot to the rescue! Simply use a phone that has mobile data through 4G or whatever. Create a WiFi hot spot with the same network name and password as at home, which the tablet already knows. The tablet will connect to your phones hot spot, and now you will be able to unlock it using a Google Family key, or just disable the limits or whatever.

I just tried this with my son, and in his case, this works!

After the tablet is unlocked, disable the hot spot and off you go.

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