Today, I had to enrol my daughter on waiting list for a class and they needed her email address to signup. I hesitantly gave hers since my email ID was associated with another account on their website already.

As I’ll be expecting a response from this organization anytime on their availability, checking her inbox frequently was necessary. To ease this process, I planned to add her Google account to my phone so that I can switch to her Gmail account anytime I need to check her emails. When I tried to add her account, Google hinted that I can’t add her account to my phone since it’s a child account and that I’m her parent.

My next choice was to configure an email forward so that I’ll get all her emails to my email id. When I tried to login to her Gmail account from my phone, there were no options in the settings menu to set a from Gmail for mobile web interface. I searched in forums and found that I’ll need a desktop to list all the advanced Gmail settings. I then forced my browser to view in Desktop mode and it failed to load in desktop mode. To force the browser to login to Gmail as if I am logged in from laptop, I had to try different url combinations and I ended up logging in in desktop mode successfully.

I wasn’t able to find “Forward to POP/IMAP” option as stated in this documentation. When I searched for the possible reasons, I found in one forum that kids account do not have forward option enabled and that they would need to be accessed via Google family link.

I had no idea what that means. When I searched for it, I understood that I’d need a Google family link app to manage her account. I’ve installed it and noticed that I cannot do anything beyond seeing her email address listed under my name. It looks like the account will need to be logged in with her email account on a Chromebook or an android device already.

Since we do not own or plan to buy her a dedicated device for her, I cannot seem to access her account at all.

I’m left in a situation where I’d have to force myself to login to her account manually from the browser every now and then to check her email.

Does anyone have a better solution to access your kid’s Gmail account easily?