Lending Your iPad to Your Kids: Settings to Check First

A home iPad has no way to switch between users the way a computer does. Shared iPad, where several people sign in to the same iPad with their own accounts, is meant for schools and businesses that manage their devices. So when you lend your own iPad to your child, they are holding a device with your mail, your photos, your way to pay and all your settings on it.

This post is for parents who share their own iPad with their child, and it collects the settings worth checking before you hand it over. I follow Apple’s support pages, but labels can differ a little between iPadOS versions, so compare with your screen as you read.

What you want to protect

When a parent’s iPad goes to a child, the trouble usually falls into four areas:

Mail and messages. Opening work mail, deleting it, or sending a reply.
Photos. Seeing photos you’d rather they didn’t, or deleting them.
Purchases. Buying apps or items inside apps.
Settings. Changing Wi-Fi or display settings, or deleting apps.

One more is easy to miss: the browser. Your Safari has your history, open tabs and sites you are still signed in to.

Instead of guarding each of these one by one, you can first make the space the child can reach smaller. Guided Access is the center of that.

1. Lock the iPad to one app with Guided Access

Guided Access temporarily keeps an iPad in a single app. The steps on Apple’s page “Use Guided Access with iPhone or iPad” are roughly these:

In Settings, go to Accessibility, turn on Guided Access, and use Passcode Settings to choose the passcode for ending a session.
Open the app your child will use and triple-click the top button (or the Home button on an iPad that has one).
Choose Guided Access and tap Start.

Now your child can’t go back to the Home Screen or switch to another app. Mail, Photos and Settings are all out of reach. Before starting, you can also choose which buttons work and set a time limit.

Make the Guided Access passcode different from the one that unlocks the iPad. The full steps, and how to avoid getting stuck yourself, are in How to Use Guided Access on iPad.

2. Lock the apps you don’t want opened

Sometimes you’ll hand the iPad over without Guided Access. Since iPadOS 18, you can lock individual apps. Apple’s page “Lock or hide an app on iPad” describes the feature as being for when “you want to show someone something on your iPad but want peace of mind that they can’t get into certain apps.”

On the Home Screen, touch and hold the app you want to lock.
In the menu that opens, tap Require Face ID (or Touch ID or Passcode).
Tap Require Face ID (or Touch ID or Passcode) again to lock the app.

A locked app needs Face ID, Touch ID or your passcode every time it opens. The same page says information inside a locked app won’t appear in notification previews, search or Siri suggestions either. Lock Mail, Photos, Messages and your work apps, and your child won’t wander into them by accident.

The lock comes back automatically when you quit the app. To remove it, choose Don’t Require Face ID from the same menu. Apps that come with the iPad can’t be hidden, though. Only apps you download from the App Store can be.

The weak point is if your child knows your iPad passcode. The passcode opens locked apps too, so the lock stops meaning anything. Try not to type it in front of your child.

3. Stop purchases

Your iPad has your payment method on it. The steps on Apple’s page “Turn off Apple In-App Purchases from Screen Time on your iPhone or iPad” stop purchases inside apps:

Open the Settings app, then tap Screen Time.
Tap Apps & Websites, then tap App Store.
Tap In-app Purchases and select Blocked.

You can also require a password for every purchase (password settings for purchases). If your child’s finger is registered for Touch ID, that finger can confirm a purchase, so it is worth checking which fingers are registered. Purchases are covered in more detail in How to Stop Kids Making In-App Purchases on an iPad.

4. Keep the browser separate from Safari

If you want your child to see a website and hand over your Safari as it is, you are handing over your history, your open tabs and the sites you are signed in to as well. In the Kinder Browser developer interview, I explained why I started making it:

When I let her use sites like Scratch and NatGeo, browsers like Safari were hard for her to operate, and it felt scary that she could go to other sites when I wasn’t watching.

Kinder Browser is a browser for children that opens only the sites a parent has added. It is a separate app from Safari, so your Safari history and tabs aren’t visible in it. A child can open the sites a parent adds as the Home Page and bookmarks in Parental Settings. Inside those sites they can follow links freely, but a link to another site stops with the message “External links are disabled”. Adult and gambling sites are blocked by a built-in list from the start.

The settings sit behind a parental gate. The default parental passcode is “0000”, so turn on Use CustomPIN and change it to your own number.

Lock Kinder Browser in place with Guided Access, and your child can’t switch to another app and, inside the browser, sees only the sites you added. One thing to remember: Kinder Browser keeps the screen from turning off while a page is shown. You can set the end time with a Guided Access time limit.

A check before you hand it over

Here is all of the above as a quick check before lending:

Look at which app is open. Don’t hand it over on your mail or a work screen.
Are the apps you don’t want opened locked?
Are in-app purchases set to Blocked?
If your child will browse, open Kinder Browser, not Safari.
Start Guided Access and set a time limit.
Have you avoided typing your passcode in front of your child?

Once it becomes routine, steps 4 and 5 take well under a minute.

When to think about a device of their own

Lending a parent’s iPad suits short stretches of use with a parent nearby. These are times to start thinking about a child’s own device and a child Apple Account:

Your child uses it alone, every day, at a set time.
Your child has their own apps or game progress to keep.
The times you need the iPad for work overlap with the times your child wants it.

Setting up a child Apple Account through Family Sharing gives you Ask to Buy, which sends you a request when your child wants an app, and Screen Time you can manage from your own device. How to set it up is in How to Create a Child Apple Account with Family Sharing, and when to give a child a device is in What Age Should Kids Get an iPad?.

Settings can only draw the boundaries. In the interview, asked about there being no way for a child to request a new site, I said:

Problems that can be solved by talking should be solved by parent and child talking directly. I don’t believe in doing everything through an app.

Kinder Browser is a one-time purchase, $9.99 in the US and ¥1,500 in Japan, with no in-app purchases, no subscription and no ads. The first setup is covered in Getting Started with Kinder Browser.