Category: Google

This is an unfortunate story that added some stress to my life but also gave me the opportunity to learn a lesson.

As many of the IT guys, I love to experiement and test new services and products.

I found out that there is a possibility to create a family group with Google accounts, to connect parents and kids in the same group and have much control of our kids activities.

I created a new family group at this link Google Families, then I added my 6-year-old daugther to control the contents of YouTube Kids.

Till now everything streight forward.

I had also to install the app in my Android mobile called Google Family Link.

While playing with the app I decide to add also my son, I manage his email so was simple to setup myself as parent and my son as supervised child (accepting the link in his email account).

Issues:

1. As soon as I linked my son, he told me that he could not sign in on YouTube on our Android TV, a message shown was saying that the device was not compatible. Strange, it’s a new TV.
   I started searching info about compatibility devices and removed all restrictions in the Family Link related to YouTube.
   Finally he could connect but as a Guest, the profile was showing his name and surname rather than the usual YouTube channel name and logo.
   Ok, I realized that something was not going as expected, so let me try to rollback the whole process deleting the link with my son from the Family Link.
   Here started the nightmare…
2. I realized his YouTube channel was litterally gone (hidden or deleted was not clear, but not visible at all).
3. I cannot remove a supervised child from the Family until he does not turn to 14. Ok, I thought, let me change his birthday date but even this attempt was not possible.
4. I cannot delete the family group that has a supervisioned child linked in it.

Workarounds:

1. I cannot change the birthday date to a date that he will be older than 14 years old so the best I could do was to setup his birthday to tomorrow, pretending he would turn 14 tomorrow.
2. Waited the day after until he receive a Happy Birthday email with subject “Ready to take charge of your Google Account?“, this arrived at 10 PM.
3. Clicked the link in the email [GET STARTED] and the in the page that opened, at the bottom, the button I’m Ready.
   Finally he got disconnested from the Family Group.
4. His YouTube channel was still gone.
   I clicked the button to create a new channel (you can choose any name, it does not matter) this automatically reconnected to his channel.
   Yeah, the only issue was a red bar with a message showing “Channel does not exists.“
5. I waited about 10 minutes when I realized that his videos were all there but marked with Visibility = Private.
   I selected all of them and changed the Visibility to Public.

He finally got his YouTube channel back so that he can still continue his dream to become a YouTuber.

Did his channel lose all subscribers? We noted that in YouTube Studio the statistics were showing a negative number of subscribers while in the channel there was a Zero. Do not be worry, it took 3-4 days until YouTube servers synchronized the data, all subscribers have been restored automatically.

If this post helped you, it’s time to pay me back subscribing to his channel, we will really appreciate it: Hypey TC