iCloud Setting Up iCloud Family Sharing

[j3tang]

I think this is bit of a newb question but I don't find this whole thing all too intuitive so I'll have to ask just in case there's something I'm missing. I've recently added child accounts to our Family (wife, myself and 2 kids).
The child's account is setup with an email and we have tested it out to work properly.

A couple things I noticed that made me go "huh?"

1) I wanted to test sending messages (thru iMessage) from kids' device to my and wife's device. Naturally, you'd need to create a new chat first and identify who you want to send the message to. Well .. the kids' device does not have either parent's contact info. Should these not automatically be in the contacts list seeing as this is part of a family plan?

Anyways, I created a contact for "mom" and "dad" on the kids' device. All's good and messages are flowing.

2) Then I wanted to add our family calendar to the child's device. From a parent's device, I tried to "add person" for the family calendar. Oops, I don't have a contact for my kids setup so I can't just select them from a list.

Similar to question above, why would the kids' contacts not automatically be selectable or already added or can be turned on/off? I tried "add person" by just sending the invite to the child's email (since you must create the account with an email to begin with). I waited 5-10 minutes and didn't see the invite come up on the child's device.

Does that mean I must have a contact created for the child in order to properly invite?


Maybe I'm just doing this all wrong? Can someone point me somewhere that can walk me through how to set some of these apps up?
I gotta say, I'm no tech-geek but I'm not someone who can't find their way around technology either. So I'm feeling a little deflated because .... is this a sign of me getting old enough to start considering ... "I'm not someone who can find their way around tech anymore"?

 

[barbu]

I can relate to this, as someone born in the, uh, 70s... I have had computers all my life but at this point it gets a bit blurry and paradigms sometimes shift when I'm not looking. So I know how it feels even though I am supposedly an "expert" in my field.

I can also relate to having confusion setting this up for a young family. I just have the one kid and it's been a bit of a learning curve understanding things like who is allowed to iMessage the kid and the fact that parental controls and content ratings mean Looney Toons are not available on the kid iPad.

I found this, I'm sure you did too. Or you can go over your work and make sure, but it does at least mention creating accounts if they don't exist and so on in a step-by-step way.

 

[j3tang]

Thanks, appreciate the link but unfortunately it didn't help. The article is somewhat written around adding someone to a family group (which assumes the person already has an email). It works well if for instance if I'm adding my wife to the account, or in-laws (god forbid), etc.

I've gone through the family setup process by creating a child account, and I guess by doing so, they've been added to the family group by default.

What I'm currently stuck on is adding the family calendar to the child's device. Reluctantly, I've created a contact for the child on my phone and I sent an invite to the child to add them to the calendar. The invite went to their email (which was how I did it previously without the contact, it was just sent directly to an email, but the invite was never received). Doing this through the contact, the invite was received by email, but the next hurdle now is that when I click on the invite in the email, it doesn't try to add the family calendar through the calendar app! Instead, the link attempts to add the calendar through the web-based iCloud, which eventually says it can't be done .... because it is going through the web-based version. 🤦‍♂️