Setting up a child's iPad

Our kids are 12 and 8.

We're fully into the world of figuring out how to handle access to internet connected hardware.

We got our son Apple Watch at 10, and that's been mostly fine. I have some annoyances, but it's passable for a communication device.

We've had family iPads for the kids. But recently we started designating devices so they can play games with each other and friends.

Last week I setup an older iPad for my daughter.

I can't believe how hard that it was.

I wanted to assign a device to her. I also wanted it to be on a child Apple account.

As I went through the setup there were a number of decisions to make.

First, choosing an email address.

Now, for each of our kids I've purchased domain names that will be theirs once they become adults (provided that's even a thing that matters by then). So they have firstnamelastname.com.

A while back I setup a simple domain forward for firstname@firstnamelastname.com for my daughter, sending any emails back to my primary email. This is so that I can start setting up accounts for her and separating them a bit from my own email—while still forwarding it all into my inbox. It's a way to prepare a digital life for the kids as they get a bit older.

Apple offers iCloud domains by default when setting up an Apple account, but I want to avoid that route unless strictly necessary.

That's where I ran into the first problem. I put in her email address to start the process.

Apple didn't recognize the email, claiming it was an invalid address. This is 2026, that's just plain silly. I ran the request again, and it went through, letting me know that a verification code had been sent to the email.

But that should have been my first clue that this flow isn't top of mind for Apple.

The email never arrived.

I tried multiple times over the next few hours.

Then I assumed something must be wrong, that I'd setup the email incorrectly. So I checked.

It was setup as a simple email forward in Hover. Just for sanity's sake I double checked our son's email. It's setup the exact same way and it's working just fine.

Well, I went a step forward and switched the DNS over to Cloudflare, and re-assigned the email forward from there.

Several attempts later on the iPad and still nothing. Never mind the fact that I've used this forwarded email in the past just fine.

Finally, several hours and a few dozen attempts later, an email forward verification code came through. As one final insult the code is numeric, but the Apple keyboard defaults to an alphabet keyboard, come.

I was nearly there.

Then I had to enter a password.

And here, at this point, I was reminded of the process of logging into a Microsoft account from an iPad when you're just trying to play Minecraft. The entire authentication process and login is an unconsidered mess. Input fields are weird, the device keyboard isn't as expected, the modals misbehave. The whole process just felt janky.

For one, I wanted the password to be a good one, so I tried using Apple Passwords—an Apple built in app that triggers from the keyboard anytime you're entering a password. It didn't work, Apple's own Settings app refused to accept the password.

So I tried again, manually typing one out in Apple Passwords, and then entering it in on my own, one that wasn't auto generated, but still had sufficient entropy. At that point Apple let me know that the password required a capital letter and a number. That would have been helpful 60 seconds previous.

I changed the password, updated it in Apple Passwords, and manually typed it in.

It worked, and for some inexplicit reason, I had to enter it another 3-4 times before finally making it through—at one point I also had to enter my personal Apple account password, which was quite confusing from a user interface perspective.

But finally I was done.

And I found myself a bit exhausted. I'd gone through the chaos, and her iPad was now ready.

And why? Why did I bother?

Because I'd been letting her use my old iPad, and once or twice a day my AirPods would connect to it while she was doing something. A daily 2 second annoyance sent me into a multi-hour spiral to solve the problem.

Maybe I should have just gone with an iCloud email address.