Last updated October 6, 2026: Google's own page now states that Gemini Apps are not available for supervised accounts in the UK, the EEA or Switzerland, so the Gemini switch described below is not there for every family. Every menu path was re-checked at source, a Play Store step that blocks an app before it installs has been added, and one date taken from page metadata has been corrected.
You can block a named AI app on your child's Android phone in about five minutes, in Google's Family Link app. The Chromebook is where it gets complicated. If your child signs in to that laptop with the account their school gave them, your settings do not apply at all: the school's administrator decides what AI they can reach, and you are not in that arrangement.
Blocking an AI app on Android tonight
Start here, because it is quick and it works. (If the phone in question is an iPhone, the route is different, and I have written that one up separately.) In the Family Link app on your own phone, tap your child, then Screen time, then Time limits, then App limits. Find the app in the list, tap it, and turn off the Allowed toggle. Tap Done.
Google's own Family Link page on managing a child's Google Play apps, re-checked on October 6, 2026, sets out what happens next. The app "will be blocked or unblocked in about 5 minutes, or once the device is connected to the internet." If your child is using it at that moment they get "a 1 minute warning to finish up before the app is blocked." And usefully, the block travels: the same page says the app "should be blocked on all of your child's Android devices or Chromebooks," so one action covers the phone and any Chromebook signed in with that supervised account.
Two limits are stated on the same page, and they matter more than they look. "System apps can't have app limits placed on them." And "Some apps can't be blocked because they're required for parent supervision settings to work, or for your child's device to work." A system app is one that came with the phone rather than one anybody installed: the browser, the keyboard, the assistant that answers when you hold the power button. That is where a growing amount of AI now lives, which is why the app list on its own is not the whole job, and why what has an off switch and what does not is the wider version of tonight's question.
You could say: "I've switched that one off for now. You're not in trouble. I want to understand what you were using it for before I decide what the rule is."
Stopping the next one before it installs
Blocking apps one at a time means you are always a step behind, because you can only switch off what your child has already found. There is a second lever that works ahead of them, and it is in a different menu.
In Family Link, tap your child, then Controls, then Google Play, then the type of content you want to filter, then choose how to restrict it. Google's page on setting up content restrictions on Google Play, read on October 6, 2026, sets out the steps and one honest limit alongside them: "You or your child will still be able to view any apps and games you downloaded before you added content restrictions."
So the two levers do different jobs, and a parent needs both. The age rating filter governs what can arrive from now on. The app limits list governs what is already on the phone. Setting the rating filter tonight and assuming it tidied up the existing apps is the single most common misreading of this screen.
Gemini sits behind its own switch, and not in every country
Google's assistant is not in the app list with everything else. It has a separate control, and a parent who blocks three AI apps and stops there will often find Gemini still running.
In Family Link, tap your child, then Controls, then Gemini, then Gemini Apps, and turn it off or on there. Google's guidance for parents on Gemini Apps, re-checked on October 6, 2026, is unusually frank about what that switch does not do. "Our filters try to limit inappropriate content from appearing, but they're not perfect. Your child may encounter content you don't want them to see." And: "Gemini is new and evolving, and can hallucinate and present inaccurate information as factual."
That second sentence is worth translating. To hallucinate, here, means to state something invented in the same confident voice it uses for something true. Ask it when your child's school was founded and it may give you a year, a founder and a short history, all of it plausible and some of it made up. It is not lying, because it does not know. It is guessing what a good answer would look like.
Two things on the same page decide whether that switch is even yours to use, and this guide got them wrong until today. The first is geography. Google states it plainly: "Gemini Apps are not available for supervised accounts in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom." If you are reading this in Britain and you cannot find the Gemini item in Family Link, nothing is broken and you have not missed a menu. Google is not offering it for supervised accounts where you live. The second is timing, in the places where it is offered: "We're gradually releasing access to Gemini Apps for supervised accounts, so access might not be available to your child just yet even if you have Gemini Apps enabled in Family Link." Switching it on is not the same as your child having it.
Where the switch does exist, Google confirms that a parent can give a child under 13, or the applicable age in their country, access to Gemini Apps. So it is a decision rather than a default you have to accept, and it is worth making having read what Gemini is actually rated for.
The assistant behind the power button
This is the part of an Android phone that moves fastest, and it is the part the app list cannot reach.
Google's page on getting started with the Gemini mobile app, read on October 6, 2026, says what happens when Gemini takes over the assistant slot: "If you switch to use Gemini through any of these methods, Gemini will replace Google Assistant as the primary assistant on your device." The methods it lists are the ordinary ways a phone is held: saying "Hey Google," pressing and holding the power button, touching and holding the Home button, or swiping up from a bottom corner. None of those is an app your child chose from a store, and none of them appears in the app limits list.
Two sentences in Google's documentation are worth more to a parent than any of that, because they describe what a supervised account does not get. Google's page on what you can do with the Gemini mobile app, read the same day, states: "Some features have age requirements and aren't available for supervised accounts." And specifically: "'Hey Google' and Voice Match with Gemini aren't available for supervised accounts."
My reading of those two sentences, rather than Google's: supervision does more here than the Family Link menu suggests. The hands-free route into the assistant, the one a child uses without picking up the phone, is closed on a supervised account. That is quietly the most useful thing on this page, and it is an argument for actually setting the account up as supervised rather than relying on a list of blocked apps.
Why your settings stop at the school's sign-in screen
Here is the part almost no guide tells parents, and it is the reason an evening of careful settings can come to nothing.
Parental controls follow the account, not the laptop. On a Chromebook, how much control you keep depends entirely on how the school's account was added to it. Google's Chromebook Help page on adding a school account for a Family Link user, re-checked on October 6, 2026, draws the line in one sentence: "If you add a school account as a new user on your Chromebook's sign-in screen, Family Link parental controls will not apply to that user account."
Add the school account inside your child's supervised profile, as a second account, and your rules hold: "Screen time limits, downtimes, and other parental controls apply whenever a child is signed in to a Chromebook with their Family Link account." Add it as its own user on the sign-in screen, and you have created a second computer inside the same machine, with none of your settings on it.
On the school's own device, the question is settled before you open it, and what a parent can and cannot put on a school Chromebook is the whole of that question rather than this paragraph. The same page states that "Google Workspace for Education administrators determine which Google services their users can access while signed into a Google Workspace for Education account." Google's page on managing a child's account on Chromebook, read the same day, repeats it and adds the consequence: a school account may carry "some features or services that your child was previously unable to access using the Family Link supervised account."
Signing in with the school's account, in other words, can hand back the very things you switched off.
So, before you change anything:
The Sign-In Check is the two-minute thing to do before you touch a single setting: open your child's laptop and look at the sign-in screen before anyone types a password. Count the accounts on it. As far as your controls are concerned, each one is a separate computer, and the evening you spend in Family Link only covers the one with your name behind it.
What I See in Schools
I have spent years on the other side of this, as a director of digital strategy in further education, and since then working on AI strategy with schools, trusts and districts. So I can tell you what that administrator's screen actually looks like, because it is the thing parents are never shown.
It is a list. A member of staff, usually one person with a dozen other jobs, decides for every pupil at once whether a Google service is on or off, and can set it differently for eleven-year-olds and sixteen-year-olds. When a new AI feature arrives, it frequently arrives switched on, and somebody has to notice and decide. The pattern I see most often is not a school making a bad call. It is a school making a real call, in a meeting, with reasons, and then telling nobody outside the building.
That is my reading of it rather than a finding from research, and I would say the same thing to the school. But it changes what a parent should do with an evening. The settings at home are worth twenty minutes. The question to the school is worth more, and almost nobody asks it.
Parental controls follow the account, not the device. Your child can be at the same kitchen table, on the same laptop, and be under a completely different set of rules depending on which account they signed in with.
What to ask the school
Keep it short and specific. A question about "AI" gets a policy. A question about a switch gets an answer.
- Which Google AI services are turned on for my child's year group right now, and who made that decision?
- If the school issues a device, is it still managed by the school when my child brings it home, and does that management cover AI tools as well as websites?
- If my child types something worrying into a school tool, what happens, and who sees it? (What a school can and cannot see is worth knowing before you ask.)
- Does the school's filtering and monitoring cover AI chat, or only websites?
That last one is the question I would push hardest on. Filtering built to block websites does not always treat a conversation inside an app the same way, and the honest answer from a school is sometimes "I will find out," which is a perfectly good answer.
If what comes back troubles you, there is a narrower request worth making, and what you can actually ask for is a shorter list than most parents expect.
How this changes by age
Under 8. Block the apps, set the Google Play rating filter so the next one cannot install, and do not feel you owe an explanation beyond "that one's for older kids." At this age the bigger risk is the assistant that answers instantly on a smart speaker, not an app your child chose.
8 to 12. This is the age to do it together rather than overnight. Sit with them, show them the Family Link screen, and let them see you make the decision rather than discover it. It is also the age where the school has said least: in Common Sense Media's 2026 census, 61% of 9 to 12 year olds said a school or teacher had talked to them about what to use AI for in schoolwork, against 80% of 13 to 15 year olds and 86% of 16 and 17 year olds. If your child has a school Chromebook, this is the age to look at the sign-in screen with them and ask which account they use for what.
13 to 15. Blocking alone starts to fail here, because a blocked app on a supervised phone is an invitation to use an unsupervised one. Keep the controls, and move most of your effort to knowing which tools they actually use. Ask what the last three things they asked it were. A general question gets a shrug; a specific one usually gets a phone held up.
16 to 18. Controls are mostly the wrong tool now, and a sixteen-year-old with a school account and a personal phone has more AI than you can switch off. What still works is the standing agreement: which tasks they will not hand over, and the fact that they can tell you when something a chatbot said unsettled them.
What blocking cannot guarantee
Four things, plainly.
It does not reach inside other companies' apps. Internet Matters, the UK online safety organization, states it in its guide to Family Link, read on October 6, 2026: "Google Family Link cannot restrict content within non-Google products. You will need to explore in-app parental controls for specific apps if you wish to do this." The AI inside Snapchat is a good example, and what My AI does and does not do is a separate decision from anything you set in Family Link.
It does not cover a signed-out browser. Nothing stops a child opening a chatbot's website without logging in to anything, on any machine.
It does not reach a phone or tablet that Family Link cannot supervise. The same Internet Matters guide lists the devices it covers: an Android phone or tablet, a Chromebook, and the Fitbit Ace LTE. An iPhone in the same house needs Apple's own controls instead.
And it does not reach school. That is the whole point of the section above, and it is not a loophole your child found. It is how the account was built.
None of this makes the block pointless. It makes it the first layer of three. The account decides what the app allows, the device decides what the screen allows, and the conversation decides everything else, which is why the last one is the only layer that covers the cases the other two miss.
What I would do this week
The numbers suggest the conversation is the layer most families are thinnest on. In the Common Sense Media census of AI use by tweens and teens, fieldwork run by SSRS from March 18 to 26, 2026 with 1,204 US children aged 9 to 17, 73% of all the children surveyed said their school or a teacher had told them what they should and should not use AI for in schoolwork, while 56% of all of them said a parent had talked to them about using AI safely. Those are children's reports of two different conversations, not a measure of how good either was. But the gap runs the direction most parents would not guess.
So: twenty minutes in Family Link tonight. Block the apps you already know about, set the Google Play rating filter so the next one cannot install itself, and look for the Gemini item, accepting that in the UK it will not be there. Then look at the sign-in screen on every laptop in the house, and find out which account your child is actually using for schoolwork. Then send one email to the school with the first question above in it.
If your child's school has not spoken to parents about which AI services are switched on, that is the work I do with schools, reviewing what is enabled and what the policy actually means in practice. It is worth sending to your head of year or principal. I also write a Sunday newsletter that keeps parents and teachers up to date without the panic.
Dan Fitzpatrick is a former secondary teacher and assistant headteacher who now helps schools and families make sense of AI.
