All Your Apps Suddenly Want to Know Your Age

Age verification is coming to your family’s apps. Here’s what changed, where your child’s birthday lives, and the one account to check this week.

TL;DR: The Quick Version

The birthday on your child’s account now controls a lot more than it used to. It decides who can message them, what they can download and buy, what gets recommended to them, and when your parental controls loosen up.

Parental controls do not end at 13. At 13, many kids gain the ability to opt out of some settings on their own, and you usually get notified when they do.

Platforms stopped trusting the birthday. Roblox now uses a short face scan to estimate age before kids can chat. Discord reads account behavior. App stores in some states ask adults for a credit card or government ID.

Your child’s birthday lives in at least three separate places (Apple, Google, and apps like Instagram), and none of them check with each other.

Four states have passed App Store age verification laws (Utah, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama), and California passed its own version. As of fall 2026, only Texas is actually in force.

Your small task this week: pick the one account you’re least sure about, check the birthday, and fix it or link it to your family group.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Spotify | Amazon Music | iHeartRadio | RSS | More

The Year 2004 Problem

Your 12-year-old typed 2004 into a signup form once. Everything protecting them has believed it ever since.

For about 30 years, that’s how the internet worked. A website asked for a birthday, you typed one in, and the website said “great, welcome aboard.” Nobody checked. A 10-year-old could sign up for Snapchat, and a 45-year-old could create an Animal Jam account, and the platform would shrug either way. The birthday was a checkbox that said “yep, you’re allowed in.”

It reminds me of when I ask my dog if she knows what happened to the bag of chips I left next to my bed. She looks right at me like, “Nope. Totally wasn’t me.”

There’s a famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon with the caption “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” That was the whole premise of being online. The internet has now decided it would very much like to know.

Over the last 18 months or so, almost every major platform your kid touches rebuilt itself around that one number. So let’s talk about what that means for your family, and what to actually do about it.

Wait, Don’t Parental Controls End at 13?

No. This is one of the most common questions I get, so let’s clear it up first.

A while back, I made a video about whether parental controls end when your child turns 13. The comments kept rolling in with the same worry: “Everything you’re teaching disappears at 13,” or “How do I set up parental controls for a teen, since they stop working after 13?”

Here’s the real answer. Parental controls do not end at age 13. What changes at 13 on many platforms is that your child gains the ability to opt out of certain settings on their own. Most of the time, you get a notification when they switch something off. The controls are still there. Your kid just gets a vote.

If you want the full walkthrough, my video on iPhone parental controls under and over 13 on the Family Tech YouTube channel covers it step by step.

Why I Keep Saying “Just Use Their Real Birthday”

In that same video, I made a plea to parents: use your child’s real birthday. Here’s why that matters, and it’s a little different depending on which direction the birthday is off.

The fudge	Why parents do it	What it costs later
Making your kid older	You’ve agreed to let them use Instagram or Discord, but the app says 13 and up	It teaches them that lying about their age gets them what they want
Making your kid younger	You want parental controls to keep working longer	It gets messy to untangle once they’re old enough to be done with controls

The “make them older” one is the one I think about most. If you sit next to your kid and walk them through typing in a birth year that isn’t true so they can get into something they’re not old enough for yet, you’ve just shown them, with your own hands, that lying about your age works. A couple of years later, when they do it on their own in an app you’ve never heard of, you don’t really have a leg to stand on.

And if you’ve done either of these? You’re in good company. We’ll get to why it made total sense at the time.

Where Your Child’s Birthday Actually Lives

So where does this number actually live? At least three places, and they’re all separate.

On an iPhone (Apple)

Open Settings.
Tap your name at the top.
Tap Personal Information.

If your child is in your Family Sharing group, you can reach their info from the Family section in Settings. If your kid made their own Apple Account before you set any of this up (and a lot of them did), you may need to go to appleid.apple.com and sign in as them.

Good news here: Apple has made it much easier for parents to correct a child’s birthday. You used to have to call Apple Support to change it. Now you can fix it yourself.

On Android or any Google account

Go to myaccount.google.com.
Tap Personal info.
Tap Birthday.

If your child has a supervised account, you’ll make the change through the Family Link app instead.

On Instagram

Go to the profile page.
Tap the three-line menu (people call it the hamburger) in the corner.
Tap Settings and privacy.
Tap Accounts Center.
Tap Personal details.

If I had to bet money on which birthday in your house is wrong, it’s this one. Instagram is almost always the account a kid set up by themselves.

A fair warning about all three

These menus move. Constantly. And they move on different schedules on iPhone and Android. Apple recently rebuilt its parental controls from top to bottom, so I’d expect some of these paths to shift.

If you open Settings and the thing I described isn’t where I said it would be, that’s not you. That’s the software. I’ve got 24 years in IT, and I still open Settings and find that someone quietly moved a menu three levels deeper since the last time I looked.

The fastest shortcut: type the setting name (like “birthday”) into the search bar at the top of Settings. That’s usually quicker than clicking around.

These three birthdays don’t talk to each other

Here’s the part most parents don’t realize. The birthday on your child’s iPhone, the one on their Google account, and the one on their Instagram don’t compare notes. Apple doesn’t check with Google. Instagram doesn’t check with anybody. Each account keeps its own private opinion about how old your child is, and they can all be different. Sometimes they are.

Checking takes about eight minutes of poking around, and it can save you a real headache later.

What That Birthday Controls Now

So what is that birthday actually deciding? Four big things.

1. Who can message your child. On several platforms, the age group your child is sorted into decides who is allowed to start a conversation with them. That’s not a setting you turned on. It’s the age band itself.

2. What they can download and buy. In states where App Store age laws are running, an account read as under 18 needs a parent to approve downloads and in-app purchases. Every single one.

3. What shows up. Not just what’s filtered, but what gets recommended, what’s discoverable, and what the account is even shown in the first place.

4. When your controls loosen up. A lot of the tools you set up are keyed to that birthday. That’s the age 13 shift I mentioned earlier, where your child can start opting out of certain settings. Some newer rules also switch settings on or off at 18.

Think of it like the date of birth line on a form at the doctor’s office. Nobody rechecks it. Every decision after that point quietly trusts it.

The Platforms Stopped Believing the Birthday

Since my dog isn’t going to tell me the truth about the snacks, tech companies have decided a whole lot of kids probably aren’t telling the truth about their age either. And with child online safety laws passing quickly, platforms now need to know who is a kid and who isn’t.

This isn’t happening at one company. It’s happening across the board, and it’s happening fast.

Roblox: it looks at your kid instead of asking

Roblox now requires an age check before anyone can use chat, anywhere in the world. Instead of asking for a birthday, it asks for a short video selfie, and a computer model estimates an age range. (Kids 13 and up can use a government ID instead.) Roblox says the images are deleted after they’re processed.

Users get sorted into six age groups:

Under 9
9 to 12
13 to 15
16 to 17
18 to 20
21 and up

Since summer 2026, that age check also shapes which games an account can find. Roblox rolled out age-based accounts globally: Roblox Kids (ages 5 to 8), Roblox Select (ages 9 to 15), and the regular experience for 16 and up, each with its own catalog of games.

Think of it as the carnival guess-your-age booth. Like the guy at the carnival, it’s close, but it’s not exact. Roblox says the average miss is about 1.4 years for kids under 18. That sounds small, unless your kid is sitting right on a line. After it launched, people documented some real misses, like a 23-year-old getting sorted into the 16 to 17 group and an 18-year-old landing in 13 to 15.

I want to be fair here, though. The alternative was a text box where a nine-year-old types 1994 and the platform shrugs. A guess that’s usually close is a real improvement on a lie that always got accepted. It’s just not an actual ID, even though it kind of behaves like one.

If your child has a linked parent account on Roblox, you can correct their birthday, approve or block specific games, adjust chat, and set screen time and spending limits.

Discord: it reads behavior

Discord went a different direction. It started rolling out teen-appropriate settings as the default for everyone in early 2026. That means:

Sensitive content stays blurred unless you’re a verified adult.
Only verified adults can get into age-restricted servers and channels.
Messages from people you don’t know go to a separate requests inbox.
Server owners can’t override the adult-content restrictions.

To figure out who’s an adult, Discord looks at account signals: how long the account has existed, what device it’s on, and broad patterns in how it’s used. It says it doesn’t read messages to do this. Discord says over 90% of people will never be asked to do anything at all. The system just decides they’re an adult.

If you’re new to Discord as a parent, my “New to Discord?” video walks through what it even is and how families use it.

Instagram: teen accounts

Instagram already limits teen direct messages to people the teen follows or is connected to, and kids under 16 need a parent’s permission to loosen those settings. I covered this in detail in a recent Oh My Tech episode [LINK: Instagram teen DM episode], so give that one a listen if you want the full breakdown.

Side by side

Platform	How it checks age	What the age controls
Roblox	Short video selfie (face age estimate) or ID for 13+	Chat access, who can chat with whom, which games show up
Discord	Account behavior signals; face scan or ID only if needed	Sensitive content, adult servers, message requests
Instagram	Birthday plus Meta’s age detection	Who can DM, sensitive content, parent approval under 16
App Stores (some states)	Credit card or government ID for adults	Parent approval for every download and purchase under 18

Roblox reads the face. Discord reads the behavior. The App Store wants a credit card or an ID. Three different approaches, all arriving at the same conclusion: the birthday on file can’t be trusted. Just like my dog can’t be trusted to tell me about the snacks.

App Store Age Verification Laws: Where Things Stand

Above all of the individual apps is another layer: the App Store itself. Four states have passed laws putting age verification at the App Store level. California passed its own version, built a little differently.

I live in Utah, so local news asks me about this one constantly.

State	Status as of September 2026
Utah	Signed spring 2025 (first in the nation). Amended in 2026 to remove attorney general enforcement, allow private lawsuits only, cover pre-installed apps, and push the deadline to May 6, 2027. Not in force yet.
Texas	In force. Operating since late May 2026 while the court appeal continues. Apple began requiring age checks in early June.
Louisiana	Passed, then delayed to July 1, 2027.
Alabama	Passed, takes effect January 1, 2027.
California	Built differently: the device’s operating system sends an age signal to apps. Takes effect January 1, 2027.

The Utah story, in plain English

Utah went first, signing its law in the spring of 2025. Then the tech industry sued. While that case was still going, Utah amended its own law. It took enforcement power away from the attorney general (so now only private lawsuits can enforce it), pushed the real deadline out to May 6, 2027, and widened the law to cover apps that come pre-installed on phones. After that, the attorney general agreed he couldn’t and wouldn’t enforce it, and the industry dropped the lawsuit. So right now, in the state that went first, none of it is actually in force.

Texas is the one that’s running

Texas’s law got blocked by a court right before it was supposed to start, then unblocked on appeal. The Supreme Court declined to step in on an emergency basis. That’s not the same thing as the Court saying the law is constitutional. The appeal is still open. The Court just refused to pause the law while the case plays out. Anybody telling you this is settled is getting a little ahead of themselves.

What it looks like if you live in Texas

A new Apple Account confirms you’re an adult with a credit card or a government ID. Debit cards don’t count.
Anyone under 18 has to join a Family Sharing group, where a parent approves every download and every purchase.

This gets tricky for families where the kid just got an iPhone but the parents use Android phones. You can’t create a Family Sharing group without your own Apple Account. Maybe this finally pushes Apple to make a Family Sharing or Screen Time app for Android. It wouldn’t be the first time a law pushed Apple to change how its technology works.

The platforms didn’t wait

Roblox, Discord, and Instagram didn’t wait for the courts to sort any of this out. States are rewriting their own bills mid-fight, and the platforms built age checks anyway. Whatever happens in those courtrooms, age verification is already coming to a kid’s phone near you.

The Real Cost: Everyone Gets Checked

I’m not going to tell you this is all good news, because there’s a real trade-off.

To enforce a rule about people under 18, you have to check everybody, including you. That means face scans, government IDs, and your credit card on file with companies that never needed it before. Every one of those is a pile of sensitive information sitting somewhere it wasn’t sitting before.

Who should do the checking?

There’s an argument happening inside the tech industry about who should hold that pile.

Meta, Snap, and X have all said the App Store is the right place for age verification. Their pitch to parents is a one-stop shop: verify once at the phone level instead of separately in 40 apps. That’s a real benefit. It also happens to move the whole burden off of them and onto Apple and Google.
Apple objected. Its position is that it doesn’t want to collect that kind of sensitive data, and that the right place to handle age-restricted content is the small number of apps that actually host it.
Google objected more sharply. It argued this approach would hand children’s age information to millions of app developers who have no business having it. Its example was a flashlight app. You don’t need an age check to turn on a flashlight, yet under this setup, the flashlight app would get that data.

I don’t think anybody in that argument is being purely principled. Everyone involved has an obvious financial interest in the other guy doing the expensive thing. Google’s flashlight point is a good one, though, no matter why they’re making it.

Where I land

I actually agree with the social media companies on this one. I think the App Store is the right place for age verification, and the App Store doesn’t need to share the actual ID or any of the proof with individual apps. It can simply pass along a yes or no: is this person a minor or an adult?

The tricky part is what happens when a kid turns 18 and the protections need to change. Thinking it through, the App Store might need to pass along the actual birthdate. But it wouldn’t need to pass along the proof. That feels like the most reasonable compromise to me.

If You Fudged the Birthday, You’re Not in Trouble

Some of these birthdays are wrong because a kid wanted in somewhere. Some are wrong because a parent typed them in on purpose.

For years, platforms gave you exactly one lever. You wanted your 10-year-old to have a shared family calendar, a family photo library, or a specific app for school, and the system said 13 and up. No exceptions. No family option. Figure it out.

So parents figured it out. That wasn’t sloppiness. It was a workaround for a product that didn’t have a door for you.

The difference now is what that number is wired into. Back then, a wrong birthday got your kid a calendar. Now it helps decide who can send your kid a message. Same workaround, very different consequence, and you couldn’t have known that when you typed it in, because it wasn’t true yet.

Kind of like Josh in the movie Big. He made one wish at a carnival machine and suddenly the whole world treated him like a 30-year-old. Nobody asked for proof. Your kid’s accounts have been doing the same thing with whatever birthday got typed in.

Your One Small Task This Week

One account. Not all of them. Just one.

Pick the account you’re least sure about. For most of you, that’s the one your kid set up by themselves while you were making dinner.
Go look at the birthday. Use the steps above, or search “birthday” in Settings.
If it’s right, you’re golden.
If it’s wrong, fix it, or get the account linked to your family group so the correction comes from you.

Then come tell me in the comments what you found! I really want to know how many of those birthdays were off.

The rules changed underneath everybody at almost the same time over the last 18 months, and almost nobody told parents that the birthday quietly became the most important setting in the house. Now you know.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do parental controls stop working when my child turns 13?

No. Parental controls keep working after 13. On many platforms, 13 is when a child gains the ability to opt out of some settings on their own, and parents are usually notified when that happens.

Where do I find my child’s birthday on an iPhone?

Go to Settings, tap your name, then Personal Information. For a child in your Family Sharing group, open the Family section in Settings. If your child made their own Apple Account, sign in as them at appleid.apple.com. Apple now lets parents correct a child’s birthday without calling support.

How do I change my child’s birthday on a Google account?

Go to myaccount.google.com, then Personal info, then Birthday. If your child has a supervised account, make the change in the Family Link app.

How does Roblox verify age?

Roblox requires an age check before users can chat. It uses facial age estimation from a short video selfie, or a government ID for users 13 and older. Users are sorted into age groups (under 9, 9 to 12, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, 18 to 20, and 21 and up), which control who they can chat with and which games they can find. Roblox reports an average error of about 1.4 years for users under 18.

How does Discord decide if someone is a teen?

Discord applies teen-appropriate settings by default and uses account signals, like account age, device, and general activity patterns, to identify likely adults. Discord says over 90% of users will never need to verify their age. Others can verify with a face scan or an ID.

Which states have App Store age verification laws?

Utah, Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama have passed App Store age verification laws, and California passed a different version that uses an operating system age signal. As of September 2026, Texas is the only one in force. Utah’s deadline is May 6, 2027, Louisiana’s is July 1, 2027, and Alabama’s and California’s take effect January 1, 2027.

What does Apple require in Texas?

New Apple Accounts in Texas confirm adult age with a credit card or government ID (debit cards aren’t accepted). Anyone under 18 must join a Family Sharing group, where a parent approves every download and purchase.

Should I use my child’s real birthday on their accounts?

Yes. Your child’s real birthday makes age-based protections work the way they’re designed to, avoids messy corrections later, and avoids teaching your child that lying about their age is how you get into things.

Listen, Watch, and Keep Going

This post is based on this week’s episode of the Oh My Tech Podcast, where we take you from tech chaos to tech confidence every Tuesday.

Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts.
Watch it on the Family Tech YouTube channel.
Subscribe so the next overwhelmed parent finds calm, helpful tech advice instead of the scary stuff.

So until next time… this is Family Tech, powering down.

Keep Reading

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I receive compensation if you make a purchase using the links.

TL;DR: The Quick Version