6 min · read

No parent’s phone: what you can remove and what you cannot

The parent’s phone drowned on holiday. Or it broke, or it was sold along with the old account, or the parent left for two weeks and cannot be reached. Meanwhile the restrictions on the child’s phone are still there: the screen goes dark on schedule, half the apps will not install, the store asks for permission. The good news is that in most cases the parent’s phone is not needed at all. The bad news is that access to their account is, and that is deliberate.

Controls hang on the account; the phone is only a remote

Family Link, Microsoft Family Safety, Apple’s Family Sharing, our own Gardion: all of them tie restrictions to the parent’s account, not to the parent’s device. The phone is a remote control. Lose the remote but remember the password, and you have lost nothing.

That is also why “mom has no phone” is not a way around the controls. If it were, any stolen handset could be cleared in a minute. This is how the system protects a device from someone else’s hands.

What follows is system by system, briefly. Full step-by-step instructions for each live on the removal guides page; this article covers only the case where the parent’s device is missing.

A woman sits at a kitchen table in the evening in front of an open laptop, a cup of tea beside her and her smartphone set aside — Parental settings live in the account, so they can be changed from any computer

Android and Family Link: a browser instead of the phone

The app is not the only place supervision settings can be changed. Google’s help on lifting restrictions says it directly: you can also change these settings at g.co/YourFamily. It opens in an ordinary browser, on a work computer, a laptop, someone else’s tablet.

The order is: go to g.co/YourFamily signed in to the parent’s Google account, pick the child, and change or remove restrictions.

If the parent’s account password is also out of reach, removing supervision is pointless until the account itself is recovered: Google does not hand supervision over without the parent’s password. Google names no recovery timeframe, so start there rather than with the child’s phone.

Windows and Microsoft Family Safety: all of it on the site

Microsoft’s family group lives on the web to begin with. Sign in at account.microsoft.com/family as the family organizer, find the person, choose Remove from family group, and confirm.

Microsoft warns about two things. If you cannot see Remove from family group, choose Withdraw consent for that child account first. And leaving the group costs that person access to the family’s shared subscriptions, Microsoft 365 Family among them.

Only the family organizer can remove someone; a second adult with the member role cannot.

A man stands at a hallway table looking at a switched-off smartphone with a cracked screen, keys and an open laptop lying next to it — A broken parent phone does not cancel access: the Microsoft family group is managed on the web

iPhone and Screen Time: officially allowed without a parent device

Apple covers this case in a paragraph of its own, and it is the most useful thing written on the subject anywhere.

If Family Sharing is set up and your child’s account is in the family group, you manage Screen Time from your own iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Vision Pro.

And here is our case, from Apple’s help: if Family Sharing is not set up, or you have no Apple device of your own, but your child aged 13 to 17 uses an iPhone or iPad, your child can create an Apple Account and you can set up and manage Screen Time and parental controls from their device.

So a parent with no iPhone is allowed to manage the restrictions straight from the child’s phone, provided the Screen Time passcode is known.

One caveat, also from Apple’s help: in some countries and regions, settings such as Screen Time, Ask to Buy and app content restrictions cannot be turned off. For a child account some restrictions are set by law rather than by a parent, and nothing lifts them.

Gardion: the parent dashboard opens in a browser

We follow the same logic as Microsoft: the parent dashboard is a web page. You open it from any computer or a borrowed phone, see your child’s devices and change the rules. A separate parent app is optional, and losing a phone breaks nothing. You can look at the dashboard without installing anything.

Gardion itself does not come off the child’s device that easily. It runs as a device administrator, so a long press will not uninstall it, and an attempt to open the uninstall screen pushes your child away from it and alerts you at once. There is usually one sign that the controls did come off: the device stops appearing online in the dashboard although the phone is in your child’s hands.

What not to do

A factory reset. After a reset, Android asks for the previous owner’s sign-in. If that account is out of reach, the phone turns into a brick and the situation is worse than it started.

“Phone flashers” from classified ads. Someone who will remove another person’s controls for money removes your anti-theft protection along with them.

Someone else’s device. You may only remove controls from your own device or your own child’s. Getting around another person’s parental controls or phone lock is illegal, and this article is not about that.

What to remember

The parent’s phone is needed less often than it seems: Family Link is managed at g.co/YourFamily, the Microsoft family group at account.microsoft.com/family, the Gardion dashboard in a browser, and Apple explicitly allows Screen Time to be run from the child’s device when the parent has none.

What you always do need is access to the parent’s account. If that is gone too, start with recovering the account rather than with the child’s phone. A map of where controls are switched on in 2026 is in the breakdown of the three places.

In short

The parent is abroad and out of contact. What now?

Wait for access to their account. None of the four systems removes controls on the strength of a support call and a photo of a birth certificate: the account is the proof of ownership.

The parent’s phone is lost but the account password is known. Do I need a new phone?

No. A parent opens Family Link at g.co/YourFamily, the Microsoft family group at account.microsoft.com/family, and the Gardion dashboard in any browser. There is no need to buy a new handset for this.

My child turned 13. Will supervision end by itself?

Age does change the rules, but differently in each system. What happens to supervision at that moment is described in the article on every way to remove controls.

I bought a phone and someone else’s parental controls are on it.

That is a separate case, and it is solved through the seller and their account. The breakdown is in the article on every way to remove parental controls.

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