Google Family Link for Home Assistant - Parental controls & device monitoring for your kids

Share your Projects! Custom Integrations
, , , ,
22

What am I doing wrong?I got the addon working and I can see my 2 accounts and the sensors but no matter what I do it doesn't change anything. I tried adding bonus time, toggling school time and locking the device but it doesn't change a single thing on the family link

23

Hi! A couple of things to check, because “sensors show up but nothing changes in Family Link” usually points to a write/permission issue rather than the dashboard itself:

  1. Which Google account is authenticated in the add-on? It must be the parent account that manages the child in Family Link. If you logged in with a secondary/non-manager account, reads work but writes (bonus, lock, school time…) are silently rejected.
  2. Check the Home Assistant logs right after you trigger an action (Settings → System → Logs, filter on familylink). If you see 401, 403 or Session expired, the cookies need re-authenticating in the add-on. A 400/invalid usually means a Google API change.
  3. Give it a few seconds - actions are sent to Google and take a short moment to propagate back; the UI uses an optimistic state for ~5s. If the Family Link app still doesn’t reflect it after ~30s, it’s a real write failure, not a delay.
  4. Make sure you’re calling the action on the right target (the correct device/child) - bonus and lock are per-device.

Also, if you’re driving everything from the auto-generated entities, it’s easy to trigger the wrong thing. There’s now a ready-made example lovelace dashboard in the repo that wires up the bonus / lock / bedtime / school-time controls cleanly - grab it here and customise the entity IDs to match yours:
:backhand_index_pointing_right: HAFamilyLink/examples at main · noiwid/HAFamilyLink · GitHub
(YAML + screenshot + the list of HACS cards it needs are in the folder’s README.)

If it’s still not writing after checking the account + logs, paste the log lines from when you press a button and we’ll dig in.

24

Hi @al52025, did you manage to make the integration work?

25

Just installed this integration. Thank you, it works flawless and feels more reliable than the Family Link app on my phone.

It also gives me endless possibilities to dive even deeper in the Home Assistant rabbit hole! :smiley:

1 Like
26

@jolsar thanks for your feedback :wink:

1 Like
27

Hi,

I only came across this integration recently (I really should have searched for it much sooner), and it’s a breath of fresh air compared to the Family Link app, which is far too cumbersome for day-to-day use. Thanks for building it!

I’m currently building an automation that lets me easily switch the schedule between holidays and school weeks. While doing so I noticed that the break you can configure within the school-time window in Family Link isn’t exposed in the integration.

I can work around this by having the automation change the schedule during the day as well, but if breaks were available in the integration, the automation would need far fewer changes. That also reduces the chance that an update doesn’t get through to the device.

Would it be possible to add support for these breaks (reading and, ideally, setting them)? Happy to help test if that’s useful.

Thanks in advance!