Parents who set up Apple IDs for children take full financial and legal responsibility for everything those children buy or do on Apple's platforms.
If you create an Apple ID for your child, you are financially responsible for every in-app purchase, subscription, or content download they make — including unauthorized or accidental purchases — and refunds for these charges are still discretionary.
Cross-platform context
See how other platforms handle Family Sharing and Parental Consent for Minors and similar clauses.
Compare across platforms →Parents are contractually liable for all purchases and actions taken by their children using Apple IDs they create, and this financial exposure continues until the child's account is changed or removed from Family Sharing.
REGULATORY FRAMEWORK: This provision directly implicates COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, 15 U.S.C. §6501, 16 C.F.R. Part 312), which requires verifiable parental consent before collecting personal information from children under 13. The FTC is the primary COPPA enforcer. GDPR Art. 8 requires parental consent for processing data of children under 16 (or lower age set by member state). California's Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (AB 2273, effective 2024) imposes additional design and data minimization requirements for services likely to be accessed by minors. The FTC has recently increased COPPA enforcement focus — see FTC v. Epic Games (2023, $275M COPPA penalty).
Compliance intelligence locked
Regulatory citations, enforcement risk, and due diligence action items.
Watcher: regulatory citations. Professional: full compliance memo.