Kindle for a teen

lesae

Hi all

We've bought our book loving 13 year old a Kindle for Christmas. What's the best way of setting her up so she can build her library? Is there a way of setting her up on my Amazon account and capping what she can spend on books. Any other ways of doing it? I don't want her getting carried away but also I don't want to overly restrict her if she is using it a lot to read.
Many thanks 

elsien

Download whatever app your local library uses, and they can read books for free? 

A Kindle does have parental controls, but I’m not sure how flexible they are in terms of spending limits, et cetera. 

Robin9

She's 13 and of an age when she needs to make some small financial choices -  do I buy a book for my Kindle , do I buy make up, do I pay for my phone ...........      How does she get her pocket money ?

rach_k

I find Amazon very awkward in general when it comes to teen accounts because they will only allow two proper accounts per family that can make purchases (adult accounts).  Any others have to be child accounts which can't buy stuff and they can't separate out their account in future.

If you aren't bothered about sharing books with your child, I would get them to set up their own adult Amazon account now and use that, so that anything they buy is properly theirs and will stay theirs as adults.  You could buy them a gift card to add to the account, or increase pocket money to account for book buying, if they have a debit card they can use.  

Because we do share books in my family, I just let my teens use my Amazon account.  One uses it to buy books and then manually adds them to her child account to read on her Kindle (she likes the children's UI so doesn't want to switch to using it as an adult Kindle just yet).  The other uses her phone with the Kindle app so she just reads directly in my account, which isn't a problem with page syncing unless we're reading the same book.

Either way, I buy most of their books.  You do need to be able to trust them - that they will ask permission first or pay with their own cards, that they won't snoop at the order history around gift buying times, that they will keep the account secure and that they will only read things that are suitable for them (if you had books you didn't want them to read, you would have to consider that).  The big downside to using my account is that when they're adults and maybe want their own household accounts, they will lose access to books they've bought via my account, or they will just have to continue reading in my account forever, which I don't mind, but they might!