New Feature Lets Parents Manage Children’s Online Church Accounts

A new feature on ChurchofJesusChrist.org makes it easier for Latter-day Saint parents to create and manage their children’s Church online accounts.

The new children accounts management feature, which automatically appears in a parent’s Church account information, allows a parent to view the accounts of any unmarried children under the age of 18 in the same household, according to their membership record. Parents can choose to create an account, reset a password or delete an account that is no longer needed.

Because the children’s and parents’ Church account information is tied to their membership and household information, parents simply need to log in to their Church account to view their children’s information.

“Enabling parents to easily set up their child’s account and reset their password solves many challenges and frustrations,” said Young Women General President Bonnie H. Cordon. “We look forward to more youth being able to log in and take advantage of Gospel Living Circles and other personalization features.”

Many Latter-day Saint children first create a Church Account as part of a Primary or youth activity. One challenge has been the difficulty in getting a parent’s permission through an email or phone call, which often happens during an activity and usually using a leader’s phone.

Later, when children got to be teens and young adults, they often couldn’t remember the username or password they had set up years before, which was a problem when they went to use the circles feature in the Gospel Living app, log in to Canvas for Seminary, or tried to apply online to serve a mission or attend a Church school.

Simply creating a new account wasn’t an option either. That’s because a Membership Record Number (MRN) can only be used for a single Church Account.

Another option for resolving Church account issues is the Account Recovery feature, which requires you to provide either an email address or a mobile phone number. But young kids under age 13 often didn’t have their own cell phone number or email account and may have used their school email or their parent’s phone number when they first set up their account.

For some parents, contacting the Church’s Global Service Department has been their last hope for resolving issues with a child’s Church account. But because this department exists to help resolve issues for leaders and clerks across the globe and is not sufficiently staffed to support the general membership of the Church, parents experience long wait times.

The Children Accounts feature is available now in 36 languages.