What a child account can and cannot do
Children see the family calendar in full. That is deliberate: knowing when dad is away and when the dentist is booked is the whole point of a shared calendar.
On the chores board they only ever see their own. There is no view of anyone else's list, and the chip bar parents use to switch between people is not there.
They can complete their own chores and earn points and streaks like everyone else, and they show up on the weekly leaderboard.
They cannot tick off a sibling's chore, reassign one, or credit someone else. Casa refuses those and says so, because a kid quietly rewriting the leaderboard is a fight nobody needs.
They do not get the family insights card. The proactive heads-up about a busy week ahead is a parent thing, and it is not even generated for a child account.
They cannot change which Google Calendar the household uses, since that would move everybody. They can choose their own Google Tasks list.
They cannot change anyone's role, including their own. A child cannot promote themselves to parent.
They can add and edit events, ask Casa questions, scan a flyer, and set their own notifications.
Setting up a child
Changing someone's role later
Open Settings, Family members, tap the person, and use the Role card on their profile. Save, and it takes effect everywhere straight away.
Only parents see that card, and it never appears on your own row: demoting yourself would leave you with no way back.
Younger kids without their own phone
Most families do not give a seven-year-old an account. They use the wall-mounted iPad instead: it shows the day, who is on, and how the chores are going, in type you can read from the kitchen table.
A child account needs its own Google account to sign in with. Google has its own rules about accounts for under-13s, handled through Family Link, so that is worth sorting out on the Google side first if you want a younger child to have their own.
You can also add a child to the household as a name without them ever signing in. Their chores and points still work, and a parent ticks things off on their behalf. That is the usual setup for the under-tens.
What HomeHQ is not
It is not parental-control software. There is no screen-time limit, no PIN lock on the app, no location tracking, and no way to read your teenager's messages. The child role limits what they see inside HomeHQ, and that is all it does.
Anyone in the household can see the shared family calendar, so anything genuinely private belongs on a personal calendar rather than the family one.