Passing a Phone Down to a Younger Child — What to Erase Before You Hand Over an iPhone

The first phone a younger sibling gets is often not a new one. A parent upgrades, and last year’s handset moves across the kitchen table. What is easy to miss is that the device keeps running on the previous owner’s setup until someone takes it out.

Deciding the timing, the device and the first settings is covered in Three Things to Settle Before Your Child’s First Phone, and splitting conditions between siblings in Phone Rules for Siblings in Different Grades. This article is only about the steps a hand-me-down needs.

Roughly a third of these phones are hand-me-downs

ALL CONNECT surveyed 300 parents in Japan with children in elementary or middle school in December 2025. Of the phones in those households, 57% were bought new, 30% were handed down from a parent, and 13% were bought used.

In the same survey, 10.7% of parents answered that they did not know what kind of device their child was using, because the child had chosen it. Once a phone is in daily use, few occasions come up to open its settings again. The handover is one of the few moments a parent sees the whole device.

Taking the previous owner out

Apple’s page “What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your iPhone or iPad” gives the order for removing personal information from a device you are passing on.

#	Step	Where
1	Create a backup	—
2	Unpair an Apple Watch, if one is paired	—
3	Sign out of iCloud and the Store	Settings > [your name] > Sign Out
4	Erase All Content and Settings	Settings > General > Transfer or Reset [device]
5	Remove it from your trusted devices	Apple Account settings

On iOS 26 and later, signing out asks you to choose Erase this [Device] or Sign Out But Don’t Erase, and then to confirm with Sign out of iCloud and Store. On a device with an eSIM, the confirmation screen offers to erase the eSIM profile as well.

Steps 3 and 4 are the ones whose order matters. Apple notes that if Find My is on, erasing may require your Apple Account and password — which is exactly the prompt you do not want to meet with a child waiting beside you.

Erasing removes cards added for Apple Pay, photos, contacts and apps from the device, while anything stored in iCloud stays there, Apple says. Find My and Activation Lock are turned off at the same time, which is the point where the phone finally behaves like one out of a box.

Create the Child Account before you hand it over

Apple states that a parent or guardian has to create the Apple Account for a child under 13, and that the age requirement varies by country or region. The steps happen on the Family Sharing organizer’s device, not on the child’s phone.

• Set up Family Sharing, if you have not already
• On the organizer’s device, go to Settings and tap Family
• Tap the Add Member button, then Create Child Account, then Continue
• Enter the child’s name and birthday
• Follow the onscreen instructions to the end

Apple also says it matters that the child has their own Apple Account rather than sharing one with another family member. Set up a younger child’s phone under an older sibling’s account and both the activity reports and the limits end up pooled.

The birthday changes the defaults

This is the part worth slowing down for. Apple’s parental controls page states that Ask to Buy and Ask to Browse are on by default for children under 13, and Limit Adult Websites is on by default for children under 18. In some states, countries and regions, Apple adds, certain controls are on by default and cannot be turned off.

So entering an age above the child’s real one does not leave you at a neutral starting point — it starts the device with protections that would otherwise have applied already switched off. Getting the birthday right when you create the account is easier than restoring each setting by hand later. Once the account exists, How to Set Up Screen Time Through Family Sharing covers filling in the rest.

The SIM can wait

In the same ALL CONNECT survey, the share of children using a phone on Wi-Fi only, with no SIM, was 22.4% in the lower elementary grades, 11.7% in the upper elementary grades and 1.0% in middle school. Among the youngest group, roughly one child in five is using the phone on home Wi-Fi alone.

A hand-me-down costs nothing in hardware, which means the decision about a connection can come later than the device does. Letting the phone live inside the house for a few weeks — long enough for where it sleeps and how long it gets used to settle — is a workable order. If the rules stop holding afterwards, When Household Phone Rules Stop Being Followed picks up from there.

Today, in thirty minutes

• Back up the device you are passing on
• Sign out first, then erase — in that order
• Remove the device from your list of trusted devices
• Create a Child Account in Family Sharing, with the correct birthday
• Check which age-based defaults are already on, from your own device
• Decide whether to add a SIM now or stay on Wi-Fi for a while

Sources

• ALL CONNECT, “Survey on children’s smartphone use (2025)” (300 parents in Japan aged 30–50 with children in elementary or middle school, conducted 3–17 December 2025 via CrowdWorks). Purchase route: 57% new, 30% handed down from a parent, 13% used. 10.67% of parents did not know the device type because the child chose it. Wi-Fi only, no SIM: 22.40% lower elementary, 11.69% upper elementary, 1.02% middle school — https://prtimes.jp/main/html/rd/p/000000157.000070245.html
• Apple, “What to do before you sell, give away, or trade in your iPhone or iPad” (accessed 30 October 2026) — https://support.apple.com/en-us/109511
• Apple, “Create an Apple Account for your child” (accessed the same day) — https://support.apple.com/en-us/102617
• Apple, “Set up parental controls to manage your child’s iPhone or iPad” (iOS 27 and later; accessed the same day) — https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121

Setting names change with OS updates, so check the current wording in the official help if an item is not where this article says. This piece summarises published survey data and official documentation; it is not medical advice or a diagnosis.