[Apple Family Sharing] Simplify moving child accounts between family groups

This weekend I switched to a new iPhone. What would normally be considered a straight-forward process turned into a little bit of an unexpected adventure as I navigated the trial of attempting to remove my under 13 child's account from my family sharing plan. This was all in an attempt to join my wife's family sharing plan (we recently joined the same carrier plan) so I could take advantage of her iCloud storage. Little did I know that her simple link in my text would turn into a weekend ordeal. When we were younger (with much less gray), we had our first child. At some point during that timeframe, it was thought that a separate iCloud account for my son would be useful. We could setup screen time limits and have some type of parental control over his electronics (whatever that is supposed to mean). One additional kid later and my son's iCloud account was pretty much forgotten. Other parents of little children will understand that the well-laid plans of first-time parents are usually abandoned fairly quickly once the reality of caring for young children sets in. Fast-forward to this weekend and I suddenly discovered that I setup a family sharing plan with my son at some point. I did my usual googling of solutions and I found that I could not just remove my son's account from my family sharing account. I also found some vague reference to having my son's account transferred to someone else (presumably my wife). I looked on her new iPhone and also came up empty. Further googling told me to look at my MacBook and see if I could make the necessary changes in System Preferences | Family Sharing. Nope. All I saw was messages to the effect of "Children under 13 cannot be removed from a family." More Google searches revealed that other exasperated parents just ended up calling Apple support until they could find a human being to help them alter their Family Sharing settings. I was definitely not prepared to spend an hour+ of my life trying to figure out how to get to a human being at Apple to help me get past this obstacle (to be fully honest, my IT-ego also played some role in this hesitancy). In the end, I decided that I would delete my son's iCloud account. We never really used it for anything and it seemed like it was getting in the way. More googling led to links like this which basically stated to login to https://appleid.apple.com, navigate to Privacy and then request to delete the account. Of course, I didn't remember the password to my son's iCloud account so I had to jump through the hoops of resetting both his password and security questions (thankfully, I setup his iCloud account to send notifications to one of my email accounts that is still in use). Once I did get into his iCloud account, I went to Privacy and found there was no option to delete his account. At this point, my foggy brain is not really sure how I figured out the correct site, but it turned out not to be https://appleid.apple.com. The correct site turned out to be https://privacy.apple.com. After logging in with my son's iCloud account, I was able to request deletion of his account. It prompted that the account deletion would need approval by me. Simple enough, right? When I clicked on the link in my e-mail, I did not find an approval waiting for me. I decided to navigate to https://appleid.apple.com directly. Nothing. https://privacy.apple.com. Also nothing. I was utterly confused. After a few minutes of trying to figure out if something was irreparably broken, I finally realized that I had left open the window of my son's Apple ID page after resetting his password/security questions successfully. I guessed that I was interfering with the authentication process by having an existing session open. I signed out and closed out all the windows tied to his Apple ID. I navigated to https://appleid.apple.com and signed in as myself. Again, nothing. https://privacy.apple.com. Also nothing. What in the world? I ended up signing out again and closing out all the web pages tied to my Apple ID. I went back to my e-mail and I clicked on the link to sign in with my Apple ID. IT WORKED. Apparently, I needed to click on that EXACT link to get to the page where I could provide the approval. Once I ran through the prompts, I was given a code for the purposes of Apple support. I stored this code (with its typos...Apple?) in a safe place. As it told me that it will take 7-10 days to delete the account, I'm still not out of the woods in regards to this process. I will update once I know this has gone through successfully or not (please bear with me as life tends to take over from time to time...leading to huge gaps in writing articles). Some lessons I've learned so far through this process: Don't create an iCloud account for your child until the time is right for family sharing. Apple has some of the best privacy amongst big tech companies (contributing to Siri sucking) but that adherence can sometimes lead to headaches. If you ignore #1 above, make sure you note the username/password combination somewhere at the time of creation. You will forget. Also, if you do end up creating an account for your child, make sure approvals go to e-mail accounts that you are actively using. I can't imagine the headache that would be incurred by trying to recover your own account in addition to making changes to your child's! Having a web store (i.e. Google Drive) for storing docs like access codes is recommended. I know some non-IT-ish parents have fears of the web and its security issues, but I can't imagine the nightmare of storing an access code to a personal computer and have that personal computer die (Do parents have time to backup?). Hang in there parents, hang in there.