It usually arrives as a request attached to something else. Your child wants an account for a game, or the school has moved homework onto a platform that wants a login, or every one of their friends has one and they would like to know why they do not.
There’s no age at which this suddenly becomes appropriate. The NSPCC makes the same point about technology generally, and having watched a lot of children arrive at this stage at very different times, I would say readiness has far more to do with how they handle being told no than how old they are.
The signs that actually matter
Can they tell you about something that made them uncomfortable without you having to prise it out? Do they understand that a stranger being friendly online is not the same as a friend? Have they managed a smaller responsibility, a tablet with rules attached or a games account, without needing a fight about it every week?
A child who hides the screen when you walk in is telling you something useful. So is the one who comes and shows you a message they’re not sure about.
The second child is ready long before the first, whatever their birthdays happen to say, and the gap between two siblings on this can be years rather than months.
Why thirteen keeps coming up
Parents notice that most platforms want users to be at least thirteen and assume it is a safety judgement about maturity. It’s closer to a legal one. The NSPCC’s advice on technology at different ages explains the reasoning and recommends following those age requirements for pre-teens.
An email address itself is a lower bar than social media, and plenty of providers offer child accounts that a parent controls. That is a reasonable middle step for a nine or ten year old who needs a login for school.
Setting up their email so it grows with them
Start supervised and loosen it over time rather than the reverse. Pulling privileges back later is far harder than granting them gradually.
Choose the provider deliberately. Several free services fund themselves by building advertising profiles from what passes through the inbox, which is a strange thing to sign a child up to. An email service that encrypts messages and does not read them avoids that, and it costs nothing to start.
Set it up together, sitting down, using your own account recovery details and with two-factor turned on from the first day. Agree in advance what happens if something worrying arrives, and make that agreement genuinely safe: they tell you, and they do not lose the account for it. A child who believes reporting a problem will cost them their access will simply stop reporting problems.
The conversation matters more than the settings
Most of my other tips from years of nannying come back to the same principle, whether it is bedtime or independence: give responsibility in pieces small enough that a mistake is survivable.
Filters help but can’t catch everything. What protects children is knowing they can come to you when something goes wrong without the whole thing being taken away.
Their first email address is a small step, and it is the one where the habits start.
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