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Don’t leave a credit card connected to your children’s accounts ever, period. Set them up to require your approval to purchase or provide them with a balance via gift cards.

I’m sorry this mother had to learn that lesson the hard way.

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Gift cards or an in-between like privacy.com where you can set max-spend on a card number are probably the best method for parents. It should probably be on the platform to suggest features along these lines, as we can't reasonably educate all parents on this, and it's against the individual game dev's best interests to show parents to limit spending (moreso than the platform as a whole)

This is great in theory until the developers make it impossible e.g. Microsoft has a convenient bug (for at least the past 4 years) where Minecraft purchases are authenticated against your child's account PIN, not the adults account PIN that holds the card details. (I use a virtual credit card to protect against overcharges so this is annoying but I suspect many parents without this setup have been burned).

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