Being a guardian

Creating a junior author, handing the device over, and reviewing what comes back.

Everything a guardian needs lives in two places: Settings → Junior authors for the arrangement itself, and the Guardian section of your front page for the day-to-day. Any member of a collective can become a guardian - creating a junior author is itself the act of accepting responsibility for one.

The Junior authors settings card: the guardian PIN, a junior author record with a reserved future username and co-guardian nomination, and the two-mode add form — Settings → Junior authors: the PIN, each child in your care, and the add form.

Setting up

The add form asks one question first: is this child new to Storyus, or do they already have a future username in another collective? The split matters:

First time on Storyus: creates the junior author in the collective you choose - their name, an optional birth year, and (optionally) a new reserved future username. If the name you want is taken, it's simply taken; nothing links by accident.

Already has a future username: type the handle their other guardian shares with you - there's no directory to browse, so discovery stays inside the family. A typo is a plain "not found"; a match links the records, and the same child can read and write in both collectives.

Then set your guardian PIN - one PIN, 4 to 6 digits, confirmed with your account password. It covers all your junior authors, and it's what takes the device back after any handover. Forgotten PINs reset with your password; repeated wrong guesses lock it out.

Co-guardians: nominate any member of the collective by username. They see the nomination in their own settings and must accept it there - guardianship is always taken up, never imposed. Another guardian elsewhere can also request a link to your child's handle; those requests wait in your settings for you to approve or quietly decline, and expire on their own.

Handing over, and reviewing

The handover is deliberately physical: from the Guardian section of home (or the New story page), tap Hand to Sam and pass the device across. That device is now in Junior Mode as Sam - your phone in your pocket is untouched, because the mode belongs to the device, not your account.

The Guardian view of the personal home: a Hand to Sam button, and a ledger of recent junior-authored work with type, byline, collective, visibility, date and review links — The Guardian view: hand the device over, then the ledger of what came back.

When the device comes home, the ledger shows everything recent with a junior byline: what it is, whose it is, where it lives, its visibility, and a review link into the story's own edit page. From there you can tidy, tag, adjust the date - and, if a piece deserves a wider family audience, raise its visibility.

The ceiling: a junior-bylined story can be raised through the circles as far as guest - never public. Storyus shows a quiet alert whenever you widen a child's story, and the public rung simply isn't offered. There's also a hide from Junior Mode flag per story, for pieces you'd rather not resurface while the child is holding the device.