The idea

Why there are no child accounts here - and what a junior author is instead.

Children are often a family's best storytellers - and the people the whole archive is really for. But a seven-year-old should not have an account on the internet, and we won't give them one. Storyus takes a different shape: the junior author. A child gets their own byline - "by Sam", plainly - inside your family's collective, while everything about the arrangement stays in adult hands.

A byline, not an account

The difference is worth holding clearly, because it's the whole design:

	A child account (not here)	A junior author (Storyus)
Sign-in	The child holds credentials	None. The child never has a password; a guardian hands them a device already in Junior Mode.
Accountability	Rests with the child	Always with an adult: every junior-bylined story belongs to a guardian's account underneath. The byline is attribution, not identity.
Audience	Whatever the platform allows	Family only. Stories made in Junior Mode are collective-or-private; a guardian can widen one later, but never to public. A child's name does not appear as an author on the open internet.
Data held	A profile's worth	A first name and an optional birth year. That's the record.

Stories about children are different. A parent writing about sports day under their own byline is ordinary authorship, governed by the normal privacy ladder. Junior authorship is about stories by children.

Guardians, and growing up

Every junior author has one or more guardians - ordinary adult accounts that have explicitly accepted responsibility for that child's storytelling. Guardianship fits real families: parents, step-parents and grandparents can share it, across households, and a nominated co-guardian must accept from their own settings before it counts - responsibility is never thrust on anyone.

And because the byline is real, it can grow up with them. A guardian can reserve a future username - @sam, held in the family's name - so that when the child is old enough for an account of their own (Storyus accounts are 13+), the name, and years of their own stories, have been theirs all along.

Next: Being a guardian - setting it up, handing the device over, and reviewing what comes back.