Why Would I Want To Do This?
In addition, members of the household share purchased content across accounts: if you’ve bought a ton of books and your spouse has bought a ton of books, those books are no longer hostage on your separate accounts. You can share them with one another without having to buy them again. The same goes for audiobooks, movies, television shows, apps, and games.
What You Need and Special Considerations
Adding an Adult
After selecting “Add an Adult”, you’ll be prompted to enter their name and email address, as seen below.
You’ll get a prompt to verify that you want to share your Prime benefits after submitting their information. Click “Agree and continue.”
On the next page you’ll be prompted to toggle certain sharing categories on or off. We’re not really clear in what kind of situation someone would be comfortable sharing their credit card data with someone but not their purchases but, hey, that’s your business. If you don’t want your husband to see that you’ve purchased an audiobook entitled “38 Simple Ways to Dispose of Your Husband’s Corpse” then now would be the time to turn “Audiobooks” sharing off, we suppose.
In the next step you’ll be prompted to actually send an invitation to the person. Enter their name and email address again, then hit “Send Invite.”
You’ll get a confirmation dialogue confirming that your email invitation has been sent. The invitee will receive an email that looks like the one below. Click “Get Prime Benefits.”
On the left hand side, you can review the members of your household including the second adult and the teen or child profiles. On the right hand side, you can review your Prime sharing benefits, manage your family library (which is just the toggles we looked at two steps ago) and then jump to your content and device management page and your payment management page — more on the Family Library feature in a moment.
Adding a Teen Profile
The teen profile is, unexpectedly, midway between a child profile and an adult profile. They can make their own purchases using your card, but only with your supervision. Open up the Household Manager page, then click “Add a Teen.”
Fill in their name and birth month, then click continue.
You need to select how much control you have over their purchases. You can let your teen have unlimited access to your card, unlimited access below a certain value, or you can require manual approval for each and every purchase.
After you do that, you’re faced with the usual requirements — you need to select a payment method you want them to use, and the address to which you want their orders delivered. Then just enter their phone number and send an invite.
They’ll get a text notification that you’ve invited them to share your account — all they have to do is click the link and create an account and they’re good to go.
You can edit the settings for your teen at any time through the Household Manager if you find your initial choices aren’t cutting it.
Adding a Child Profile
Enter the child’s name, birth date (relevant for age-based content), and select an icon for their profile. Click “Save”.
The child’s profile will now appear in the sidebar.
Although you can click to change the basic settings of the profile, the real power is found in the “Family Library”. Let’s wrap up the tutorial by highlighting how to use the family library function to share content with your children.
How to Share Content in the Family Library
In the previous section, we enabled content sharing between the two adults using blanket toggles: all audiobooks, all ebooks, etc. The content management for the child profiles is much more granular and you have to explicitly approve each title in your media library for access by each individual child.
After making your library visible, select any movie you wish to share by checking the box next to it. You can select as many movies in one swoop as you wish. Once you’ve checked the books you wish to share, click “Add to Library”. Alternatively, you can click “Manage Library” next to each individual movie.
Here you can select which person in your household you wish to share the movie with. Using this mechanism you can selectively share age-appropriate content with your children.
