Family and purchase settings - what changed, and how do I now control whether my son can make ...

This is about changes to how family security and payment settings are done, and difficulties in finding out how to control purchases on my son's account. I should point out that I'm not a gamer and I don't have a great knowledge of how all the Microsoft
account structure works; nor do I want to be just to sort this simple issue - so I would very much appreciate a simple answer that doesn't first require hours spent understanding how it all fits together. I am also concerned about apparent inconsistencies
and oddities in the system and the implications of supplying personal and financial data into it.

Here's the problem: Up until recently I had an xbox live account and so did my son, and I'd set it up with him as my child so that I could control his settings. I had my credit card set up to pay his Gold account, and used the "Privacy and Online Safety"
settings at account.xbox.com to switch on permission for him to make purchases when he wanted to spend some money on something appropriate. I'd log in, switch on the permission, wait for him to make the purchase, then toggle the permission back off. It worked
well.

Now if I try to access his permissions I get "Sorry, Xbox 360 Online Safety settings is not available at the moment. Refresh the page to try again." - and no amount of refreshing has worked for days now.

I've also noticed that the purchase option has disappeared in my own account settings, but others have appeared - so something has obviously changed but I can't find any explanation or notification of the changes. I've been down all kinds of rabbit
warrens that have taken me in and out of the microsoft and the xbox sites, tried setting up the family feature on the microsoft bit, which seems to replicate the data already held on the xbox site (surely different designs on the same database?) but it's making
no sense.

Eventually I found an option where I could add money to my son's microsoft account, but that seems to assume you're in the USA and only lets you add dollar amounts. (Not the end of the world, just annoying.) When I try to add funds, despite it listing
my recent payments and clearly still having my card active, it asks me to add a payment method all over again - which rings alarm bells. And even if you do proceed, you can't complete it because it forces you to select a US state from a list before you can
select a country.

I've been trying for 2 hours and frankly the whole thing seems so flaky and disconnected that I don't trust it at all. So this is a last attempt before I kick it all into touch and get a playstation. If anyone can give me some steer on how to get
back to the nice, simple, unobtrusive and reliable control I had before I'd really appreciate it, and so would my son, who's been wanting to spend his birthday money on a new game for over a week.

Thanks in advance!

:)

 

How do I associate my child's XBOX Live account to my Live account

My son and I each have XBox Live accounts. I would like to set some parental controls. How do I associate his account as a child account to mine so I can set controls in Family Settings?

Thanks.

 

Force passcode for purchases on all user accounts

There is no pass code for purchases. However if your son has a child account you can use the Family Settings/Parental Settings to restrict what he is able to do while on XBL.

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Xbox 360 console parental controls

 

I have this issue too and it looks like it limits my son from purchasing in the avatar store