Somewhere in your house there’s a permission slip due Friday, a soccer practice that moved to Thursdays, and a birthday party invite crumpled at the bottom of a backpack. And you know about all of it, because you’re the default parent, which means the entire schedule lives in your head.
A shared family calendar takes that schedule out of your head and puts it on a screen everyone in your house can see. Learning how to use Google Calendar for family scheduling takes about fifteen minutes, and it’s my favorite free way to share calendars.
I’ve used Google Calendar for as long as it’s existed. It launched in beta when I was in college, and it was so helpful to keep track of my class schedule. After graduating, I kept that love of organizing schedules going by keeping product launches on track. And I’ve discovered that running a household is the same kind of job (except nobody sends you a meeting invite for picture day). I’ve never been good at keeping track of it all from memory, and with two little kids, the appointments have multiplied, so I live by my calendar.
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How To Use Google Calendar For Family
I’ll walk you through what Google Calendar is, why it works so well for families, two ways to set it up, and the hardest part: getting everyone else to check it. Grab your phone or open a new tab and let’s get set up.
What Is Google Calendar?
Google Calendar is the free digital calendar that comes with every Google account. If you use Gmail, you already have access. It runs on iPhone, Android, tablets, and any computer with a browser, and every change automatically syncs across all of them. Add the dentist appointment from the school pickup line, and it’s already on your partner’s computer at home before you leave the parking lot.
Why Use Google Calendar for Your Family?
The case for why Google Calendar comes down to five things:
- It’s free. No subscription, no premium tier you secretly need.
- It works on any device. iPhone family, Android family, or the mixed marriage of one of each: everyone sees the same thing.
- It syncs in real time. Change a pickup time at 2 pm, and it’s updated everywhere automatically.
- You can color-code. Every family member gets a color.
- You can share it. One shared family calendar puts the schedule in front of everyone who needs it, without you having to repeat yourself 4 times.
I keep a list of my favorite time management tools for busy moms on the blog, and Google Calendar made that list. A shared calendar helps everyone in the house stay on the same page.
How to Set Up a Family Calendar in Google Calendar
You can share a calendar with your family in two ways: set up a Google family group, which includes a shared Family calendar, or share any calendar directly with specific people. The four steps below walk through the family group route, with direct sharing covered in Step Three. To get started, you’ll need a phone or computer and an email address for each person in your house.
Step One: Create a Family Group in Your Google Account
Go to families.google.com and sign in with your Google account. Follow the prompts to create a family group. It takes about two minutes, and the person who does it becomes the family manager.
The same family group covers shared Google services like YouTube and Google One if you use them, but the part you’re here for is this: Google automatically creates a shared calendar called Family as soon as your group exists.
Step Two: Invite Family Members to Join Your Family
From the family group page, tap “Invite family members” and enter an email address for each person. Google allows six people total in a family group: the family manager plus five family members who join by accepting an emailed invitation.
Every member needs a Google account. For a partner or a teenager with Gmail, the invite takes seconds. For children under 13, you can create a supervised account through Google’s Family Link.
Step Three: Share the Family Calendar
Once family members accept, the Family calendar appears automatically in each person’s Google Calendar, listed in the sidebar on a computer or under the menu in the app. Everyone in the group can see the calendar and add events to it.
If you’ve created a separate calendar you want to share, or want to share the Family calendar with people outside the Family group, you can share it individually. On the web, select the three-dot menu next to the calendar name, select “Settings and Sharing”, and under “Shared With”, you can “Add People and Groups”. On the app, select Settings, the calendar name, and under “Shared With”, you can add additional people.
Step Four: Manage Sharing and Permissions as the Family Manager
As the family manager, you manage sharing from the same family group page: you can remove a member or dissolve the group if you ever need to. Google doesn’t let you hand the manager role to someone else later, so whoever creates the group keeps the job.
Beyond the family group, Google Calendar lets you share any individual calendar with specific people at specific permission levels: see only free or busy, see all event details, or make changes to events. That comes in handy for grandparents or a carpool partner. Share a view-only version so they can see practice times without accidentally deleting them.
How to Use Google Calendar Effectively for Family
Setup only takes a few minutes. Making the calendar a habit takes longer, but is worth the effort. Here are my top tips to make it stick.
Give Every Family Member a Color
Assign each person a color. At our house I’m blue, my husband is green, and the kids share purple (feel free to do separate colors for each child if they have their own events!). Work gets its own yellow on mine, so a full work week and a full kid week look different at a glance. Once the colors settle in, you’ll know whose week is heavy before you’ve read a single event title.
Color also helps little kids participate: a four-year-old can’t read “swim, 3:30” but can learn that the purple squares are her days.
Set Up Recurring Events for Weekly Activities
If your family has weekly activities, set them up as recurring events in the calendar. We have swim, dance, school drop-off, and school pickup times. This lets you set it once and not worry about it again unless things change. Make sure you set an end date for when the activities are over. And, as someone who just booked a doctor’s appointment for her son nine months out, it’s helpful to have everything in the calendar as far out as you can.
Turn On Reminders and Notifications
Set default notifications so events ping you: one alert the night before for anything requiring prep (snacks to buy, a costume to locate) and one an hour before for anything requiring driving. Need to remember to buy something for an event? Set a reminder for a week before. Reminders are personal, so make sure each person in the family group sets their own.
Create a Separate Calendar for Each Person When You Need It
One shared family calendar covers most households. But if one schedule or category gets dense – a kid in travel sports, a partner on shift work, or the school year itself – give it a calendar of its own. At the start of the school year, I made a separate school calendar for the kids and shared it with my husband, my mom, and my sister, so the school year shows up on their phones without me having to forward anything.
Sharing like this also reaches past the family group: a grandparent or an aunt gets the one calendar that concerns them, sent to their own Google account (view-only, if you like), and they’re in the loop.
You can toggle each calendar on and off, so you can view one person’s commitments alone or the full family picture together.
How to Get Your Whole Family to Actually Use It
None of this setup helps if you’re the only one who uses the calendar. The goal is to make checking the calendar as automatic as checking the weather, and that takes a little engineering.
Put the app on every phone. On the front screen, never buried in a folder. Add the Google Calendar widget so the day’s events are visible without opening anything.
Review the week together, in whatever form survives your season of life. We tried a real family meeting, and I liked it, but finding ten quiet minutes together with a four-year-old and a two-year-old in the house is its own scheduling problem. When the sit-down meeting works, ten minutes on Sunday replaces four rounds of “what’s happening tomorrow?” later on.
The version that stuck for us is casual: a whiteboard calendar on the wall that we look at and talk through regularly, no agenda, no set time. Find what works for your family and stick with it.
Keep it visible in the house. This is the whiteboard’s job at our house: the phones hold the details, and the wall shows the week to anyone walking by. A printed version of the month stuck to the fridge, or a smart display does the same job.
Let people add their own events. When your partner enters the work dinner, and the teenager enters the study group, they own those entries. You retire from the household’s data-entry department, and everyone learns the house rule: if an event is missing from the calendar, nobody is planning around it.
We learned that rule the hard way once: my husband forgot to put an appointment in, and we ended up needing to be in two places at once. Since my appointment was in the calendar, he had to reschedule. A mistake people tend to make only once.
A new school year stress-tests every bit of this, with new teachers, new pickup logistics, and forms multiplying overnight. My back-to-school checklist pairs well with a calendar you already use: add each deadline as you work through the list.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Google Calendar free?
Yes. Google Calendar is free with any Google account, and a Google account is also free.
How many people can join your family group?
Six: one family manager and up to five family members. Each person needs their own Google account. If your household is bigger than six, share the calendar directly with the extra people from the calendar’s settings. The calendar works the same for them.
Does Google Calendar work on iPhone and Android?
Yes, and equally well on both. Android phones come with it built in. iPhone users download the free Google Calendar app from the App Store. A mixed iPhone-and-Android household is exactly where Google Calendar shines.
Do we all have to use the Google Calendar app?
No. A Google Calendar can show up in whatever calendar app each person already uses. On iPhone, add your Google account in Settings, and everything appears in Apple’s built-in Calendar app. Third-party apps like Fantastical connect to a Google account the same way.
Can I access Google Calendar from my laptop/tablet?
Yes. Google Calendar is available anywhere you have an internet connection.
What if my kids are too young for their own accounts?
Put their activities on the family calendar yourself and color-code them anyway. When they’re old enough for a supervised account through Family Link, they can join your family group and start seeing their own schedule.
Do I need a Skylight or a smart calendar display?
No. I’ve heard good things about Skylight, but it costs a few hundred dollars, which keeps it out of my budget for now. The free route to the same idea is the calendar on every phone. If you’d like to add something physical, we use a whiteboard calendar. You can also print the month and stick it on the fridge: open calendar.google.com on a computer, switch to the Month view, click the gear icon, and choose Print.
Set It Up today
If you didn’t follow along and set up your family Google Calendar while you were reading, I recommend pausing now and going back to step one. It takes about 15 minutes, and I promise it’s worth it.
And if you find yourself still struggling to keep up with the seasonal deadlines, you’ll love the Default Parent Planning System inside The Simplified Membership™. I research the deadlines your planner won’t catch and share them in a monthly planning page, so you know what’s coming before it happens. Check out my free Monthly Planning Preview to see the latest.
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