Hey Google, thanks for making my daughter cry.

You're the Product.

I'd suggest a Fastmail.fm account instead. Their TOS says:

    This Service is provided to individuals who are at least 18 
    years old or minors who have parental permission to open 
    and maintain an account.

I think I read somewhere that they consider a charge on a parent's credit card to be explicit parental consent. Makes sense to me.

Also, since you are paying them a little money, they offer actual technical support, unlike Google.

They also have family accounts, where you can have one person take care of billing and administration of several accounts. That's what I use for my whole family, including my parents.

B-b-but Google made this fancy video advertisement about how I can give my infant daughter a Gmail account and write to her as she grows up! Does it only work if she never uses it? You've gotta wait until you can hold a bat mitzvah to hand it off to her?

This kind of chicanery is why I can only chuckle when Google announces new initiatives that require significant customer service, like selling telephones or providing a fulfillment system to compete with Amazon Prime. They treat their users like ants. And given the way their business is structured, that scale is about correct.

Google doesn't need for any given user of their service to be pleased. They're a whale, straining krill from the ocean, playing a vast advertising numbers game on a scale individuals can barely grasp, and can barely factor into.

Which is not an illegitimate position. But it poses a problem for individuals who are swept into its gaping maw - there is zero incentive machinery to compel Google to ever get things corrected. Depending on where a product is on its growth curve, it might even cost Google more to fix the problem than to replace the users. Your only recourse is to hope for enough public embarrassment to short-circuit the system.

It also calls into question the viability of their entry into any business where service is a differentiating characteristic.

Losing access to Chromebook is an interesting case. Where did we go so wrong that breaching particular point of AuP causes our own hardware to become inaccessible?

People rally against zealous lockdown of PC (recently restricted boot in EFI, earlier TrustedComputing in general). Not being able to install any software of choice (with reasonably little effort) sure is bad, but having an already functioning computer swept right from under your fingertips could easily be way more damaging. Government couldn't do that without serious due process. Why a company can, and why aren't there voices of stern protest?