I've just switched over from the existing Family Sharing feature to the beta of Steam Families, and overall its a nice evolution. One immediate issue I've noticed though.

When it comes to buying games for my kids, my preferred approach is to Gift them - that way I don't need to give them access to the Store and I can basically handle all payments. I did this today and realised that it didn't trigger a Notification in the child account, and when I went into gifts it wouldn't let us redeem it at all, even though it was listed.

The way I resolved this was to disable parental controls on the child account completely (using the new Family management screen), at which point I could redeem the gift and then re-enable parental controls. Enabling access to the Store or to "all games" wasn't enough.

My assumption is that the mechanism that controls how game access is managed in Families isn't currently working properly with the workflow for gifts. The ideal approach would probably be to have a specific management option in the Families screen for how Gifts are handled - either allowing the child to accept them themself, of have them go to an adult to approve. In the case of the former an email to an adult would make sense.

Anyway now I know the workaround I can manage things, and no doubt this will get resolved in due course.