How to Setup and Use Parental Controls on YouTube

This article will show you how to Setup and Use Parental Controls on YouTube. Kids love to stream videos, but every parent knows that YouTube can be dangerous. Parents need to know how to set up parental controls on YouTube. The reason is easy to understand: your child only needs to tap a few times to go to some very dark parts of the internet. There is hope, though, and it doesn’t involve you sneaking around the corner. Cocomelon is a bedtime stories channel on YouTube that has 150 million subscribers, making it the second most subscribed channel of all time.

Do we need any more proof that YouTube is the best place for kids to have fun? You wouldn’t want your kids to watch a lot of things on YouTube, though. So, here’s how to make YouTube safer for kids. Parental controls on YouTube keep kids from seeing a lot of questionable content when they are turned on. Setting up parental controls is as easy as swiping right through the menus. The same goes for How to Setup and Use Parental Controls on YouTube. So do what we did, and then take a deep breath—a kid-friendly YouTube is just a few minutes away.

What is YouTube Parental Controls?

There are several settings available on YouTube, such as “Restricted Mode” on the main YouTube page and the curated YouTube Kids app. Both of these settings are designed to block access to content that is deemed to be inappropriate for children. While YouTube Kids is intended for children in pre-school and the early grades of elementary school, Restricted Mode is more appropriate for children in the pre-teen and teen age ranges. Both restrictions have their uses, but in most cases, they do not go far enough to ensure that children are protected when using YouTube.

The purpose of YouTube’s Restricted Mode is to remove a wide variety of content that is deemed to be inappropriate by employing automated filtering that analyses the metadata and title of a video in addition to the language that is spoken in the video. When you switch to the Restricted Mode on YouTube, you won’t see any of the videos that have been reported by other users as being inappropriate.

How to Setup and Use Parental Controls on YouTube

Using YouTube Kids

1. Download the YouTube Kids app From the App Store or Google Play.
2. Open the app and sign in with your Google account.
3. Create a profile for your child.
4. You can choose from three settings for your child’s account:
   • Explore: This setting allows your child to watch a wide variety of videos, including educational content, cartoons, and music videos.
   • Supervised: This setting allows you to control the videos that your child can watch by approving or blocking specific channels and videos.
   • Approved: This setting only allows your child to watch videos that you have specifically approved.
5. Once you have chosen a setting, you can customize your child’s experience by adding or removing specific channels and videos.
6. You can also set a time limit for how long your child can use the app each day.

Using Restricted Mode

1. Sign in to your Google account.
2. Click on your profile picture in the top right corner of the screen.
3. Select Restricted Mode from the drop-down menu.
4. Restricted Mode will filter out most videos that are flagged as mature or inappropriate.

Using YouTube’s Safety Tools

1. Visit the YouTube Safety Center.
2. Click on Learn More next to Parental Controls.
3. You will find a variety of resources on how to keep your child safe online, including tips on how to talk to your child about online safety and how to manage their YouTube viewing habits.

The Importance of Parental Controls on YouTube

1. Content Filtering: Parental controls allow parents to filter out inappropriate or age-restricted content. This ensures that children are exposed to content that is suitable for their age and maturity level, reducing the risk of them encountering harmful or disturbing material.
2. Safety: YouTube can be a platform where users upload a wide range of content, including potentially harmful or dangerous material. Parental controls help in restricting access to such content, making it a safer space for children to explore.
3. Privacy Protection: Parental controls can help protect the privacy of children by preventing them from sharing personal information, such as their location or contact details, with strangers on the platform. It can also limit their interactions with others, reducing the risk of cyberbullying or predatory behavior.
4. Screen Time Management: Parental controls often include features for managing screen time. This helps parents set limits on the amount of time their children spend on YouTube, promoting a healthy balance between online and offline activities.
5. Educational Value: YouTube offers a wealth of educational content. Parental controls can ensure that children have access to high-quality, educational videos while preventing them from straying into content that may not be suitable for learning.
6. Monitoring and Tracking: Some parental control tools allow parents to monitor their child’s YouTube activity. This enables parents to gain insights into what their children are watching and engaging with, fostering conversations about internet safety and responsible online behavior.

Conclusion

Every single day, more than five billion videos are viewed on YouTube, and more than 300 hours of video are uploaded to the platform every single minute. Videos that are readily available on the platform cannot be easily moderated at this scale of consumption and creation because there is no simple way to do so. YouTube’s team of human content moderators face an increasingly impossible task of spotting inappropriate content before it reaches too many eyes. So the question is, what can we do to prevent young children and kids from coming across inappropriate content on YouTube? What are some of the more useful parental control options that are available on YouTube, and who can access them?

Questions and Answers