We have passed the watching other kids unwrap toys phase (thank goodness) but now we’re in this bottomless pit of content with someone named Mr. Beast, pranks with swimming pools filled with slime and stories of how someone did something and got a $1 million dollars from some person. I am not a fan of this content to say it gently. I am also concerned that it’s sometimes hard to identify truth from make-believe on YouTube and we’ve had a few conversations that started “But on YouTube someone said…”. YouTube is the one place online that can consume both of our boys, where they completely loose track of time. But wrapping my mind around YouTube parent controls and then actually trying to implement them was like playing a game of Whack-a-Mole.
A friend and fellow mom Rebekah who is collaborating on this tech exploration project with me decided to dive into YouTube parent controls for us because she too has a pre-teen who loves YouTube. She created a YouTube Management slide deck and you can read it here and use it as a resource. I recommend taking a look and spending some time on it - I actually learned a great deal about how the platform works.
To sum up her research: YouTube has made it deliberately hard to set any kind of effective and consistent parent controls.
Her YouTube plan for her own family with a teen and a pre-teen after doing this research is:
Install Restricted mode
Experiment with Family Link settings and see how it goes
Talk to her teenager, come up with a plan together
Ongoing discussions with both children regularly about their device usage, videos watched, experiences with content and feeling stuck on devices
Participate more in device-free activities
We’ll probably land at a family plan that looks very similar. During this process, I learned that I really have no idea what our kids are watching on YouTube. So I spent last Friday night pretending to be 11 and 13, and a boy. And then I tried a few of the so-called restrictions to come up with our family YouTube plan.
Here’s what I tried:
YouTube Kids - For those of you with young kids, like 3-6 years old, and you want to allow YouTube, you may be able to get away with the YouTube Kids app and website. In theory, it should be the answer for all kids at least to age 10 but the interface is basically aimed at a pre-school/K crowd and for any kid who has been allowed to explore the real deal, there is no way to go back and convince them that YouTube Kids is what they get to have but please feel free to try! Plus if your child knows how to open a browser and search for YouTube like ours do, they have access to the mothership, no sign in required.
Restricted Mode - This is the low hanging fruit of restrictions and easy to do in 2 seconds. See page 5/6 of YouTube Management doc here. But that also means any clever kid can turn it off if they know it is turned on. So for sure don’t tell them you are turning it on! I turned it on on all devices in our house and noticed that on a few playlists of videos I had saved on my own channel that 3 videos were blacked out and tagged “restricted”. So I unchecked restricted mode, went back to the playlist and found that the videos that had been “restricted” were from Brene Brown. Not so sure why those were tagged as restricted but makes me wonder about who is deciding what gets restricted. Regardless, I set Restricted Mode back on because maybe it’s a place to start.
Time Watched - I think this is a useful feature because it allows you to turn off autopay - which automatically plays the next video making it hard to know when one video ends and another one starts. I also like that you can set reminders to take a break and bedtime. It does not make the content inaccessible after the reminder (which would make this feature a game changer) but it at least raises the awareness of the watcher. See page 7 of YouTube Management doc here for more info and how to set-it up.
Google Family Link - I decided not to play around with Google Family link because we don’t have Google devices and the Apple version is not very user friendly. See pages 9-17 of YouTube Management doc here for more info and how to set-it up.
But I did spend some time in YouTube in our younger son’s account and really looked at what kinds of videos he was watching. On the Home Page, I marked many of them “Not interested” or “Don’t Recommend Channel” which you can access by clicking on the 3 dots under each video. Wondering if that will help to disorient the algorithm a little. It’s not a sustainable trick unless you do it weekly which is not something I will do but looking into what your kids are watching is a good habit. Unless they are so clever already and know all about Incognito Windows - which I literally just learned about. Thank you Rebekah! I did also look at the channels our youngest had subscribed too and then we talked about each one. He said he didn’t like any of them so he agreed to unsubscribe and then we chose 5-10 channels of content that we both agreed were educational and interesting. Hoping those flood his recommendations, making swimming pools filled with slime a thing of the past. At least until next week.
Love,