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How to Make YouTube Safer for Your Kids?

If you were a 90s kid, there were limited sources of entertainment like television, radio, etc. We used to just wait to get home back from school and turn on the idiot box. Today’s kids want more than just television and YouTube is one of the biggest addictions. Therefore, its time to take one step ahead and make YouTube safer for your kids.

How to Make YouTube Safer for Your Kids

Basically, YouTube allows children above 13 years old to sign up for an account. But parents create accounts for their children and even allow them to use their own accounts.

According to a survey by Common Sense Media, kids under 8 years old spend up to 48 minutes a day on their mobile devices and spend around 2 hours and 19 minutes of screen time.

Of course, YouTube comes up with some innovative content. You can search for almost everything you need. However, like everything else in the world, there is a dark side of YouTube. Anyone can come across videos with hatred, profanity, and even vulgarity.

To try and remove such types of inappropriate content that could be harmful to the mental state of young people, YouTube is taking some major steps.

In order to add filters that can handpick videos especially for kids, they have launched YouTube Kids. They have also removed monetization from channels that post adult content and removed the incentive for marketing.

Furthermore, Here is how to make YouTube safer for kids

Create a Family Account

If your child is younger than 12 years, you can also set up a YouTube family account to protect your kids from inappropriate content. You have to create a new Gmail account and accomplish this goal by creating the YouTube account with the same account.

How to Make YouTube Safer for Your Kids

With a family account, you can create playlists of the right videos and subscribe to them to only family-friendly channels. You can see what kinds of videos your kids are watching in the history list on the left and you can keep track of their viewing activity on the go.

You can add some other layers of protection to ensure the safety of your account and make YouTube safer for your kids–

  • Pause the Watch History and turn off Search option. With these actions, YouTube won’t gather any information from videos your child wants to watch.
  • Turn Restricted mode or Safety mode on. If the same YouTube account is used by the family on different browsers, do it to all of them. Simply go to the bottom.
  • Lock the safety mode using login details to protect the same.
  • Flag inappropriate videos for better protection. YouTube uses its own algorithm to keep track of these notifications.
  • When reporting the video, it will be blocked automatically from your YouTube channel.
  • You can also turn off the Autoplay option if you don’t want your kids to access inappropriate content. It can keep YouTube from playing videos automatically.

Parental Control

You cannot expect YouTube to block every content that your child shouldn’t watch. Only parents can add that important filter for their child.

You are solely liable to talk to your kids and make things clear before allowing them to use this platform. Let them know that you are monitoring their viewing pattern.

Make YouTube Safer for Your Kids Parental Control

  • Check their device on a timely basis. Check their watch history. Be careful if you find it empty. There are chances that they are removing their watch history because they don’t want to get caught.
  • On every browser and app, your child uses, enable restricted mode on them.
  • Be sure to talk to your kids regarding what they should do if they see any inappropriate content and what would happen if they don’t follow the rules.
  • Keep their login credentials handy.

Secure Personal Account

When your child reaches their tweens, they may start to refuse using a family account and get angry on being limited to only those playlists you throw at them. Here are some of the ideas to let them use their own YouTube account safely –

  • You may use a network service like Cisco’s OpenDNS for another layer of security and content filtering.
  • You can use some online filtering programs like McAfee Safe Eyes or Norton Family Premier to know whenever your child is watching objectionable content and block them right away.

Block or Report Offensive Content

If your child ever comes across a disturbing content, you can simply block the same to keep it from being featured again. You can report the video as offensive.

The team behind YouTube Kids always keeps track of flagged videos all the time. You can both report and block the videos that seem offensive to your kids.

Simply tap the triple-dot button and block the video by tapping block. You can also block the video that is being played. You can also block the entire channel if the publisher seems to be fishy.

Tap the triple-dot button to flag the video which is being played and tap Report. You can also select the reasons like inappropriate visuals, inappropriate audio or other before reporting.

Limit Your Kids’ Screen Time

With these steps, you can limit the screen time for your kids to watch videos on YouTube using YouTube Kids app

Limit Your Kids’ Screen Time

  • Launch the YouTube Kids on iOS or Android.
  • On the bottom right, tap the Lock icon and enter the password.
  • Tap Timer.
  • Set a time limit from 1 to 60 minutes. Tap Start Timer once done.

Uploading Videos to YouTube

The major difference between the TV we were glued to in childhood and today’s YouTube is that you can upload your own videos on it. At a young age, a lot of kids are intrigued to start their own YouTube channel and create their own videos.

However, uploading videos can also bring disastrous results as they are unsupervised. When uploading video, kids risk their identity, location, and other private data. If they can’t resist –

  • Work with them and do it discreetly and safely.
  • First of all post videos privately. By doing it, people have to use the link to watch your videos like family members and watch the video. It won’t make it public.
  • Disable the comments until they get older enough to use as a teaching tool.

Bottom line

To all the parents, you should always keep these questions in mind- Are your kids using YouTube? Are you keeping track of their usage? Consider the risk if you are still not monitoring them. Hence it is time to make it secured. We hope you like our guide on how to make YouTube safer for kids.

Please share your view with us, we will be happy to hear from you.

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Poonam

Having a keen interest in technology and gadgets, I love writing reviews and insights for electronic items like Smart Phones, Smart Watches, Games, Gaming devices, etc. I am a tech enthusiast with a passion for the smartphone world, been reviewing and experimenting with them for the last 8 years.

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