YouTube Parental Controls
How Safe are Your Kids Online? Ways to Ensure Your Children Are Safe By Using YouTube Parental Controls
Children today have too much information in their hands. Some of this information is not age appropriate, yet they view it anyway. With our busy schedules, it becomes tough to monitor everything a child is watching on TV or the internet. YouTube has millions of videos, and millions more uploaded every day. You need to enforce YouTube parental controls on your child’s device to ensure the watch is not age-appropriate content. YouTube introduced YouTube kids, a channel that features curated content for children and enforces YouTube restrictions on available content. Sometimes, inappropriate content can slip through the algorithm used to curate the videos. Parents need to take steps by blocking content.
How to Set YouTube Parental Controls
The primary YouTube parental control setting means you can allow your child to search for videos, or you can choose not to. The disabling of the search permission limits content to only what is verified by the YouTube Kids curators. You have the option of selecting trusted channels and some channels in the Collections section. You can as well restrict the channels YouTube recommends and limit their watching to channels recommended by human beings and not by an algorithm. The YouTube parental controls are known as Safety Mode.
YouTube Kids offers some basic controls, which limit exposure to inappropriate videos. You can find the YouTube controls in the section with parent settings on the app. These settings are accessible from different screens and protected by a password.
How to set up YouTube Controls
YouTube controls setup has a few steps you can follow:- Profiles: YouTube allows you to create profiles for your children if you have more than one. Add the children’s ages to each of their profiles so that YouTube shows the age-appropriate videos.
- Search: For each of the profiles, choose whether the child can search for videos on the app. Turning the search feature off limits the child to videos curated by the YouTube Kids team.
- Passcodes: These passcodes are for the parental setting. Create YouTube controls password that only the parents know. If you do not do this, you get a random password generated every time you log in. This random password is in plain text, and your children can gain access to it if they can read.
- Collection: For every child’s profile, choose curated videos on various subjects by Sesame Workshop and PBS Kids, which have YouTube restrictions on content.
- Blocking videos: If you have any specific YouTube restrictions for the children, you can block the videos. YouTube makes use of this data to prevent videos of a similar nature from showing.
- Timer: Timers are important as YouTube parental controls. You can set the timer for the period you want them to spend on YouTube. When this time expires, they have no option but to stop viewing.
The Process:
- Tap on the Lock icon on the bottom corners of any page
- Enter the custom password
- Click on Settings
- Select child profile and enter the password to your parent account
- Select the 'Approved content only.'
- Click Select collection
- Click on the box adjacent to the collections you want your child to watch
- Click on the back arrow to save settings, then exit
- If you wish to edit the collections list, tap on Manage under the context 'Approved content only.'
Turning on Google Safe Search
If you have not downloaded the YouTube kids’ app, you can lock down YouTube. This is not a sure-fire assurance that they will not access inappropriate material. The first thing you should do is turn on the Safe Search filter in all browsers your children access. You can do this by:
- Go to Google.com
- Click on Settings in the bottom right corner.
- Click on the Search Settings option.
- Check in the box "Turn on SafeSearch," then click Lock SafeSearch.
Conclusion
YouTube, with its millions of videos already online, and millions being uploaded every minute, cannot police your child. They give fair warning and ask you to monitor what your children watch. As much as they have algorithms, which check for, content that violates their rules, some videos may pass undetected. The YouTube Kids app helps a great deal in censoring what children watch, but you can still tighten the noose further by adding more YouTube parental controls. Add Safe search on all your browsers in case your child uses your device to access YouTube. You can never be too careful where children are concerned. Their curiosity will always lead them into trouble. Unless you put YouTube restrictions, they might end up watching inappropriate videos.