YT kids uses a separate app, with a different UI. It's branded as YouTube Kids. And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.
Another approach... Is to mark their kids account as a kids account or something, and have that just be on the regular YouTube website and app.
Or what every parent really wants.
To whitelist content your kid can watch like in YT Kids. But also include blacklisting shorts.
The more this looks like regular YouTube. The better your chances of your kid not just signing out of the app. Or using a web browser with a logged out account to circumvent it.
You have to give some illusion in order to maintain the control.
Who's in charge here, you or your kids? Sure, maybe you could imagine a teen YouTube product you might like more, but you can't say the whitelist feature doesn't exist. It's there and it works.
As a parent you're not in charge of a teenager. You're there to guide them, and try to protect them from their bad choices, but they have reached a point where they are beginning to control their self-determinism. They're not a kid anymore.
If you just try to act the authority, try to control everything, then well... You'll either end up in abusive land, or trying to control someone who has learnt to hate you for not treating them as a person who does have their own sense of self.
It is quite impressive that nearly everything you’ve typed is incorrect.
Parenting is pretty subjective, and everybody has their own way of doing it. You may disagree with something, but that doesnt make it incorrect here.
Treating an adolescent as a child is damaging to their mental state [0].
I already said boundaries are a thing: You are there to guide them. But you are not there... To control them. Because doing so, is damaging. And as a parent, damaging your family is both heinous, and a crime.
To put it another way: The law sets boundaries on how you can drive. This guides you, to keep you and others safe. It does not however enforce control over you. Your choices are still your own. A parent aims to guide an adolescent, who is no longer a child.
We are great now, it wasn't a huge issue or anything, but I wasn't going to stick around while my mom searched my whole room from top to bottom every week.
Oh, and if the kid is not English speaking, YouTube kids is a wasteland of nothingness.
> YT kids uses a separate app, with a different UI. It's branded as YouTube Kids. And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.
This doesn’t sound like a YouTube problem.
The embedded walkthrough video on how to set it up is really quite good.
Because you're whitelisting on videos that Youtube already filtered on. If there's some form of content that is not on Youtube Kids that you want to whitelist, you're out of luck.
>why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids
COPPA, probably.
This is false too. You can add almost any channel or any video on YouTube by using the YouTube app on your phone to "share" it to your kids.
As I said, it will refuse on some videos that contain product placement, and there are probably a few other restricted categories, but otherwise you are not restricted to sharing pre-filtered "kid" videos.
Now back to the comment I’d written at first:
It does seem to be, in typical large corporation fashion, a bit too complicated to set up. For example, there are three ways to add parental supervision, including a mode where you can transition from YouTube Kids to the full YouTube experience while still preserving those controls until a child is 13: https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/10495678?sjid=...
That said, all it would take is an open web browser and a not signed in YouTube account for kids to bypass these controls. But I suppose that’s not actually the point - the point of channel filtering is to reduce the harm recommendation engines and spammy content might have. The gotcha is that recommendation engines are everywhere now, spammy content is pervasive, and even AI responses in Google are arguably now a source of noise to be filtered.
I will say, however, it’s great to have an ad-free family plan for YouTube. I wish you could add more accounts to it, but for now I’m getting by with YouTube brand (sub-)accounts to create separate lists of subscriptions, histories and recommendations while still staying ad-free in apps.
And tools adults might find useful, I expect kids and teens would find useful too - for example, browser extensions to customize your YouTube experience.
As long as we have an open web for e.g. YouTube, we do have independent options, if geeky enough to pursue them. :)
It does have a few issues. It's not reliable in showing everything you allow, sometimes things are missing for no reason, other times it will prevent you from whitelisting a video because it contains product placement (why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids). But it is a true whitelist mode and won't show other videos, just as requested.