Kids & Teens
At YouTube, we understand that children want to explore, teens want to find independence and parents want to protect. That's why we've been building products for more than a decade that work for every member of the family.
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Kids & Teens
We have a long track record of continuing to deliver and innovate our products, tools and services to meet the unique developmental needs of children and teens, and everything that we do is guided by five youth principles, which are core to YouTube's work on creating a safer and more enriching environment for young people.
Parents trust YouTube to provide appropriate experiences for their families and we take that responsibility seriously, with a focus on content, controls and providing the right experience for every age. Soon, we're introducing an updated sign-up experience that lets parents create a new supervised child account and easily switch between accounts in the mobile app, depending on who's watching, with just a few taps.
YouTube Kids is an app built from the ground up to be a simpler experience for children aged 12 and under to explore, with tools for parents and caregivers to guide their journey.
It includes four viewing experiences that allow parents to decide what content to make available to their children. For complete control, parents can approve content themselves – or they can choose from categories that feature content that's appropriate for specific age ranges.
In addition to content settings, parents and caregivers can also:
– Block their children from searching
– Pause or clear their children's search history
– Set screen time limits
– Block a video or an entire channel with just a
couple of clicks
Our supervised experience for pre-teens (children under the age of 13 or the relevant age in their country/region) is designed for parents who decide that their child is ready to explore a broader array of content on the main YouTube app, but still want to supervise their experience.
It offers three content settings that account for different parenting styles and individual differences in child development, with each option offering greater access to YouTube's world of content. It also offers:
– Additional parental controls (e.g. disabling auto-play and reviewing, pausing and clearing watch history)
– Disabling certain features normally available on the main YouTube app (e.g. uploads, writing comments, live chat, live stream, etc.)
Our voluntary supervised experience for teenagers (aged 13–17 in most countries and regions) allows parents and teenagers to voluntarily link accounts to help give parents insights about videos that their teenagers create and comments that they leave, spark conversations between parents and teenagers, and provide timely learning opportunities about how to safely create on YouTube.
We also have added safeguards to ensure that mature content isn't seen by younger users. So, while sometimes content on YouTube doesn't violate our Community Guidelines, it may not be appropriate for viewers under the age of 18. In these cases, we place age restrictions on the video or prevent search results from appearing. This applies to videos, video descriptions, custom thumbnails, live streams and any other YouTube product or feature.
We have some of the strongest safeguards when it comes to protecting our youngest users from harmful content. These are covered by policies found here.
Content that targets young minors and families but contains sexual themes, violence, obscenity or other mature themes not suitable for young audiences is not allowed on YouTube.
Developed alongside child development experts, YouTube's children quality principles and teen quality principles outline the type of content that is deemed to be low and high quality for young audiences. These principles are based on extensive research and inform our recommendation system, allowing us to raise high-quality videos. We also have a guide to educate our global creator community on their role in supporting teens on YouTube.
We regularly update our family product experiences and policies in consultation with experts in children's media, child development, digital learning and citizenship from a range of academic, non-profit and clinical backgrounds. This Youth and Families Advisory Committee is a collection of independent experts that weigh in on products, policies and services that we offer to young people and families.
In today's digital-first age, teens face unique challenges when it comes to nurturing and preserving their wellbeing and mental health. We know that teens are digital natives, with the Internet as a part of their everyday lives – we want to help support them through the new experiences and pressures that come with navigating the online world.
Our Youth and Families Advisory Committee consistently helps us to understand the unique and complex developmental needs of teens to ensure that we're providing the right products and tools to help them navigate and enjoy the broad range of content available to them – while putting their wellbeing first.
'Take a Break' and 'Bedtime' reminders appear as full-screen takeovers and are turned on by default for teens. Parents will soon be able to customise these reminders for supervised child and teen accounts. Since these default reminders launched, they have served as industry-leading digital wellbeing tools that have helped users better understand and manage their screen time.
Additionally, our parental controls now give parents the ability to limit the time that their children or teens spend scrolling on the Shorts Feed. And coming soon, parents will have the option to set the timer to zero.
Teens' uploads are set to the most private available setting by default to help them make informed decisions about their online footprint and digital privacy.
Working with our Youth and Families Advisory Committee, we developed safeguards on video sequencing for teens by identifying categories of video that are okay in a single or few views, but could become problematic for some if viewed in repetition. We then developed ways to disperse viewership of those videos for teens globally to prevent repetitive viewing. This includes topics ranging from body comparison to unrealistic financial advice or social aggression.
Crisis resource panels appear when viewers search for certain terms related to suicide, self-harm or eating disorders. This full-page experience enables viewers to prominently see resources for third-party crisis hotlines.
