YouTube for Kids

YouTube offers age-grouped collections of videos for children and adolescents through a version of YouTube labeled YouTube Kids. Before I go further I acknowledge that some have issues with this program. There are two issues; a) videos may contain ads and b) videos may be inappropriate. People have various views on how serious these issues are. Google claims it selects videos carefully for the different age groups served by YouTube kids. Google also claims the same for the ads. It is possible to use the service without ads and to designate what channels children can see, but the best of these controls requires participation in a paid plan. What I describe below is the fee (ad supported) plan.

A parent or guardian sets up a YouTube Kids account. There are a couple of settings to consider at this point – a) the age group of the child and b) whether you want to allow searches.

The video access screen looks like this. Across the top are icons for movies, music, and educational content. The content associated with a selected category appears below. This account has been set up to allow searches. The two red boxes offer a parent/guardian options. The lock icon allows adjustments to the settings for a particular child. The icon in the left shows the history of videos viewed. If for some reason content that has been viewed does not meet parental approval, there is a way to block content from that channel.

In the lower right-hand corner of the image for most video channels, you should see three dots. Selecting this icon allows the channel to be blocked.

Adults may have a different reaction toward children viewing ads than toward their own exposure to ads. Perhaps adults might try to block all ads. Note that Google does offer the opportunity to subscribe to a service that blocks YouTube ads. I have this service as a secondary benefit of paying for Google Play Music. When blocking ads it is important to consider that ads provide revenue for Google and for some content creators. The subscription option provides an alternate way to support these services.

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