YouTube Parent Supervised Accounts for Tweens & Teens

YouTube have recently announced that they are introducing parental controls for tweens & teens.

YouTube Kids is too young for this age group and with YouTube’s age rating of 17+, it was leaving our tweens and teens open to easily stumble across (or look for) content not appropriate for their age.

Parents will have access to the new features via Family Link which uses a Google Acount.

Family Link was originally created to give parents more control over their kids’ android devices. It will work with Apple devices however, some features are not available and to-date I have not seen anything to confirm that the YouTube options will be accessible for Apple devices.

Family Link requires the parent to create a child Google Account or, if you child already has a Google Account then you can simply link to it.

Once linked, Parents will be able to choose from 3 different levels of YouTube Access.

Explore – which gives the child access to videos rated 9+

Explore more – which gives the child access to videos rated 13+

Most of YouTube – gives them access to anything that isn’t mature rated for mature audiences (18+)

YouTube will still look the same but some features will be disabled. It will not show any personalised ads and will restrics ads for some categories.

There may be further limitations added to this list but we’ll have to wait to find out.

These new options are still in beta with no confirmed release date yet but I’ll be sure to let you know once they go live!