Six features to help keep your child safe on YouTube

Safety settings and features on YouTube

1. Supervised Experience

A supervised experience YouTube account is available for under 13s with a Google account managed by Family Link. This can help manage how they use the app.

This will give you access to content settings and parental controls to help you manage what channels they can subscribe to and how long they spend on the app.

For information on how to set this up visit YouTube’s advice page.

2. Restricted Mode

This helps to filter out inappropriate videos. However, it’s not 100% effective due to the volume of videos on the platform.

To enable this feature go to ‘Settings’. Click the drop down menu at the bottom of the screen and select ‘Restricted Mode: Off’. Change the option to ‘On’ and press ‘Save’.

3. Custom password

You can set up a custom passcode to stop your child from accessing your parental controls and making changes. To do this, tap the lock icon, and choose ‘Set my own passcode’.

4. Set videos to private

If your child posts their own videos on YouTube you might want to speak to them about setting the content they upload to private so only their subscribers or followers can view their videos. Remember to talk to your child about who is allowed to follow or subscribe to their channel.

To do this you need to go to ‘Library’ and select ‘Your Videos’. Then select ‘More’ and 'Visibility'. You can then choose from the following options:

Public – everyone, including those who don’t have a YouTube account, can see the video.
Private – only subscribers can watch.
Unlisted – this makes the video private so no one can see it unless they have a direct link to the video.

5. Auto-play
Auto-play stops videos from automatically playing after one has ended. This will stop your child from watching videos suggested to them by the app.

To turn this on, go to the watch screen on any video. Then tap the auto-play switch so it says ‘Off’.

6. Create playlists
You can create playlists on YouTube to help manage the videos your child can watch. We recommend watching videos before your child does to make sure they're appropriate and then adding them to a new playlist.

To add a video to a playlist select ‘Save’ at the bottom of the video you want to add. Select the playlist you want to add it to or choose ‘create new playlist’.