YouTube Now Allows Parents To Block Shorts Entirely From Their Kids And Teens

In a time where online content is increasingly polluted with low-quality brainrot (it’s a real word, mind you) – often in short-form content format – YouTube announced new tools that allows parents or guardians to specify the amount of time their kids and teens are allowed to watch YouTube Shorts, its short video platform equivalent to TikTok or Instagram Reels.

New YouTube Shorts Parental Controls

Parents of supervised child/teen accounts can soon set limits on time spent on fiddling thumbs on Shorts, all the way down to zero to block said teen from accessing it altogether, or “change it to 60 minutes during a long car trip to be entertained.” After all, it’s still in YouTube’s interest to maximize a teen’s watch time on its platform, even if that means potentially frying their attention spans.

That aside, parents can also set custom Bedtime and Take a Break reminders, on top of existing wellbeing settings for teen accounts; an updated account setup experience will also be introduced in the coming weeks with a simplified process, allowing parents to create child accounts and easily switch between family accounts within the mobile app.

For creators responsible for creating kids or teen-focused content, YouTube is also introducing new principles and a creator guide developed with leading institutes specializing in youth’s psychological wellbeing. “The principles also inform our recommendation system, allowing us to raise high quality videos – like those from Khan Academy, CrashCourse and TED-Ed – and increase the frequency they are shown to teens,” according to Jennifer Flannery O’Connor, YouTube’s VP of Product Management.

Pokdepinion: I do hope parents are well aware of the effects from short video consumption.