Limit Your Child’s YouTube Shorts Screen Time
▼ Summary
– Parents can now manually set a time limit of 15 minutes to 2 hours for their children’s YouTube Shorts feed, a feature adapted from an existing one for under-18 accounts.
– Parents can also set custom “Bedtime” and “Take a break” reminders for their kids’ accounts, features that are optional for adult users.
– These updates follow YouTube’s push to identify and restrict minors’ accounts using AI age estimation based on user activity and account age.
– YouTube is updating its sign-up page to let parents manually set their child’s age category and adjust accessible content when creating a new account.
– This expansion of parental controls mirrors similar restrictions on platforms like Meta and TikTok, aiming to better secure minors’ accounts.
Parents now have a powerful new tool to manage their children’s digital habits, as YouTube has introduced the ability to manually set a daily time limit for the Shorts feed on kids’ and teens’ accounts. This feature, which allows limits ranging from fifteen minutes to two hours, is a significant expansion of a tool previously available only to general users. Crucially, the young users themselves cannot alter or disable this restriction once their parent or guardian has set it. This update is part of a broader initiative by the platform to provide more robust parental oversight, especially following last year’s efforts to use AI for identifying and restricting accounts belonging to minors.
Beyond the new Shorts timer, the platform is enhancing its existing reminder systems for younger audiences. Parents can now configure custom “Bedtime” and “Take a break” alerts specifically for their child’s account. While similar optional features exist for adult users, these are being formally integrated into the suite of parental controls. These developments arrive as part of a concerted push to create a safer, more age-appropriate environment, leveraging technology like AI age estimation that analyzes account activity and creation date.
Further simplifying the process, YouTube is updating its account creation flow to help ensure children are placed in the correct experience from the start. In the coming weeks, the sign-up page will allow parents to manually select their child’s age category when establishing a new account. This direct input helps automatically adjust the type of content the account can access, providing a more tailored and secure foundation.
This move towards more comprehensive parental controls reflects a wider industry trend. Social media companies are increasingly implementing features designed to lock down and protect minors’ accounts. For instance, Meta rolled out a series of restrictions on Instagram, Facebook, and Messenger last year, which included a content filter for younger users. Similarly, TikTok instituted a daily screen time limit for users under 18 back in 2023. YouTube’s latest updates place it firmly alongside these platforms in offering parents more granular tools to guide their children’s online engagement.
(Source: The Verge)
