YouTube - 5 Top Tips
for Parents
Steve Shepherd - Online Safety, SWGfL
There is no denying it children love YouTube. They can
spend hours searching and watching their favourite videos,
researching a school topic or creating their own videos and
uploading them to share with family and friends. Unfortunately, not everything on YouTube is child friendly, and
young people can come across some very inappropriate
content including violence, sexual videos, bad language
and even bullying and trolls. So we've put together some
top tips for parents to help make
YouTube that bit safer.
1. Create an account in Google that
is used by the whole family. When
you make a shared Google account
you can see exactly what videos
your children are watching,
uploading and sharing.
2. Sign in to Youtube via the
Family Google Account, and switch
on restricted mode. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the
YouTube page you’ll find the option to turn on restricted
mode. This will help keep out some, but not all, of the
inappropriate stuff. Remember that you have to save this
option and you have to set it up for every browser that you
use. So if you have more than one device you will have to
do this on each one.
3. Sit down together with your child and go through the
things that they like to watch. Most content they like will
be attached to a channel. If you are happy with the content
of the channel then subscribe to it, this will then promote
content to the feed when you log in. It also lets them know
when new videos are available and hopefully this will stop
your child from searching which may lead them into
content they don’t want to see.
4. If your child is into creating videos then make sure
they are signed into the Family Account when they upload,
and make sure they upload privately. When they click the
upload button they can choose to upload as Public, Private
or Unlisted. Private means that only people you choose can
view the video. If you choose Unlisted then the video can
only be viewed by a link generated within the video and
this means that only people that you send the link to can
view the video.
5. The last thing to do is disable the
comments. By disabling this it stops
people from making inappropriate
comments on any video uploaded
by them.
YouTube is an amazing resource for
knowledge and entertainment, as
well as a great way for children to
explore their creativity when making
videos. By following these 5 tips you will make it a safer
place, but remember you can’t make it 100% safe, so keep
having regular chats with your children about what they are
doing and take time to sit down with them and use YouTube together and have some fun as a family. Lastly don’t
forget that YouTube’s own terms and conditions mean that
it should not be used by anyone under 13 years of age.
If your children are under 13 years of age then YouTube has
created an App available on Google Play and Apple’s App
store especially for them called ‘YouTube for Kids’. Created
especially by Youtube using stronger filtering algorithms
to keep kids safe. Remember though nothing is 100% safe
so maintain an interest in what they are doing and keep
having those important safety chats.
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