YouTube is making it much easier for parents to manage what their kids watch. The company is rolling out new tools that allow parents to set specific time limits for YouTube Shorts on supervised teen accounts. If a parent feels their child is spending too much time scrolling through quick clips, they can limit daily viewing time or set the timer to 0 to block Shorts entirely.
Jennifer Flannery O’Connor, a vice president at YouTube, says this is the first time a major video platform has offered a feature like this. She noted that it puts parents firmly in control of how much short-form content their children consume. Along with these timers, YouTube is also making “take-a-break” and bedtime reminders the default setting for everyone aged 13 to 17.
The platform isn’t just changing how long kids watch, but also what they see. YouTube is updating its recommendation system to push more “enriching” and educational videos to teens. This means the algorithm will suggest content from creators like Khan Academy, TED-Ed, and CrashCourse more often. To get this right, YouTube worked with child development experts from UCLA, the American Psychological Association, and the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital. Together, they created a set of principles to ensure the app points teens toward healthy, age-appropriate content.
Finally, the company is simplifying how families use the app. They are launching an updated sign-up process for children’s accounts that links them directly to a parent’s profile. Because these accounts are tied together, kids won’t need to remember their own email addresses or passwords. A new update to the mobile app will allow family members to switch between their individual profiles with just a few taps. This ensures that every person in the house gets their own personalized feed and settings, without the hassle of constantly logging in and out. These updates should start appearing for users over the coming weeks.
