Comment by theshrike79

My kid didn't get access to Youtube until they were 12. It's fine otherwise now, but Youtube Shorts is a cesspool and it CANNOT be turned off in any way. There are no parental controls to limit or disable it.

Before that we did try Youtube Kids, but it's creepy AF. There's a ton of "this kid gets to buy EVERYTHING he wants!" -shit in there.

I decided I'd rather pay for _every_ streaming service, give the kid a child account in there and let them watch anything. It kinda worked. Their ability to tolerate the basic screaming jump-cutting Youtuber is close to zero.

I've had chats with them where they explicitly said that "X does interesting videos but they shout all the time so I don't want to watch them".

With Netflix, Disney+ and our local PBS equivalent I can sorta trust that the content is professionally made and even slightly educational.

The age limit for social media over here is 13 at the moment, we'll need to burn that bridge this summer. Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook and all that will be open after that. I'm not going to encourage that but we'll see what peer pressure does.