YouTube Safety for Children [VIDEO]

Rogelio

Jan 25, 2020

At Robin, our main goal is to help children discover and develop their passions. We want to create a safe learning environment, and we know many parents worry about their children’s safety on platforms like YouTube. If your children tell you they want to upload videos to YouTube, how can you support them? What safety settings can you put in place? Let’s talk about it.

YouTube allows users to create an account starting at age 13. When children are younger, they should use an account supervised by a responsible adult. Beyond that, there are two important decisions families should make together:

Safety lock 1 - Comments

First, you need to decide who can interact with the account, and the main way people do that is through a video’s comments section. Although YouTube has evolved and become safer over time, negative comments and criticism can still appear, and some families simply do not want strangers talking to their children at all. That is why I always recommend using at least this first layer of protection so that no video can receive comments, whether positive, negative, or anything in between.

You can do this when uploading a new video by indicating at the bottom that the video was made for children. If you want the setting to apply to every video on the channel, you can go to the settings icon in studio.youtube.com and select the advanced channel preferences to mark the entire channel as made for kids. This will disable comments, notifications, and stories across the channel.

Safety lock 2 - Friends only

The next safety lock limits who can find the videos on the YouTube channel. Sometimes children want to upload videos just so their friends can watch them. To do that, you can change the visibility setting for the video.

YouTube asks about this when you upload a new video, and in that case you would choose the second option. Once you do, nobody will be able to find the video unless you share the direct link yourself, whether through WhatsApp, email, or any other method.

Safety lock 3 - Completely private

The second option is already quite safe because people need the direct link in order to view the video. Still, there is always the possibility that a friend could forward the link to someone else without your permission. To avoid that, you can choose the first option and make the video fully private. In that case, only the owner of the channel can see the video. If you want to share it with certain family members or friends, you can specifically add the accounts that are allowed to view it.

That way, even if someone shares the link, the video will still remain invisible to anyone else. It is the strictest and most secure setting.

So which option do I recommend? Personally, in our course I recommend that every family at least use the first safety lock. That way children can still share their videos with friends, enjoy most of the benefits of the platform, and remain very protected from outside interaction. That said, every family is different, which is why in our YouTube Video Production Course we present all three options. It is a decision that should be made together at home.

What is the point of uploading videos if nobody is going to watch them? The goal of the course is not to become famous on YouTube. The goal is to develop valuable skills in communication, pre-production, post-production, and digital editing, while also understanding how the YouTube platform works. Children can continue building all of those skills without needing a public channel with thousands of subscribers. What matters is that they learn in a healthy way and discover what they love doing.