We understand that parents and guardians sometimes have questions about their teen's behaviour and wellbeing online. We've put together some tools and resources to help you manage their experience on YouTube.
Resources for parents
To support parents and families, we've created a Family guide to teen content creation in partnership with Common Sense Networks, an affiliate of Common Sense Media.
For quick tips and advice, take a look at these Tips for parents or watch these videos from our Family Guide:
You can also share these resources with your teen to help them get started:
- Our Community Guidelines, which outline what content and behaviour is acceptable on YouTube
- Tips for teens
Age requirements for teens
To sign in to YouTube, your teen must have a Google Account that meets the minimum age requirements in your country or region.
Privacy and safety tools
- Inappropriate content: If you or your teen finds a video that seems inappropriate or like it may violate our Community Guidelines, flag the video.
- Privacy: If you feel that your teen's privacy has been violated, learn more about our privacy policy and how to file a privacy complaint.
- Harassment and cyberbullying:
- If your teen is being harassed by someone on YouTube, direct them to block the user.
- If the harassment persists, review our harassment and cyberbullying policies for harassment prevention info.
- You or your teen can report harassment in videos, channels/profiles or comments.
- Restricted mode: Enabling this setting on your teen's device screens out potentially mature content on YouTube. Learn more about Restricted mode.
- Moderating channel comments: Your teen can remove comments posted on their channel or moderate them before they appear. Learn more about moderating channel comments.
Supervised experiences
For additional safety, you can set up a supervised experience and link with your teen's account. When linked, you can get insight into your teen's YouTube activity. These insights may spark in-the-moment learning opportunities and conversations about how to create safely on YouTube. Learn more about supervised experiences for teens.
Support wellbeing
- Take a break reminders: This feature is turned on automatically for teens, and reminds them to take a break while browsing or watching videos or YouTube Shorts.
- Bedtime reminders: This feature is on automatically for teens, and appears when it's time for them to stop watching YouTube and go to bed.
- Auto-play turned off: This feature is off automatically for teens. While off, videos won't continuously play for your teen, and they'll have to select the next video that they want to watch.
- Safety features for video recommendations: YouTube has video recommendation safety features that provide more responsible recommendations for teens. This system automatically minimises exposure to content that could negatively impact their self-image or behaviours. Learn more about how we build content recommendations to meet the unique needs of teens.