Kids YouTube and Dynamo being buried alive

[TheWaterWitch]

just wondering why people try and scare kids. My 8 year old was watching kids YouTube (we have all the strong filters on and it’s restricted right down) and in the middle of watching a 15 minute crafting video up pops a video of Dynamo being buried alive under tonnes of soil then trying to scrape his way out for his latest magic trick. I now have a traumatised child. How can this be acceptable? Is there anyway of further restricting content on kids YouTube?

No unfortunately that's the Internet for you :(

hm, I guess so…. I remember a while ago there was a violent peppa pig episode doing the rounds and I think quite a few children had nightmares from that!

You need to go ad-free with Youtube Premium.

I didn’t know this was a thing! Does that mean things like that wouldn’t pop up mid video? Will Google. Thank you.

It's not always ads though. The one op mentioned did sound as if it could have been, but there have been some in the past where some twisted creeps have posted something that looks all innocent but then turns out to be totally traumatizing for little people. And even if ad-free was the solution, isn't it awful that we should have to pay to not have our children subjected to stuff like that? There really should be better monitoring of what is put up, especially on things which are supposed to be filtered and safe such as Youtube Kids.

It shouldn't be allowed. It's very hard for a company to filter everything out though. We get issues with it too, along with lots of other people.

Wow. Twat.

Block YouTube. 99% of what most children watch is dross at best.

Yes I know people will say their children learned the clarinet/mandarin etc solely from YouTube but I remain sceptical. My dc don’t have it (and they’re much older than yours!). I turn it on if they need it for homework or want to look up something specific.

We also have all the parental
controls etc and they’ve gone from watching something child friendly to things popping up that were not ok.

I bloody dislike YouTube and really find it so frustrating that so many parents allow it with very little (or no) idea what their children are watching.

I have deleted it from the iPad this evening, it’s not used much but as you say most of it is complete dross. Lesson learned.

Exactly this. I probably let my DC watch more TV/Netflix than some people (just saying this cos I’m not a holier than thou type) but YouTube is unadulterated crap. My kids aren’t allowed to watch it, unless under supervision to look at something very specific.

To answer your question though, yes you can restrict the content further. We've just set it up for my 2 yo and he can only watch the videos I have selected and approved. Not that he would be selecting the video at that age anyway, but it's easier for us to find content too.

Not sure it will be any help for a pre-teen though!

I let my kids watch adult YouTube but only specific pre agreed channels (they LOVE half asleep Chris).

But I don't think there's much you can do about adverts. I occasionally remind them to look away it turn it over til the ad is over.

Thanks everyone, this has been a learning curve for us!

Letting a child wander around the internet unsupervised is exactly the same as letting them wander around the streets unsupervised. Perhaps they’ll meet nice people. Perhaps not. I’ll have to accept the risk at age 13 but I don’t let my 8 yr old use youtube alone, no. Either you sit with them, or they don’t get youtube, or they’ll eventually come across content created by psychos. Those are your only choices sadly.

We've band YouTube kids for our 9yo, and lo and behold, she's started to speak in proper sentences again, picked up books and play on her keyboard! YT is just turning kids' brains to mush, it's frightening.

If the issue is adverts, then you can use firefox webbrowser + various ad blocking plug ins to avoid seeing most pop up adverts on youtube.

If the issue is videos that are stitched together, probably the way around it is to only allow children to watch things on known and trusted well established channels, or videos you've pre vetted.

However, it only takes one weirdo on the internet to upset a lot of children, so I wouldn't really be allowing an 8yo to have unsupervised internet access on any site, whether marketed as "for kids" or not.

Agreed, I ended up getting my son Youtube Premium for £3.33 a month, courtesy of Gamsgo.com, Google it. It’s been great as they just added his existing account to a family plan so you don't lose your playlists or data. You also get Youtube Music included with Youtube Premium which is their version of Spotify so it's well worth it for the price.

They've emailed me discount code GIVEME5 for 5% if anyone wants to use it.