What to watch for 8 year old boy

[FDmum]

my son has had access to YouTube kids for a while now but has recently discovered that he can use safari and get on to adult YouTube. He’s only watching it downstairs and at the moment is only looking up people opening football cards so it is all very innocent. But I know he’s only a couple of clicks away from something not as innocent.

We are planning to remove safari from his ipad. He has iplayer so can watch football highlights and match of the day but I would like to get a subscription to something like Netflix or Disney plus so when we tell him safari has gone, we can show him his new options. Which one is better for anything sporty/non fiction/ football related?

Also any otter tips on keeping him safe using an ipad would be really appreciated. He’s an early rises so watches his ipad from about 5:30am for an hour before I get up.

I would have a good browse through his screen time settings and set limits (you can do this from your phone if you’re on Apple and have him linked to you). Set up a screen time passcode so he can’t change things in his own settings.

Disney Plus mainly has the Disney/Pixar film catalogues. You can set an age limit on Disney so they can only see content by age rating. We got bored of it quite quickly. Netflix has much more variety of content and new things added regularly, and some really good kids TV like The Inbestigators, Little Lunch, Carmen Sandiago etc. You can also set an age limit.

I’ve not seen much sports/football type content for kids on either. They both have family friendly documentaries. I just searched football on kids Netflix and all they have is a 2022 kids film called The Soccer Movie.

There’s also a Youtube Kids app which isn’t perfect but is more tightly controlled than letting them loose on YouTube via Safari. Make sure he has a kids Youtube account set to his age as then it blocks them from seeing comments and adult videos etc.

There’s an iPlayer for Kids if you haven’t come across it.

Possibly look into the BBC Sports app too? I’m not sure of how appropriate it is for kids, but it’s mainly news type content and my DS (11) likes having a browse through the football video clips sometimes.

Thank you for this. BBC sport app is a good shout - I hadn’t thought of that. He has iplayer and YouTube kids already. He can’t ever seem to find anything new on YouTube kids that interests him. He has ASD so gets quite obsessed with one topic - at the moment it’s football- and isn’t very open minded to anything other than his current obsession.
he uses iplayer to watch match if the day and sports highlights. Problem is that I have to set the restrictions in Screentome quite high for him to be able to watch this. Not sure if there’s a way around that? It’s set at 12 when he’s only 8 as when I set it lower his iplayer app disappeared. I guess because match of the day is not counted as kids content?
Anyway, thanks for your advice about Disney getting boring quickly-that’s the one we were leaning towards but perhaps we’ll rethink and go for Netflix.