DC (9) been watching dodgy videos on YouTube

[SpawnChorus]

Not sure what I'm wanting from this, other than possible advice about damage limitation (and maybe some sympathy/ reassurance that I'm not a shit parent). I've just found out that my 9 year old has watched a bunch of very iffy videos on YouTube. He asked me this morning what "vabe" means, and it turned out that he meant "rape" which he'd heard on a video titled "world's youngest mothers". I've just watched the video, and it's grim. It's presented with a cheery cartoon narrator, designed (I think) to look and sound child friendly, but it's obviously an account of horrific child abuse (eg a pregnant 8 year old).

Obviously I'm gutted with myself for not having been better at monitoring what he's watching. I've often looked at what he's watching and have checked his history, and up until now it's all been completely innocuous. His account previously had a safe search option, but that's been switched off (I honestly don't think he'd have done that on purpose, as he is easily frightened, and refuses to watch anything over PG... Not that I try to make him do that, obviously 🤔).

Sigh... I know I need to have a chat with him about that particular video (and some other ones titled things like "world's weirdest looking kids" etc). And obviously up the monitoring or just ban YouTube.

Feel like I'm doing a crappy job at parenting at the moment.

YouTube is not a regulated TV channel with standards and not amount of software will stop material which may be age inappropriate.

The only safe way to use YouTube with young children is to actively monitor it or to download the videos yourself and then play them using media player.

Have you got restricted mode on? I searched the title and the content creators that came up aren't trying to make videos for children. When I searched for the type of video a lot of the channels weren't there.

Forgot to say thats the search results before putting restricted mode on. Also the content creators are responsible for age gating their content so they don't show up in restricted mode.

Yeah, I did know about restricted mode and thought I had it enabled. It certainly is on my older two DCs accounts.

Does DC9 know how to disable it? Also your meant to be 13 to have a YouTube account so unless you use the kids app I don't think you can avoid certain types of content.

I'm now questioning whether I ever did put restricted mode on his account :-(

Cross posted - no I don't think he does know how, and I also honestly don't think he'd try to do that even if he did. He's very cautious not to watch scary things.

Do you think he might have meant Vape?
My daughter recently came across vape videos on Tic toc where people were doing tricks with them, and she thought it was cool!
I've got restricted mode on & have the router settings on, some things just slip through through!

I think either the kids app, or banning it completely is the easy forward.

Scoleah, that's what I'd originally thought too, but as the conversation went (heart-sinkingly) on, I realised he definitely meant rape (it was in the context of a pregnant 8 year old).