Would you try a structured alternative to YouTube / Youtube Kids if it existed?

[TwoBoysDad]

Following on from a thread I posted last week about the post-screen comedown after YouTube — which got 33 replies, all saying yes they'd noticed it too.

One thing that came up repeatedly was that banning YouTube entirely is hard to sustain. As kids get older, it's on school iPads, at friends' houses, everywhere. A full ban becomes almost impossible to maintain.

So I've been thinking about whether there's a middle ground.

Not YouTube with better parental controls. Not just a timer. But something more like how TV used to work — a finite session with a beginning, middle and calm end. No algorithm deciding what's next. No autoplay pulling them down a rabbit hole. Just curated content that ends properly rather than escalating forever.

My boys are 11 and 8. They're past the CBeebies age but not old enough to self-regulate on YouTube. There's a gap there that nothing seems to fill.

A few questions for other parents:

1. Is "just ban it" actually working in your house long term?
2. Would a structured session-based alternative appeal, or does it sound like overkill?
3. What would make you actually try something different — price, content, ease of use?

Not selling anything. Genuinely trying to understand whether other parents see the same gap.

I’m compete with you! As a child I’d catch the last 30 minutes of CITV or CBBC twice a week and then Blue Peter on a Friday. Beyond that I might have watched a VHS at the weekend. We just didn’t have the options or access to content our children have. It means parents are constantly policing and “being the bad guy” rather than simple “children’s tv is over for the day” and there’s literally no way around it!

Id love something timed and carried across the week.

Yes, we were the same. There was something almost protective about the schedule being managed by the channels, the TV just stopped, and that was that after neighbours or home and away, then dinner and pretty much bed! No negotiation because there was nothing to negotiate with. The limit was built into the environment, not enforced by a parent.
"Timed and carried across the week" is an interesting idea — do you mean like a weekly session allowance that resets, or more like a proper schedule (Tuesday after school = X, Saturday morning = Y)? Genuinely curious how you'd want that to work because the "when" matters as much as the "what" I think.

Sorry I was typing as I was putting baby to bed. I meant timed and varied as in, not every show available every day.

I agree the content is s important as the schedule. Lower stimulation and a wind down end. As many continuous shots as possible!

Complete ban works fine in our house. Older dc (13) has Disney+, Netflix and Prime plus normal on demand tv. If she can’t find a series to watch on there, she reads, does LEGO or goes to bounce on the trampoline or messages a friend to meet up. In the actual evenings, she’s busy with sports. Our family routines set the timings for the day, not tv content.

On rare occasions, she does need to watch something on YouTube. She brings us her phone. We unlock it and then we re-lock it. YouTube removed from all smart tvs in the house. It isn’t hard. 8 year old has never watched it.

What I do think parents need is more training and support in how to set and manage parental controls because it’s not necessarily intuitive especially if you aren’t a tech person.

Can you just write your own replies instead of feeding everything into an LLM? It's really off-putting.

If I was going to pay for something it wouldn't be YouTube related. I'd just pay for one of the better content services. We already use parental controls to limit overall time.

Fair. Which contents services would you consider? My proposition would be hand picked content, in structured session, no scrolling, a calm end and built in breaks. How does that sound? Would you like a trial of what I have been building?

@TwoBoysDad CBBC still exists (the bbc channel for 6-12 year olds).
Just get them to watch that if they want to watch something.

Yes I agree also. The platform is the issue. Child is overwhelmed with choice and often goes with the loudest and brightest. The quality content doesn't get chance.

My issues with YouTube are:

• the display with a smorgasbord of random videos - "I want to watch that one! No that one!" It creates a false sense of urgency that of you don't watch it now you will never find it again.
• very difficult to check content is appropriate - innocuous videos of Lego builds/animation with skibidi toilet or guns
• very quick to recommend absolute dross. Which my kid was then quick to choose over other things, even if he started off intending to watch something else.

For all those reasons, we just don't watch it anymore. It is much much easier to set boundaries over screen time without YouTube for now!

Hand picked content sounds good, especially if you can put your own child's interests in and your own preferences for what to avoid (e.g. language/violence/other). If I was really on the ball that's what I'd be doing personally for my own DC by using the built in option where everything is blocked except for whitelisted content. However, I don't have the time or inclination to scour all of youtube to find stuff they will want to watch that I am happy for them to watch. And I found the whitelist option is not great when used on the app on a TV (we use via Google TV/Chromecast) because you can't whitelist channels, you have to do videos individually and you can't search. So it only ever shows the last 3 videos added and basically that makes it totally pointless.

I think it's unrealistic to offer hand-picked (if you mean human-picked) and have the quality of recommendations remain consistent because I know how much time this takes up, it's a lot. So you're either doing it all yourself, in which case you can't possibly sustain more than a handful of accounts. Or you're doing it algorithmically, which just brings up exactly the same issues again. Or you're hiring people to choose things at very low wages and I don't think the quality can be consistent. So I don't see how it works.

We've had Netflix and Amazon Prime before, mainly because they are easy and they work easily with the TV. I find Disney+ too expensive. I want them to watch CBBC or our local equivalent ARD/ZDF but they already know Youtube exists and tend to gravitate to that. There is stuff on youtube that they can't find elsewhere. For my 7yo it's videos about vehicle driving simulation games. That's a difficult category in itself, because a lot of gaming videos have inappropriate language/themes. And I don't like the 4yo watching gaming videos because he tends to be drawn to people who are very shouty and I think it's obnoxious and promotes really awful behaviour. Recently with all the autodubbed stuff those melt my brain out of my ears as well, when they start showing up I know it's time to turn the TV off.

TBH what I do now is go through periodically and block channels which are the most spammy, annoying, or which have questionable content. That works OK. I would prefer to just remove youtube entirely but I do see how much the 7yo likes the simulation games and I don't want him not to be able to access that.

What is this thread? What is the point of this? Why is everything you’re posting written by AI?

My DC are 13 and 11. You Tube is not allowed. It’s not been difficult to enforce. They understand why it is dangerous. It’s not available on any school device.

Thank you for your detailed response. Totally agree with you about the gamer influencers. It is a genuine problem category I have not tried to adress.

Yes finding content is a bottleneck however there are lots of playlists on Youtube which my system ingests and then drip feeds the content to the child depending on interest on the and the world they enter. All videos are tagged as they are ingested, based on topic, interest, pace of video and where it fits on the start, peak or close curve of any session generated and there is a like and unlike for each video playing at the time. My system understands how many videos are in each world and each age category and how many hours are available for the child to watch.

I am only just starting and have been coding and building since February. I am trying to do it solo to test and prove the model. I am only just putting it out there and this sort of feedback is exactly what I need to hear at this stage. If your 7yo has channels he likes which you find acceptable I would be grateful to hear about them. Always looking for good content.