There is no denying it children love YouTube. They can spend hours searching and watching their favourite videos, researching a school topic or creating their own videos and uploading them to share with family and friends. Unfortunately, not everything on YouTube is child friendly, and young people can come across some very inappropriate content including violence, videos, bad language and even bullying and trolls. The following top tips for parents were published by the South West Grid for Learning to help make YouTube that bit safer.
http://swgfl.org.uk/magazine/YouTube-5-Top-Tips-for-Parents
- Create an account in Google that is used by the whole family so that you can see exactly which videos your children are watching, uploading and sharing.
- Switch on “restricted mode” which will help you keep out some, but not all, of the inappropriate content you don’t want the children to see. You need to save this option and set it for every browser that you use. You also need to do this on each device you own.
- Sit down with the children and go through the things that they like to watch. Most content will be attached to a channel and if you are happy with the content of the channel, you can subscribe to it. This may stop searches for other content.
- If your children are making their own videos, make sure they are signed into the family account when they upload, and make sure they upload privately. Privae means that only people you chose can view the video
- The last tip is to disable the comments which prevents people from making inappropriate comments on any video uploaded by them.