Whether you are looking for cartoons, videos of nursery rhymes or animated movies to keep your kids entertained, YouTube has them all.
A simple search reveals that YouTube currently has more than 65,000 “Mickey Mouse” videos and over 56,000 “Tom and Jerry” cartoons. It will therefore be hard, if not impossible, to find a video that’s available in your nearest movie library but is not on YouTube (the video may have been ripped from the DVD and uploaded illegally but that’s a different story).
Not all YouTube videos are appropriate for children
Kids, as most parents would agree, are quite tech-savvy these days. They may be too young for reading or writing but they can still easily operate the YouTube site (using image thumbnails) without seeking the help of their parents.
That may be a good thing but the problem with YouTube is that it is not a very child-friendly site in terms of content. You child may be watching a perfectly “safe for kids” video on YouTube but she may still accidently run over videos that aren’t very appropriate for her.
How do you prevent this? Google has added a new security filter in YouTube that, when turned on, will automatically hide objectionable videos from the site. To activate the safety mode, just go to youtube.com, scroll to the bottom left and toggle the link that says “Safety mode is off.”
This won’t only block videos that contain adult content but clips that may have graphical images of violence will also be kept out of view.
YouTube Safety Mode can sometimes fail
Safety mode in YouTube is a temporary setting and the website will restore to its default (off) state once you close the browser. If you want to make this lock permanent, sign-in to YouTube with your Google Account and choose “Save and Lock Safety mode” instead of “Save”.
The Safety Mode in YouTube is a great option but don’t be too excited as it isn’t fool proof yet. This is because YouTube relies on the ”crowd sourcing” model to determine age-restricted content - if the community doesn’t flag a video, the clip will bypass the Safety mode filter as well.
In my limited testing, YouTube did block videos for terms like “naked” and “sex” but the filtering simply failed in quite a few cases. For instance, even though the safety mode is switched on in this screenshot of youtube.com, none of the related videos (and their thumbnail images) are safe for kids but they still show up on the YouTube website.
If you are still concerned, manually create a playlist on YouTube containing only videos that you want your kids to watch and then embed this playlist on another webpage (see example) – this will automatically hide all the other YouTube stuff from your children.
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