[gpspake]

I took me a while but I finally figured this out. I think the difficulty is a dark ui pattern that hides the control behind an age selection. In the youtube kids admin settings, there's a part where you select your kids age 0-4, 4-9 etc... My kid is 4 so I never really looked at the later options but after probably 20 times on that screen, I noticed at the end (where my eyes glossed over the higher ages) there's something along the lines of "control content yourself". Once I selected it, I could whitelist channels and completely disable search and recommendations. This means the youtube kids app _only_ shows what I say it can. If I want to give him access to something like "smarter every day" or a specific video that's not on youtube kids, I can click share from my account and share with "kids" We've still pretty much banned youtube on all devices but, like you said, there's a lot of valuable stuff and I really miss the time when he would get in to "tornadoes" or "helicopters" or some other topic and we could watch a bunch of educational videos without being flooded with trash toy videos and subversive attention leeching ads. This at least opens the door back up for some of that good content without the garbage.

[bcoughlan]

I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid.

So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site. Works for my 3.5 year old, not sure the plan when they outgrow it.

[nonethewiser]

>I considered doing the same but in the end decided I don’t want to use a platform I have to fight against, while still letting them build brand recognition to my kid.

>So I downloaded a bunch of the videos on our desktop and blocked the site.

Downloading videos from youtube and blocking the site seems more like fighting against the platform (and more work) than turning on a whitelist mode. Seems like the end result is the same but with more work.

[bcoughlan]

I’m talking youtube-dl and VLC player. No YouTube logos, no concept of what YouTube even is.

Even the sidebar of recommendations is a dark pattern for a 3 year old. Unlike Netflix etc where you have to exit the video to browse something else.

[LtWorf]

Maybe he's downloading kid's cartoons from telegram… he didn't say where he's downloading from.

[kridsdale1]

Telegram is a media piracy platform now? I had no idea.

[LtWorf]

Since like forever. No reason to downvote me just because you weren't aware.

[onemoresoop]

I did the same and it’s great. At some point normal boredom kicks in and no bad habits are formed. I realized a while ago that many kids are primed early throug so many channels, it’s beyond despicable. At this point a big share of blame needs to fall on the parents turning a bling eye to it all.

[chrisweekly]

boredom is an essential ingredient in the development of a healthy mind

[plussed_reader]

Is there a modern parent sysadmin reference?

I miss portability of settings; configuring restrictions for an mdm is soul sucking.

[alabastervlog]

It's practically fucking impossible to have a normal amount of tech in the house and keep it under control, while also keeping things not-annoying for the adults. It's so much work, all because the tech is bad at providing simple and powerful solutions.

Everything lacks the basics, and nothing reads system-level e.g. content rating restrictions, it's all per-service and per-device and it's maddening.

Worse, the single most-useful parental control possible, an allow-list, is often absent from TV interfaces and steaming services. Allow-list just the PBS app on AppleTV? Impossible, there is no way to do a case-by-case allow list. Allow-list only the handful of non-brain-rot children's shows on Netflix? Nah, it's just by age rating. Et c.

[EDIT] Our solution, after years and years of banging our heads against this? App-installation blocked everywhere, no YouTube on anything, all streaming services cancelled because they're such a pain in the ass, and the kids have a large curated set of pirated content served by Jellyfin that they can watch when they get TV time, including some things pulled from YouTube by yt-dlp. If we want to one-off stream something for the kids outside of that set of content, we "cast" it from a parent's device.

The non-piracy alternative would be to go back to discs for everything, I guess.

Standard ways of interacting with "modern" media services are just awful, if you're a parent. They're so bad that it's easiest to simply abandon them.

[plussed_reader]

I pretty much subscribe to your list, with the further caveat the router I got for Comcast service has a USBA network drive port that can run a 64GB thumbstick of content. A single piece of content can serve 5 devices this way before you start seeing buffering issues. Great for car trips.

[basch]

Identity needs to be redesigned on the web.

A family unit should own all accounts in the family, parents should be able to reset any password to any owned account from a central dashboard without hunting down email links and 2factor. I don't want to set up a management account for each service. I want all any services management options exposed by api and displayed in my central dashboard. Of my choice.

[bippihippi1]

so make it

[throwanem]

Would it help to do it with a kid on your lap, or otherwise actively involved? Perhaps you could put a laptop on the floor and make a game of it, and certainly in our line there's never any shortage of complicated words that can be said in funny ways.

I don't know. I didn't ever have kids, but if I don't mind letting a $3k laptop wear a few battle scars just for it participating in the life of a photographer, I have to suppose getting a little dinged up to help make a child smile must be at least as honorable.

For that matter, I recall a ferret - now long since gone to her reward, of course, this was decades ago - jumping on an Esc key just in time to cancel a Windows 2000 install, and that was funny enough to laugh about for years. How much more so with a cheerful, clever baby primate? Don't mind me, though. Just getting a little maudlin in my old age.

[hahajk]

Children still need to be able to explore the world themselves, I would say most of the time kids spend above 3yo should be without a parent facilitating their activities.

Also, adults have lots of responsibilities other than making sure children are playing constructively. Requiring over-the-shoulder collaboration for all online activity isn't realistic, especially when you have more than one child per parent.

Banning youtube has been a no-brainer for me. The loss of the "smart" shows is a cost well worth reducing attention addiction.

[lotsofpulp]

> I would say most of the time kids spend above 3yo should be without a parent facilitating their activities.

3 to 4 year olds are still putting things in their mouth that they shouldn’t be.

In a village raises the kid scenario, there would be older kids and neighbors looking after the kid, presumably with good intentions since they are neighbors.

But in a world (the internet) where anyone from around the world can communicate any of their idea to everyone instantaneously, the village is no longer raising the kid, so village rules don’t apply.

[plussed_reader]

I was learning dos command line on my grandfather's lap at 3/4.

Reminds me of the time I tried using pkunzip to expand a shareware demo and filled the C drive on accident.

You could be taught to use those machines respectfully, if you knew games were available.

What does a family computer with minimal internet access look like in the constantly connected modern era?

[throwanem]

More to add, but I would like to note first that I suggested making a game of configuring an MDM profile (indeed natively miserable! Why else suggest inviting along a whole kid to try to make it tolerable, lol) and never suggested that manual filtering must be synchronous filtering.

Download tools and selfhosted video streaming tools exist for YT content. I run them myself. I learned to set them up based on a couple of HN commenters' passing mentions that it was easier than I had made it out to be, by following search terms from their comments, and by screwing around breaking things till they quit falling apart on me.

In other words, old-fashioned sysadmin work, of the kind I loudly hate and quietly love to. In aggregate, it took about two days' (ie ca 16h though not as closely tracked as if billing ofc) work, and though my notes are aides-memoires in no fit state for publication, I would be happy to share them privately and save you some of that time.

(This offer stands for any reader, and my email is in my profile here; to see those, click on the name above this or any comment. My fifty-year-old, brilliant but determinedly nontechnical, beloved catty bitch of an ex-boyfriend had much derision for the content of my library, but none for the quality of service. I confide you won't disappoint your family too badly, either.)

eta: What I wanted to add is this, a short and I hope not too dull piece which I wrote now almost a decade ago. Please excuse the state you find it in; my old website broke ages ago and this needs a rewrite anyway for that the man proved far more vile than I yet knew to paint him. But I think it still can stand as a hint of my real feelings on these matters, which might surprise you somewhat. https://web.archive.org/web/20220125083230/https://aaron-m.c...

[mattmanser]

16 hours is like 2-3 weeks of free time for children of young parents.

I cannot really explain to a non-parent how different the life of a parent is. We don't have the ability to sit down and do 16 hours of time in a project in 2 days.

[throwanem]

This is why parents and especially young parents need a community.

It's nothing for example I would shy away from administering for my neighborhood, tenant per family or account per family or whatever people want in each their own case - in the same sense we share other resources as a community, from a drop cord to a car or a bedroom. Indeed I have no kids of my own in large part because I was terrified I'd be homeless by 50, if I did not focus on building the kinds of skills that make this something I can do in a couple days without mostly at any time putting in a lot of serious effort - this was second-screen stuff I did mostly in bed with a cup of one or another of the embarrassing milk-and-coffee concoctions I like.

I never knew what I would miss that way, focusing on building a reliably remunerative career instead of fostering any other kind of social connection, until too damn late. I don't need to hear (and won't receive well) anything like "it's never too late;" no one else here is competent to speak to my personal regrets, and I speak of this one here only so I can cite it as one motivation among many to try to do something with that so hard-earned skill that makes a difference for folks whose lives are embedded among those of others in just that way I never learned the hang of. What else could I do that's worth more?

No one is asking me to do that for my community, not at the moment. I don't know if anyone else here would think of it; one major reason I bought here is because I've lived here enough years to know it is mostly unattractive to tech people and fast becoming more so. That's good; no monoculture is healthy and that one metastasizes.

So sure. In theory I could build something like a Helm chart or deployable Compose file, or some such awful useless other shit that no one with a life could ever make heads nor tails of. Those are all things I wasted too much of my one and only mortal life learning how to do, but there are no tools we make that a human can use so just that alone doesn't work. So then I'd have to turn it into a business, and pitch to YC just so I could say they rejected me, and eventually Alphabet would sue me into my next incarnation for threatening one Ads PM's metrics bonus best case, and all I ever really wanted to do was help the overworked parents around me make their kids happy in a way that was safe.

To hell with all that, it's for the chumps here whom I grant are in the majority but do not mistake me for one of them. I said before if you want my notes you can email me and I'll share them, Docker Compose file and all; if you don't have time to act on them then you can try to find a friend or family member or neighbor who does, if you still remember how to speak to any such person. Or trade someone for babysitting so you do have the time. Or let your kids learn something about what Daddy does all day! And if you're embarrassed of that, well, maybe you should be. Unless you know some grave occult evil of Jellyfin or yt-dlp, I don't see why you'd feel that way, though.

Any of those you're welcome to by me, or whatever else you like. Not my problem, but for whatever you find it to be worth, I would say any or all of them seems a better use of your precious time than to waste more of it whining to me.

[citizenkeen]

My frustration is that you can’t add monetized videos to that list, so there’s a lot of great science videos you can’t add.

[philips]

I started running Pinchflat and a Jellyfin server after I outgrew the restrictions in YouTube kids.

[the_third_wave]

> My kid is 4 so ...

... there is no way in hell I'll give him or her access to the 'net. Right?

Right.

[Retr0id]

Unless you anticipate your child growing up to live in a world with no internet, it doesn't make much sense to raise them with no internet. Parentally-curated information sources seems like a more than fine approach to that.

[haswell]

Kids grow up in a world full of things that are not appropriate at a young age, but are perfectly fine later in life.

Personally, I worry about the mental models formed at an early age, and how distorting technology can be relative to the real world. It layers abstraction on top of abstraction on top of abstraction at a time when kids are trying to make sense of reality for the first time and establishing internal models that will stay with them into adulthood.

Sure, some carefully curated content may be fine, but I think there’s a deeper question to be asked about the impact of current technology on young brains. Adults certainly haven’t adjusted very well. The truth is, we don’t really know how harmful it is. Maybe we’ll survive the next 100 years to find out.

[somenameforme]

There's also what it's taking the place of. Even if it's not directly harmful, and I think that's one hugeeee if, it's a massive timesink that they would otherwise spent doing other things. And it's difficult to imagine anything that could be worse except maybe just sitting in front of the TV. Though even there, TV has the benefit of being much more boring, so the kid may be more inclined to voluntarily seek other entertainment; so perhaps even TV isn't worse.

[andrepd]

There's more excellent children's content out there than they could ever watch in a lifetime. I mean videos, books, toys, games, etc. Why would you even need to give them access to the internet until they're 12 or 14 or 16 years old? You just need to curate the good content yourself (hard, time consuming), and that's it.

[aziaziazi]

That doesn’t makes sense to me:

Everybody drinks alcohol. Should I help my toddler tryout alcohol to prepare to the future dinners, parties and weddings?

[Retr0id]

I was allowed to try sips of alcohol as a young child (not that young, though). I think knowing what alcohol tastes like is a pretty useful thing to know, for example to detect a spiked drink.

[onemoresoop]

Oh please, kids will detect alcohol as a foreign substance and will hate it, nobody has to teach them that. And spiked drinks are usually alcohol based drinks spiked with other substances. Good luck detecting that!!

[gessha]

Not sure why you get downvoted without any arguments but to add support for your position, I had a similar experience growing up.

I didn’t want to drink before high school gatherings where there was peer pressure and I stopped shortly after that.

I see so many first-world westerners cringe at the idea of letting your child have freedom and make mistakes on their own. Tracking, parental controls everywhere, neighbors snitching when your child is out and about exploring the world, etc, etc.

[danesparza]

I agree with this approach, especially teaching your kids that "what you put in your brain matters" (kinda like what you put in your mouth matters)

[spacechild1]

Why? My generation only got access to the internet in high school. I got my first smartphone in my mid twenties. Yet I'm able to navigate the modern world just fine.

[gh0stcat]

This, as someone without kids, I am SHOCKED by how many people are like... "obviously my 2 year old just watches the videos I want them to watch" as if they deserve a pat on the back. Why do these young children need screens?? Parents need to take a step back and question what has been normalized.

[lotsofpulp]

Skills compound, so the logic of I didn’t do x until age y, and I was still competitive, doesn’t mean that your kid will be competitive with their peers if they wait until the same age, assuming others are not.

Not that it means 2 year olds should run around the internet with unfettered access, but just that the aforementioned logic is not sound.

There is also benefit to being culturally in sync (not necessarily 1 to 1, but somewhat) with one’s peer group. It can be alienating to be the odd one out.

If it were up to my grandparents, I never would have watched a tv show or movie growing up, or read fiction novels. But while that may have had some benefits, it obviously would have some costs with me being unable to participate in some of my peers’ activities and conversations.

[sapphicsnail]

But your generation got access at the same time. You were on the same page as your peers. I don't have kids but my friends that do worry that if they block their kid from social media, their kid won't be able to relate to other kids.

[spacechild1]

That is a valid concern, but certainly not for pre-schoolers. Once they go to school, peer pressure will gradually kick in and I will need to make compromises. I just wanted to challenge the notion that a 5-year-old should be able to browse the internet, because that is completely ridiculous IMO.

[sebastiennight]

I anticipate my kid needing to live in a word with capitalism, it doesn't ncessarily mean that they need a Mastercard at 4 years old.

Same with many other things: condoms, keys to a car, access to alcohol. There is a time for everything, and at the age of 4, a young human probably has not yet maxxed out on analog stimuli opportunities.

I learned YouTube when it came out in 2006 and I was 21. I've got 19 years of YouTube experience and I'm doing fine. A 21-year old logging into YouTube for the first time in 2025 will probably be doing even better within days. (hours ? minutes ?)

I don't see any reason that a child needs "the internet" (for a value of "the internet" meaning "mass-market apps") to prepare for the future.

Maybe you'd want to give them "Scratch Jr"[0] at some point to give them a head start ; maybe that would make much more sense. But YouTube??

[0]: https://scratch.mit.edu/

[Retr0id]

It's more like giving them pocket money than a Mastercard. Given the dwindling number of ways to spend physical cash these days, a prepaid card might actually make sense, if you can monitor its usage.

[joseda-hg]

The only place I would use physical money that doesn't take a form of digital payment, is public transportation (And that one is a matter of time)

While there are many formative opportunities about handling physical money (The sensation of exchanging physical coins is big on a kids mind or knowing they have money and having missplaced it), I can 100% see a case for a card instead, trackable, instant access to emergency money, etc

[Apocryphon]

Why does a child who isn't even in school yet need the internet?

[youoy]

True, but 4 years old? The reactions that 4 year olds have to videos on screens is like drugs. They are fully hipnotized while watching the video, to the point that its difficult to get them to react to the outside world, and turning off the screen triggers some hard withdrawal reactions. At that age they have 0 tools to control and understand their emotions.

[spacechild1]

I certainly don't. Occasionally we watch photos or music videos together. There is no unsupervised device usage.

Side note: Just a few days ago I witnessed a mom letting her ~2 year old daughter browse TikTok while shopping groceries. The kid mindlessly swept to the next video every few seconds. I was horrified.

[oblio]

They don't need internet access at that age, don't listen to what other people say (trust your gut on this one)

My first computer was at age 13 and I had internet (broadband, directly) at 20.

Now, obviously both of those are very late for 2025+ and social pressure would be overbearing.

But I think internet usage before, say, 7, is useless. There is so much to learn in the real world before that, anyway (outdoors activities including sports, books, card and boardgames, crafting, ...).

Thankfully I live in a place where they're introducing school bans for smartphones, total ones in primary and during classes in secondary. That should reduce social pressure massively.

If all goes well computers will be introduced around 7, supervised (probably with a locked down Linux and various educational programs, maybe some simple multiplayer games, etc). A dumb phone will probably appear in a few years and a locked down smartphone as late as possible, maybe around 12?

I expect mobile device mastery to happen almost instantly, instilling desktop computer usage is the real target, maybe some programming.

Unsupervised internet usage is a tricky thing. Not sure when exactly, they need to learn about NSFW and especially NSFL. And of course about the crack-manufacturers employed by FAANG.

[stickfigure]

I gave my kid the Youtube Kids app at that age. I curated the channels he was allowed to watch. It was pretty good. I loved it when my kid quoted random science facts to me that I didn't know.

YMMV.

[dismalaf]

There's a lot of good stuff on the internet. More information than we had access to as kids. Better to raise them to be responsible, well adjusted humans than to shield them from reality.

[derektank]

Do they need access to that information at the age of 4 though? Almost certainly not. They don't even have basic reading proficiency until age around age 7 or 8. Kindergarten is still mostly focused on phonics.

[JoshTriplett]

> They don't even have basic reading proficiency until age around age 7 or 8.

Some develop advanced reading proficiency well before that, and the more they read the more likely that is to become the case.

Every child is different, but the more you assume they can't do certain things, the more you'll find that to be self-fulfilling.

(That said, that makes an argument for extensive access to reading materials, not videos.)

[Icathian]

This is completely wrong. Kids can easily learn to read at age 5. A child who is working on "basic reading proficiency" at 8 is very behind and has not been well-served by the people responsible for raising them.

[spacechild1]

Yes, but still I would argue that books are the more appropriate reading material :)

[Icathian]

Yeah, 100% with you on that.

[angryGhost]

there must be a ReVanced alternative for web browsers, ever since cracking YouTube I find myself only using it when I want to search for a video because I have disabled the home screen and disabled shorts so I never see the slop

[netsharc]

I use https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/improve-youtube-%F0... and my YouTube start page is empty... it can also remove shorts from the search results.

[rglullis]

Untrap YouTube + Brave browser + Sponsorblock works quite well, too. I've disabled pretty much every "recommended" section: no in-video cards, no "related videos", nothing except on the main page, so the only way to get "random suggestions from the algorithm is is by intentionally refreshing the home page.