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Parental controls on children’s tech devices are out of touch with child’s play
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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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Parenting
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Yeah the controls offered are god awful. I want to prevent my kid from accessing youtube on the nintendo switch. Nope. I want to block him from accessing youtube on the xbox. Nope. I want to block him from accessing youtube on the ipad. Kinda.
I just want to keep him from getting access to user-created content because it is terribly moderated and often explicitly paid for by rightwing shittards that are trying to poison our culture. Too bad. Guess he doesn't get to use those devices anymore.
We allow YouTube, but not without us present. We had a decent list of blocked channels, then went to edit it but that just cleared out the entire list. So much for usability.
Depending on your technical level and home network equipment, this can be accomplished. You can assign a static IP to those devices and block internet traffic to and from certain domains for those specific IPs.
I agree though, the default base level stuff is awful, but I'd bet that its terrible because it doesnt have a big enough financial return. Companies dont do things that dont make money. If they did, we wouldn't need regulations.
That's a good idea. It won't last for long though because many devices are trending toward secure dns lookups.
I was just thinking that a PiHole might make for a pretty good parental control too. Slightly more advanced networking, but that way you could block YouTube (and anything else) on a per-device basis while still allowing software updates and the like though (at least until your kid figures out how to override the network provided DNS, but at that point they're hopefully either responsible enough for YouTube or well on their way to a promising career in tech). Plus it gives some observability into what sites are being visited if that's needed.
Very much agree though, it shouldn't take an IT degree/ hobby to do parental controls.
I was having some success at that and then Spotify became YouTube and screwed a lot of it. Took me a while to catch as well :-/
I assume Microsoft and Google don't care much about parental controls because it doesn't make them more money, and even if something goes wrong and someone tries to bring a lawsuit it won't really hurt them. It's like that scene from fight club about when they do a recall. (That and they're probably cool with kids seeing right wing garbage, because these companies are largely right wing garbage themselves)
My kid watches a ton of educational content, so I don't even necessarily want to block all of YouTube. I just want to be able to block individual videos and channels.
Or whitelist a bunch of channels or videos I'm happy with.
A YouTube whitelist would go a long way, but I think Google don't want you to do that. The ads are obviously another problem if you can't block them.
One option (if you are technical) is to use automation tools to subscribe to a whitelist of channels and pre-cache the videos locally.
Lol, easier to just get long form media and jellyfin it instead.
I know some countries, ads on TV are not allowed for kids. Some outlaw certain types of ads, like junk food. We could quite easily regulate them so that it's more profitable to not show ads and have proper parental controls.
I'm in Australia which is banning social media for kids and many online we're berating it as unworkable for things like YouTube. Well, they had plenty of time to get their house in order and chose short term profits instead.
The different controls on different devices is also a problem. You want to set a limit on one app or one device, they just switch to another. Have siblings? They'll just use that device instead.
In a world of single devices and one child, they are still useless as they are naggy for the parents and create friction rather than responsibility.