YouTube debuts new parental controls aimed at teens

YouTube is expanding its existing set of parental controls with a new feature that would allow a parent to link their account to their teen's account in order to gain insight into the teen's activity across the video-sharing platform, the company announced on Wednesday. Once linked, parents will be alerted to their teen's channel activity, including the number of uploads, subscriptions, and comments -- not the content. They'll also receive email notifications about events, like a new upload or livestream.

The company tells TechCrunch that the act of linking the account won't influence the YouTube algorithm in terms of what's shown to the teen, however, as that's already personalized to the user. Parents also aren't able to inform YouTube of the child's real age via the act of account linking, as YouTube defers to the age the teen entered when they signed up for YouTube.

However, parents will be able to be alerted to new uploads across YouTube and YouTube Shorts, even if they're private or unlisted videos, and they'll be able to see when video privacy settings are changed.

The new experience builds on the parental controls YouTube introduced back in 2021, which allowed parents to test supervised accounts with children under the age of consent for online services; that's age 13 in the U.S. but different in other countries. The company at that time had said it would expand to older age groups in the future.

Supervised experiences on social media platforms have arisen as the tech giants have tried to either get ahead of or align themselves with incoming regulations and laws around their services' use by minors. In the U.S., Utah, Arkansas and others have even passed laws restricting children under 18 from joining social media sites without parents' consent, though these are being held up by the courts or by further legislative changes.

Other social apps, including TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook have also previously rolled out parental controls that involve supervised accounts linked to parents.

Though YouTube isn't always thought of as being in the same category as social apps like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok, it does offer a social experience that includes things like user profiles, the ability to follow creators, support for commenting, and access to entertainment that's driven by an algorithm, among other things.

YouTube says the new experience for teens will begin rolling out to parents this week, allowing parents to link their accounts to their teens via the new Family Center hub in the app. Google's parental controls service Family Link will also offer parents access to an entry point to these new controls from its app. The experience should reach YouTube's global users over the next several weeks.

In addition, parents will have access to resources created with Common Sense Networks, an affiliate of Common Sense Media, to help them guide teens on responsible content creation.

The company says it also worked with its Youth and Families Advisory Committee on the development of the new controls. To date, YouTube's products for kids, including the YouTube Kids app and supervised experiences for pre-teens, reach more than 100 million active users per month, the company notes, including both logged-in and logged-out viewers.