YouTube, with its vast user base of over 2.7 billion monthly users, has a significant global audience that includes many teenagers and even younger viewers. While the platform has had a profound social impact, it often faces criticism for promoting misinformation, enabling copyright violations, and compromising children’s safety.
Recognizing these concerns, YouTube has introduced a new “collaborative” approach to teen supervision, aiming to give parents more insight into their children’s online activities. This supervised experience is an evolution of YouTube’s previous efforts to monitor pre-teen usage and is expected to improve over time.
Parents and teens can now link their accounts through the Family Center hub, providing shared insights into activities such as video uploads, subscriptions, and comments. The platform will also send “proactive” email notifications to both parents and teens about key events, allowing for mutual control over the feature. Teens, however, have the option to disable the feature entirely, excluding their parents from their YouTube activities.
YouTube has developed these supervision tools in consultation with independent child development experts, aiming to balance teens’ autonomy with parents’ concerns about online safety. Ellen Selkie, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, highlights the importance of giving teens space to explore their identity and values while maintaining a “trust, but verify” approach to online activities. YouTube’s new feature aligns with this philosophy, supporting mutual growth and responsibility.
