A decade of building for Australian families
At YouTube, we're committed to creating a safer online experience for kids and teens. We know that while the internet is an incredible tool for learning and playing, it also poses risks, especially for young people.
For over a decade, we’ve continued to invest in age-appropriate experiences for families, kids, and teens in Australia and around the world. Last year, we announced a new teen supervised experience, shaped by a nuanced understanding of how the online behaviour of young people changes as they grow older and in partnership with child development experts. This builds on the other experiences we have for younger people, such as YouTube Kids and supervised experiences for pre-teens, designed to be safer spaces for young explorers, while empowering parents with intuitive tools to tailor the experience for their family's unique needs.
Choose content settings for your children.
We aim to create great experiences for young people, which is why their privacy, safety, wellbeing and mental health is at the core of our service and policy development.
- Additional safeguards for younger users: We're building a digital environment where curiosity can flourish without constant worry. This means defaulting uploads to private, making default digital wellbeing protections like our Take a Break and Bedtime reminders more prominent, blocking personalised ad targeting and restricting sensitive ad content and categories, and limiting repeated recommendations of videos related to certain sensitive categories. These aren't just technical account-level settings; they're our commitment to helping your child build healthy digital habits and feel secure exploring their interests.
To better help teens manage their screen time, both Take a Break and Bedtime reminders now appear as a full-screen takeover across Shorts and long-form videos, and they’re on by default for users under 18.
- Empowering parents with a comprehensive range of tools: We know that each family is different, with unique views and needs on how kids can be safe online. We provide parents with an extensive range of options and tools that let them decide what their families do and see online. They also have the option to use the Family Link app to access additional controls, such as screen timers or to activate School time.
Parents can schedule and select which apps are allowed during School time in Family Link.
- Access to a library of free, high-quality content: With the support of our Youth and Families Advisory Council - experts in child development, emerging media and digital wellbeing - we created a set of quality principles for kids and family content. These principles guide how we surface content in YouTube’s recommendations, and include content in the YouTube Kids app. In fact, in Australia, 85% of parents who use YouTube agree that YouTube (or YouTube Kids for children under 13) provides quality content for their children's learning and/or entertainment 1 .
- Leveraging the insights of cross-industry experts: Beyond our close collaboration with the Youth and Families Advisory Council, we continue to collaborate with third-party experts, including with the American Psychological Association, to create a parents’ guide for quality online time. Earlier this year, we joined over a dozen regional content creators and distributors, including The Wiggles and Bounce Patrol in Australia, to announce the Youth Digital Wellbeing Initiative. We’re committed to positively shape young users' online experiences by promoting healthy, enriching content that supports media literacy, digital citizenship, and learning while actively limiting low-quality content.
YouTube gives parents and teens the option to link their accounts and get shared insights and notifications.
Our investment in youth safety isn't new, it's a long-standing commitment spanning a decade that is core to everything that we do. We're continuously evolving our safeguards, learning from experts, and listening to families like yours, because every child deserves a safe and inspiring space to explore their world online. We'll keep investing and expanding on this vital work.
