Supporting Canadian families in the digital world
More than ever before, Canadians are searching for better, safer online experiences for their kids. According to Google Trends, search terms like “how to set up parental controls”, “how to limit screen time” and searches for Google’s “Family Link” reached all-time highs in 2025.
Google and YouTube are deeply committed to pushing our industry forward and further empowering Canadian families with age-appropriate experiences, parental controls, and resources that help parents, caregivers and kids navigate the digital world confidently and safely.
Today, we’re proud to announce over $1.4 million CAD in funding from Google.org to support new initiatives that will reach families across the country with essential digital wellbeing and online safety skills.
Supercharging the reach and impact of Be Internet Awesome
When we launched our Online Safety Roadshow in Canada, we committed to pursuing opportunities to bring our expert-backed Be Internet Awesome curriculum to as many Canadians as possible. With this funding from Google.org, Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada and Kids Help Phone will leverage Be Internet Awesome to independently develop new programming and resources that will have an impact across the country.
- BGC Canada will use Be Internet Awesome to create its first national, in-person digital safety program, using interactive activities to teach kids aged 8-12 about topics like misinformation and online bullying.
- Kids Help Phone will build a new online safety module for its Counsellor in the Classroom program based on Be Internet Awesome's core principles and launch a new Online Safety Resource Hub to help youth build digital resilience.
We’re thrilled that today’s announcement will help Kids Help Phone and BGC Canada support Canadian families with essential knowledge and skills to navigate the digital world safely and with confidence.
Empowering families through parental controls
Across Google and YouTube, we’re making it easier for Canadian families to choose and customize the experience that’s right for them through improved supervised accounts and parental controls.
Google Family Link has a new design that makes it easier to manage child profiles and devices from a single page, with more advanced settings just a tap away. The new Screen Time tab consolidates all screen-time tools in a single, easily accessible place, where parents can view device-specific usage summary, set time limits and more easily adjust Downtime and School time controls.
For families using YouTube, an updated sign up process is making it easier to ensure everyone in the family is in the right viewing experience, with the right content settings and recommendations of age appropriate content they actually want to watch.
Parents can also now help teens be more intentional about how they watch, with controls for the amount of time spent scrolling Shorts. And soon, there will be the option to set the timer to zero. This industry-first feature puts parents firmly in control of the amount of short-form content their kids watch. Parents of supervised accounts can also set custom Bedtime and Take a Break reminders, building on the existing default-on wellbeing protections for teens.
Supporting young minds with quality content and educational resources
We want young people to have positive, safe and enriching experiences on our platforms.
On YouTube, we've introduced new teen quality content principles, which help our systems recommend more age-appropriate, high-quality videos to teens and act as a guide for our creator community. We also partner with high quality content creators and programmers to bring more enriching content, like Sesame Street, to families everywhere.
Google and YouTube work to help youth develop a healthy relationship with technology while off the platform, too, by investing in education and resources through our Be Internet Awesome program and Online Safety Roadshows. We've also recently expanded the Be Internet Awesome program to include a new AI literacy guide, which offers lesson plans and classroom activities to help educators make foundational AI concepts engaging for students. And we offer online workshops for beginners, Meet LEO for parents and Meet LEA for educators, to help everyone get comfortable with these new tools.
Kids deserve online experiences where they can learn, grow and discover safely. We’re committed to continuing to raise the bar for the industry, while working alongside community leaders and policy makers to build a safer online environment for all Canadians.
