YouTube: all about parental control

YouTube can be used to educate, entertain, listen to music or even find old programs that you have not seen in years. But YouTube is also full of content that is not necessarily appropriate for children. If you want to limit what your children can find there, you will have to follow a few steps to activate the restricted mode of the site.

But before that, you should note that the restricted mode is not an exact science, and that it is based in part on user reports for inappropriate content. Also, even if you enable this mode, it is not impossible that your children will still fall on content that is not intended for them.

Here's how to enable parental control on YouTube.

Enable parental control in your browser


1. From the YouTube.com home page, sign in to your Google Account. 
After this step you should be brought back to the home page.

2. Scroll down to find, among other options, the one you are looking for: a "Restricted Mode" button to click.

3. After clicking the button, you will find additional information about Restricted Mode, including the fact that its filters are not 100% reliable.

4. Select the Enabled checkbox to turn it on.

5. Click Save. YouTube will refresh and confirm the new settings. However, adult content will remain accessible in this window. Close and reopen YouTube remains the best way to ensure that the parental filter is active.

A different procedure on mobile

Many YouTube users also visit the service from their mobile app on iPhone and Android. It is therefore useful to know that changing its parameters on its browser will not necessarily have the same effect everywhere else. In fact, you will need to activate the restricted mode on each device from which you view YouTube if you want to filter adult content.

Here's how to do it in the YouTube mobile app:

1. Open the YouTube app and log in.

2. Click on the profile icon and go to your account. You will find it in the upper right corner of your screen.

3. Choose Settings. You will see several options for editing your YouTube experience. But in our case, these are the parameters that interest us.

4. Tap "Filtering in Restricted Mode". Once the choice is made, you will be sent to a page asking you to choose a filter.

5. Choose "Strict". YouTube filters may be ambiguous, compared to Netflix, for example, which offers age filtering. YouTube only gives the choice between two options: no filter or a strict filter.

6. Go back to confirm your settings. Tap the return button will bring you back to the settings page and confirm that the changes have been taken into account.

7. Your settings are now set to strict. The mention next to the appropriate option should confirm this. You can now browse YouTube to see what types of content are available, and which ones are not.