Why is that? My daughter has an extremely restricted access to screens. I code for a living. She understands that is my work. She understands we consider she is too young to decide the contents she watches. And even when she doesn't understand, she understands it's not her call.

You have a very understanding kid then, I'm jealous.

We let ours decide what to watch / play out of a handful of things we've hand-picked as OK (such as Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood or Super Simple Songs), and iOS's guided access mode has been a godsend for this.

Super Simple Songs is on YouTube and has great content for kids, but I refuse to use YouTube Kids as we tried it once and couldn't control it well enough—weird videos started creeping in almost immediately. So, we use regular YouTube and disable autoplay, which we have to manually check every single time, because YouTube has randomly re-enabled it for us a couple times which led to the weird videos again).

We do limit her screen time (and consequently, ours), but trying to keep her away from them 100% of the time? That's honestly not realistic, nor fair.

This. I was also not allowed to watch certain TV shows if they happened to air at a time where I wasn't put to bed yet. And don't get me started on magazines in the supermarket. I didn't understand why not, but I knew that disrespecting the rule was not worth getting my curiosity satisfied.

You were still allowed to watch TV shows then, I presume? Just like pretty much everyone I know? Our daughter is too, and we absolutely control what she can and can not watch. But in HN terms, YouTube is a massive foot-gun compared to other services. Auto-play very quickly leads you to trouble, and you can never quite trust YouTube to not re-enable it, or show thumbnails for inappropriate content at the end of a video.

At our daughter's previous day home, the provider started letting her watch a YouTube channel called babybus (against our previous agreement of no TV, which was the straw that caused us to quit her service). At first glance the show is innocent enough, it's just a bunch of cartoon characters singing and going on adventures. But if you actually pay close attention to some (not all) of the episodes, its a weird fear-based morality show from China that threatens death if you don't behave a certain (rather authoritarian) way.

The frustrating part about it is that there is a ton of really great kids' programming on YouTube that simply wouldn't be possible without it. It just takes an order of magnitude more effort to sort it out than pretty much any other service that provides content because you have to curate everything yourself.

Honest Question: If you did use a device and disallowed the same for your daughter, did your daughter "freak out" in some manner?

I ask out of curiosity and personal learning, not out of any sort of judgement. I do not have children and if I did would likely not have had so in time for this to occur.

It's not quite as simple as you've laid out, but sometimes it can be, depending on everyone's moods. Sometimes she's perfectly fine playing in her play kitchen while we watch a 20 minute show, other times she wants to watch a nursery rhyme and sing and dance along, or watch Lucas the Spider while she cuddles her stuffed version of him.

You don't realize just how much free time you really have until a toddler demands it all away from you. Meanwhile, dinner needs to get cooked, dishes need to be done, laundry has to be washed and folded, the house needs to get cleaned, etc. And your kid wants / needs attention every few minutes (at least ours does—she can only colour or paint or play with toys for so long by herself before she wants to play with you).