I can manually curate YouTube kids. There’s no suggestions outside the curated channels and auto play can be disabled. What’s the problem?

Not all channels my kids watch are on YouTube kids.

They watch Minecraft building channels.

Can you share the process? I did not know this either.

When you setup YouTube kids app, it has an option to allow only the shared/whitelisted/curated content. Don't remember the exact terminology.

Then from your main account, go to a channel, click three dots -> Share with children -> Share. Can do the same with a single video too.

It can be a painful process though. If you want to unshare, you have to find that video and repeat the process. Or unshare it in the youtube kids android app by logging in as a parent first.

Would have been nice if i could share a play list. That way I would only have to modify that play list to add/remove a video.

Maybe things have improved with the YouTube Kids app. Previously, I was not able to manually chose channels that were fine to watch, and there was still a ton of trash there, although Google claims it is manually curated.

The main problem is when children get older and YouTube Kids is simply not a good fit anymore (my children refer to it as "Baby Youtube"). The way I remember it, I would consider the content to be applicable for children up to maybe 6 or 7 years? Until that age, I did at least casually monitor what my children watched anyway and didn't just leave them alone with a tablet.

The regular Youtube has a "content setting" for parents with categories like "9+" and "13+", but when I actually tried this, these categories were an absolute joke and still contained a ton of adult content, especially all the influencer gaming grifts, the right-wing "manosphere" bullshit, and so on. It is obvious that some AI does the filtering here, and we all know how well that works.

How do you set up YouTube in a way that only an explicit list of channels can be watched, without the possibility to trivially circumvent this by simply opening a browser and going to youtube.com directly without being logged in?

Freetube allows me to

- set up a list of channels that are OK

- disable the search box

- set up a PIN so that the configuration cannot be changed.

The installed browser is simply using a different filtered DNS and will not be able to connect to youtube.com directly.

This also has the advantage that I don't even need a Google account for anything.

When you setup youtube kids, select the first option of minimum age I think. That does not have a search box and only videos/channels shared by you can be seen.

Process is still somewhat ass though. But its better than giving full search and recommendations access.

OK, but is Youtube Kids limited to the official "approved-for-kids" channels (so mainly Peppa Pig and co)? Or can I also allow arbitrary channels for older kids that are only available on Youtube proper?

I don't think you can find older kids channels in YouTube kids.

You can share any video with kids from your main profile. Buy I haven't tried sharing adult only or age restricted content so don't know where that is allowed.