> I don't really understand why Youtube won't let me create a profile, on my paid family account that I'm paying $29 NZD a month for, which lets me whitelist channels

The answer is to this question is always: it is too niche a product feature for a giant corporation to prioritize. This product would require constant work to keep in sync as UIs and features change. It would be one more feature to regression test against an ever growing list changes, and an ever growing list of client apps that need to work across an endless list of phones, computers, tvs, etc.

This is why it is important that society normalize third party clients to public web services. We should be allowed to create and use whatever UI we want for the public endpoints that are exposed.

PS: this particular feature exists though.

https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/6172308?hl=en&...

That feature isn't what I think the parent comment is asking for. What you've linked to is specifically YouTube Kids, and it's groups of channels whitelisted by the YouTube team. What I think the parent comment is asking for, and I want too, is full availability of all YouTube channels, but the ability to block everything except whitelisted channels. I agree, it's too niche a product. But I often think that people whose response to complaints about kids' access to inappropriate content is "you need to parent your kids" is fine, but I need the tools to do that! A tool like this would be a godsend.

Why is everyone saying this doesn't exist? It's right there on the linked page! It's called "Approved Content Only" and I assure you that it exists, it's a real feature, it works just like you want, I use it myself, my kids watch Primitive Technology and Smarter Every Day and they can't watch videos I don't whitelist.

It does have a few issues. It's not reliable in showing everything you allow, sometimes things are missing for no reason, other times it will prevent you from whitelisting a video because it contains product placement (why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids). But it is a true whitelist mode and won't show other videos, just as requested.

YouTube Documentation on this feature - https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/6172308?hl=en&...

The embedded walkthrough video on how to set it up is really quite good.

Edit: I just noticed the list of supported countries (in my link below) includes Canada but excludes the French-speaking province of Quebec. It seems a bit spiteful to go so far as to ensure a service can be legally delivered in such a long list of countries and then exclude Quebec. Hm, I was about to use Puerto Rico as an example, but it’s not in the list as well, but perhaps it’s considered part of the United States here.

Now back to the comment I’d written at first:

It does seem to be, in typical large corporation fashion, a bit too complicated to set up. For example, there are three ways to add parental supervision, including a mode where you can transition from YouTube Kids to the full YouTube experience while still preserving those controls until a child is 13: https://support.google.com/youtubekids/answer/10495678?sjid=...

That said, all it would take is an open web browser and a not signed in YouTube account for kids to bypass these controls. But I suppose that’s not actually the point - the point of channel filtering is to reduce the harm recommendation engines and spammy content might have. The gotcha is that recommendation engines are everywhere now, spammy content is pervasive, and even AI responses in Google are arguably now a source of noise to be filtered.

I will say, however, it’s great to have an ad-free family plan for YouTube. I wish you could add more accounts to it, but for now I’m getting by with YouTube brand (sub-)accounts to create separate lists of subscriptions, histories and recommendations while still staying ad-free in apps.

And tools adults might find useful, I expect kids and teens would find useful too - for example, browser extensions to customize your YouTube experience.

As long as we have an open web for e.g. YouTube, we do have independent options, if geeky enough to pursue them. :)

An unfiltered web browser has stuff a lot worse than YouTube. That's on you if you give your kids access to that.

Unfiltered web browsers might be harder to come by these days than when I was growing up, but they still exist. I remember finding out by accident that certain restricted apps would pull up help pages, and from there I could click a link that would take me to an unrestricted web browser due to a bug in the code. I also remember computers where you could show up with pocket apps on a floppy or USB key and bring your own unrestricted web browser. On top of that, just because the web is restricted often doesn’t mean YouTube is restricted. For example, schools need YouTube to show educational content, so it often is unrestricted even when the rest of the web is restricted e.g. by dns.

Because it's YouTube kids. Not YouTube

YT kids uses a separate app, with a different UI. It's branded as YouTube Kids. And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.

Another approach... Is to mark their kids account as a kids account or something, and have that just be on the regular YouTube website and app.

Or what every parent really wants.

To whitelist content your kid can watch like in YT Kids. But also include blacklisting shorts.

The more this looks like regular YouTube. The better your chances of your kid not just signing out of the app. Or using a web browser with a logged out account to circumvent it.

You have to give some illusion in order to maintain the control.

> And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.

Who's in charge here, you or your kids? Sure, maybe you could imagine a teen YouTube product you might like more, but you can't say the whitelist feature doesn't exist. It's there and it works.

> Who's in charge here, you or your kids?

As a parent you're not in charge of a teenager. You're there to guide them, and try to protect them from their bad choices, but they have reached a point where they are beginning to control their self-determinism. They're not a kid anymore.

If you just try to act the authority, try to control everything, then well... You'll either end up in abusive land, or trying to control someone who has learnt to hate you for not treating them as a person who does have their own sense of self.

You are, in fact, in charge of your teenager as a parent. They are, in fact, still a kid. Controlling your kid’s access to things which you deem harmful is, in fact, not abusive. Setting appropriate boundaries does not, in fact, mean you are not treating your kid as a person who has their own sense of self. Most kids will not, in fact, hate you for setting boundaries and being their parent.

It is quite impressive that nearly everything you’ve typed is incorrect.

They're no longer a child. That is why they have a different nomenclature - teenager. They are not "a kid".

Treating an adolescent as a child is damaging to their mental state [0].

I already said boundaries are a thing: You are there to guide them. But you are not there... To control them. Because doing so, is damaging. And as a parent, damaging your family is both heinous, and a crime.

To put it another way: The law sets boundaries on how you can drive. This guides you, to keep you and others safe. It does not however enforce control over you. Your choices are still your own. A parent aims to guide an adolescent, who is no longer a child.

[0] https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/002003.htm

This is an argument for not applying parental controls to YouTube for teenagers, while the guy I was replying to is explicitly asking for parental controls for YouTube for teenagers. I think "teenager" is too broad to have a productive discussion here. Maybe we can agree that sometime between 13 and 19 you should definitely stop trying to impose parental controls on your kids.

You when your kids reach 18: "why do my kids not talk to me anymore? oh woe is me, what have I ever done wrong!"

If you're lucky. That means they have a good moral compass and figured out that you were the anchor on their lives.

I'm especially worried about the point where parents are accompanying college students into their inerviews. Which is an slowly, but alarmingly rising phenomenon.

This is like the swansong of every parent ever lol.

Yes, people exaggerate, but I have not gone to see mine in person since 2009 and I have not talked to them since 2016. In fact at uni, I initially didn't understand why anybody would want to go home for Christmas - it was many years later that I realised that my childhood wasn't normal.

> It is quite impressive that nearly everything you’ve typed is incorrect.

Parenting is pretty subjective, and everybody has their own way of doing it. You may disagree with something, but that doesnt make it incorrect here.

This is a terrible argument. You just repeated the claims and said that they're false, giving no reason to believe this over the claims that you're disagreeing with. If you want to convince anyone, you should explain how you came to the conclusion that these things are false.

My parents did this to me, and while I loved them, I left home as quickly as I could at age 17 despite them more or less begging me to stay.

We are great now, it wasn't a huge issue or anything, but I wasn't going to stick around while my mom searched my whole room from top to bottom every week.

Ok, once kids hit certain age, YouTube kids is mostly useless to them. As the most perfectly ok and even educational channels are just not there. Includes channels parent wants to give to the kid.

Oh, and if the kid is not English speaking, YouTube kids is a wasteland of nothingness.

> Because it's YouTube kids. Not YouTube

> YT kids uses a separate app, with a different UI. It's branded as YouTube Kids. And once your kid hits a certain age, they do not want to be on the kids version.

This doesn’t sound like a YouTube problem.

>Why is everyone saying this doesn't exist? It's right there on the linked page!

Because you're whitelisting on videos that Youtube already filtered on. If there's some form of content that is not on Youtube Kids that you want to whitelist, you're out of luck.

>why does Google get to decide that for me? I'm an adult and can choose what level of product placement is acceptable for my kids

COPPA, probably.

> If there's some form of content that is not on Youtube Kids that you want to whitelist, you're out of luck.

This is false too. You can add almost any channel or any video on YouTube by using the YouTube app on your phone to "share" it to your kids.

As I said, it will refuse on some videos that contain product placement, and there are probably a few other restricted categories, but otherwise you are not restricted to sharing pre-filtered "kid" videos.

And where is that? That's not in the link provided upchain.

> I agree, it's too niche a product

I don't think it is that niche. I think lots of people would take advantage of it not just for their kids, but themselves.

The problem is that it is a feature that makes YouTube less "sticky" and thus there is economic incentive against implementing it due to lack of competition in that area. (Their competitors also want to maximize stickiness.)

Not only that, but YouTube kids whitelists a ton of content I never want my kids watching, while exempting a decent chunk of things I'd be tickled pink if my kids watched.

I don't want em watching cocomelon, I want them watching Steve Mould

I want the Netflix version of this. An account that is completely empty except for shows that I add. And not for kids, I just want an empty library that I can fill myself.

Arrr, there's a way to do that, just not a way to pay for it.

Gabe’s law: piracy is an UX issue.

Quite the seaworthy approach if you ask me.

I was going to say - Netflix has functionality to do exactly this but only for kids accounts. You can hand pick which shows appear on each child account.

"parent your kids" doesn't mean "ask youtube to be better", it means "teach your kids to choose better"

It also means “trust, but verify“.

Censorship is not trust

Calling restrictions for kids “censorship” is just silly.

Removing undesirable information is literally censorship. For irony's sake, I'll adjust my comment for your sensibility:

Every restriction is a demonstration of a lack of trust.

Censorship is quite strictly defined to be done by the government. Not allowing kids to watch anything they please is called parenting.

Incorrect.

Your first sentence is plain wrong and your second only begs the question. It's as if you're just trying to distract from the content of my comment with sheer semantic disingenuity. But maybe you missed my point so:

every check shows distrust

Do you even have kids

depends on the age range.

and that's the problem. I don't want Youtube's input aside from being a dumb pipe. I want them to hand me the remote so I can manage my feed.

> depends on the age range.

How's that?

The older the kid, the less I'll filter their content. I'll make sure that a 5 year old only has specific channels to access. A 16 year old is more around a point where I'm only worried about scams and propaganda instead of finding a curse word in one video.

basically just a profile that can only access a single playlist or feed, with which content is added to by another account.

You heard it here first folks - children are too niche now.

2ish billion people, well known for their indirect spending power, are not worth figuring out a simple whitelist system for.

It's parenting that is niche. It's outsourced to Google.

Your second paragraph is kind of funny as a solution to your first, but was nonetheless what I was going to suggest: since it would require too much work for a multi-trillion dollar company to be cable of building, you can instead rely on hobbyists and use yt-dlp and jellyfin to make your own whitelisted youtube.

The option (or at least documentation) does not seem to be there for computers. Is it only on mobile devices?

Of course if it made a bunch of money it would be a top priority though.

Yeah its a weird one, the lack of this feature is whats making me stop giving them money and I wonder how many other families are in the same boat.

The PS kind of undermines the rest of your point.

I don’t think this is too niche of a feature. Instead, the issue is that this would decrease the engagement (and profitability) for any customer using it, so they have a disincentive to building it. Same reason that Facebook removed features that helped customers narrow their feeds down to just favorite friends and family.

> We should be allowed to create and use whatever UI we want for the public endpoints that are exposed

Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error was a frequent occurrence.

The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable.

These days there’s also a problem of scraping and botting. The more open the API, the more abuse you get. You can’t have security through obscurity be your only protection, but having a closed API makes a huge difference even though the bad actors can technically constantly reverse engineer it if they really want. In practice, they get tired and can’t keep up.

I doubt this will be a popular anecdote on HN, but after walking the walk I understand why this idealistic concept is much harder in reality.

Thanks for your comment and for sharing your experience.

> Having been at a company that tried this: The number of poorly-behaved or outright abusive clients is a huge problem. Having a client become popular with a small group of people and then receive some update that turned it into a DDoS machine because someone made a mistake in a loop or forgot to sleep after an error was a frequent occurrence.

Ok, but this could be easily solved by having rate limits on api?

> The secondary problem is that when it breaks, the customers blame the company providing the service, not the team providing the client. The volume of support requests due to third party clients became unbearable.

I would say this is subjective/arguable in general.

> These days there’s also a problem of scraping and botting. The more open the API, the more abuse you get. You can’t have security through obscurity be your only protection, but having a closed API makes a huge difference even though the bad actors can technically constantly reverse engineer it if they really want. In practice, they get tired and can’t keep up.

There is no limit that avoid both false nevative and false postives

It's what happens, it's almost by definition not subjective. The world is full of people geeky enough to use third party clients but not geeky enough to understand the nuances of service evolution. Their reasoning goes like this: yesterday it worked, today it doesn't. I didn't change my client, so it must have been the service that changed. Therefore, it's the service's fault.

This type of reasoning is typically reinforced by the third party app developers themselves, who will tweet "XXX broke their APIs today, really sorry, working hard to get you an update that works around their $@!%#! engineering" and other stuff that not-so-subtly encourages people to blame the service.

Also, don't discount the abuse aspect. Closing clients and out-iterating them is a proven strategy for winning the abuse war, and as all users care about abuse but very few care about third party clients, losing the latter to please the rest of the user base is an easy decision to make.

To be fair, the chances of a breaking server change being unintentional or a natural evolution versus being a hostile move from the provider are about 50/50. AOL was known back in the day for making actively hostile changes to AIM for the sole purpose of breaking third party clients.

Today I'd say the chances of it being a hostile move are more like 75/25.

> The volume of support requests due to third party clients

It's not like Google provides any support to their consumers though. They barely provide any to their customers.

But it would mean they'd have to scale up from one, to two support staff.

Something being hard shouldn't be a reason to not do it. Put the features in and punish those who abuse the system. That's what regulation should be for. I think in general we need a wider solution to rampant botting as AI makes it even easier to bot.

If the cost exceeds the benefit, that's a reason to not do something.

But no one is forcing you to myopically express that benefit as solely "increase shareholder value", that's a choice.

If you want to operate at "dominant player in the industry" there's a lot of reasons you have to do stuff that has reasons not to be done, saying "its hard" isn't a good enough excuse if you want to get the lions share of the market.

Dominant players can also afford to do a lot of things without immediate payoff, e.g. Google, Bell Labs.

Somehow I don't think the billion dollar monopoly on video hosting is worried about doing anything more than serving adverts at this point. So let's just enshittify the product until we get broken up or a competitor somehow rises.

You've described the problems.

But this is where all the value of the future is locked up.

We can't do better at serving people's individual needs until we give up on "one size MUST FIT ALL"

Also Google raked in about 100 bil based on a quick search last year.

Surely some of that could be redirected to an engineering team to do what's listed here, and while they're at it, maybe make the Apple TV YouTube app not suck industrial quantities of ass.

I think the only one I've used that's worse than YouTube's is Nebula but it's not a direct comparison, Nebula just lags quite a bit, it does function. The YouTube app in comparison frequently just... breaks in incredibly bizarre ways.

> The answer is to this question is always: it is too niche a product feature for a giant corporation to prioritize.

The answer is even shorter: money. Our society prioritizes "giant corporation makes money" over good things happening.

Electron apps solve the sync problem by redirecting to main site for full UI. Also there's not much need for UI in this case, because the user is not supposed to change or see whitelist, filtering can be implemented on server side.

How can it be niche if it would be front and center for every responsible parent?

>responsible parent

>responsible

Yeah, that's niche.

Fuck.

> This product would require constant work to keep in sync as UIs and features change.

But why does the UI need to change? Nobody would miss having to relearn it every couple of months.

No, that feature doesn't exist. My son is 4 and I looked. You can approve individual videos, but to my knowledge you can't whitelist channels for your kid. You can subscribe to a bunch of channels, and that will tend to make your kids' feed get steered in that direction, but random outliers are always a possibility.

Which as a parent of a toddler is absolutely mind-numbing.

Which means that every so often he will always end up encountering either some foreign-language content (borderline appropriate if I want him to learn his native tongue first) or something with violence, etc. that is not at all appropriate, or something like some kid playing some dumb but colorful game (non-mind-enriching, pure dopamine garbage) from some rando channel.

PLUS, they seem to be abandoning YouTube Kids in order to merge its functionality into the main YouTube app, and yet...

Like, does ANYONE at Google/Alphabet/whatever actually have fucking kids?!?!?!

I paid for family YouTube just so my kid (and myself) wouldn't be forced to watch ads.

All they'd have to do here is let me ban FUCKING shorts (don't get me started... note that they intentionally made this extremely difficult to impossible, good luck blocking it at the router level), and whitelist some channels, and they'd instantly make every parent 100% happier with YouTube!

And no, I'm sorry but this would NOT be hard to build/maintain. Hell, they can hire me to build it out, I'm LFW!

I haven't tried it myself yet, but I self host my own Jellyfin(1) instance, and I've had it recommended to combine it with pinchflat(2), which will auto download and label entire youtube channels, as they publish new videos. So then you could use it to archive and provide access to the channels you want without worrying about the recommendations and other channels.

1. https://jellyfin.org/

2. https://github.com/kieraneglin/pinchflat

Interesting, i have 2 questions:

- Can it limit the time range of video to download? Some channels may have ten thousand of video.

- Can it auto include the CC to video, that's one of main selling points of youtube to me.

I've just started setting this up for my own family with plex instead of jellyfin, so I don't have a LOT of answers, but...

- yes pinchflat allows you to define the date at which it starts downloading. For a couple channels, I set it to only download the past year's worth of videos and it seems to have respected that properly. It also allows you to set a retention period

- it allows you to download, embed, and use autogenerated subtitles (three separate options)

Can you link it up with ffmpeg and SponsorBlock to remove ads?

I have this workflow with the ytdl-sub docker on my k8 cluster, is pretty powerful at filtering to specific videos and includes sponsorblock - everything is configuration driven, no ui, which can just be dropped into a yaml configmap

I rarely have to touch it unless I'm adding a new playlist or channel

https://ytdl-sub.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html

It's been great, the kid can watch any channels on there she wants on her ipad with no ads or sponsored segments

The ability to filter what your kids can access disappeared with the invention of the transistor radio.

Ads as effective parental controls is wild, hilarious, and somewhat dystopian to me.

Why? Back when I was a kid and TV/radio were the only options, it's the ads that often got me to shut it off and do something else as often as not having anything to watch. I would wager advertiser data reflects this. Conversely I noticed a trend sometime in the 2010s my grandkids would watch shows that didnt break to commercial after rolling the end credits but instead segue to a new episode in a mini-view, and they would never leave.

For windows / linux I've found the freetube app to provide a lot of sane controls. I can block channels as needed, block shorts, hide profile pictures of commenters, and a lot of other quality of life things. You can even set a password for the settings as needed. Otherwise in the browser (firefox) I've been somewhat succesful in blocking youtube shorts with ublock origin filter rules: www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(1) www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2) www.youtube.com##ytd-rich-section-renderer.ytd-rich-grid-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(4) www.youtube.com##ytd-guide-entry-renderer.ytd-guide-section-renderer.style-scope:nth-of-type(2)

It's pretty clear to me that Youtube shoving endless low quality content towards kids is their intended business model. It's what drives the most engagement. It's why they don't let you permanently disable YouTube Shorts. It's why they don't let you block channels easily any more. Or dislike videos. They're AB testing themselves into a low quality slop firehose.

There's some truly great content on the platform, some of it even for kids. But it gets drowned out by mountains of algorithmic slop.

I have stopped giving my kid access to Youtube. instead I set up my own media server, filled it with pirated TV shows and Movies I can curate, and give them access to that on the TV and iPad in their allowed screen times.

If you disable YouTube history, it completely removes shorts. It also breaks functionality in surprising ways (breaks back button behavior - the petty bastards)

I think its a similar issue with older generation than dont search and just scroll for content.

YouTube kids has a feature to only show whitelisted channels and videos. It's been there a few years now. You can share videos to your kids directly from the YouTube app.

Whitelisting and YouTube Kids are not viable solutions for the 12-16 age group, which is the group this legislation is targeting.

Whitelisting: There is way too much appropriate content out there to whitelist it all. It's totally infeasible for a parent, unless you're planning to only approve a handful of channels, which makes YouTube pointless.

YouTube Kids: Teenagers are not "kids" and are not going to go onto YouTube Kids to watch Baby Shark and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse or whatever other kiddie stuff they have there.

Something else entirely is needed here.

Sure, a whitelist makes YouTube less useful to a teenager, but it's hardly "pointless". Even a few whitelisted educational videos and channels could have huge value. You can send videos and channels to your kids' whitelists straight from your phone as you come across them and build up a huge library over time. My kids have dozens of channels and thousands of videos to choose from now, and I add more frequently as I naturally come across them in my own causal browsing.

Give parents the ability to turn off shorts and watch most of the AI slop they watch go away.

Hmmm I'll check it out, I last looked into this about a year ago. I'm pretty sure it still allowed a bunch of crap through that I didn't want them to have access to.

edit: Oh neat they do have a parental approval mode in there now. Last time I was in here they only let you set an age range for the content that you wanted. It still seems a bit weird though, I can select a channel from the list they are presenting me but I can't search for some arbitrary channel to unlock. I'll have another look tonight though

Yeah the interface in the Kids app sucks. The way to do it is from your own phone. Use the "share" feature and choose "with kids". It takes a lot of taps to share a channel, that could be improved for sure. But if you share good channels as you come across them then over time you'll build up a great library of content for your kids.

Ahh "sharing" the magic, cool thanks.

The UX is a complete fail, my comment having a moan about it all has over 90 upvotes now, yet I'm wrong. But the reason I'm wrong is because they've made it painfully hard to manage.

Agreed the UX is terrible.

But that also opens all the yt kids content, doesn't it? At least I couldn't find any way to whitelist within the kids app too. And there's just WAY too much brainrot crap in it to allow open access for my kid.

No. There is a true whitelist mode that only shows content you choose.

Kind of weird that there are so many comments here lamenting the lack of this feature when it actually exists just as requested.

If it's not found by people who tried the app and explicitly looked for it, maybe the problem is on the app side? (Or maybe it's not available to everyone?)

Yup. Id pay money to lock down the 24/7 Bluey youtube channel for the kids... at least until the next trend comes along.

https://www.youtube.com/live/cN4EPsfBnq0?feature=shared

Another commenter has just pointed out that this is actually possible in the YT Kids app now. You can select approved channels and Bluey Live is one of them. I still need to see if I can approve other channels though.

Presumably for the same reason Google doesn't let you block or filter shit sites.

If you genuinely let user's preferences be taken into account, it's incredibly hard to make money from ads if the user's true preferences are not to be shown them.

The entire point of ads is to manipulate and change user preferences and behaviours.

So any preferences or customisation has to be minimal enough that their use can only partially implement user preferences. White listing is a step too far against the purpose of YouTube.

Thus Google will always be biased to not letting you implement full customisability and user control.

Agreed but ElCapitanMarkla is paying for an ad free service so at that point (as far as I can see) there shouldn't be any reason they can't have what they suggest.

Try Kagi. You can filter out the shit sites. It's great!

Well, that didn't or wouldn't have mattered when Google only had a top box and sidebox with sponsored sites.

Once they started masquerading ads as results, yeah any ability for user down or upranking became unworkable.

Whitelisting—and more user control in general—seems like such a valuable feature, that they could probably charge for it. Heck, I'd pay $10 a year if I could just customise certain aspects of YouTube and remove all the ads and suggested content.

Whether this is viable or not, I don't know. I'm not sure what the average take per person is from the current model.

You might be able to rig something up with invidious? https://github.com/iv-org/invidious

Is there perhaps a way to do some kind of person-in-the-middle attack to intercept youtube packets and drop channels you don't whitelist, so that the UI only ever shows the whitelisted channels?

NewPipe blocks ads, and optionally blocks Shorts. NewPipe does also happen to break YouTube's terms of service.

My opinion is that YouTube should be forced to permit third party clients (interoperate). NewPipe and the various other clients are proof that there is a desire for alternative experiences and more toggles and options. Forcing users to identity themselves online to watch videos (or certain classes of videos) is a privacy nightmare, dystopic even.

I don't have kids, so I really can't comment, but I'll describe my setup.

Ublock origin and Sponserblock on Firefox. I also have an extension (forget the name) that blocks recommendations after a video. Disable autoplay.

There are also extensions that replace the home page with the subscriptions page.

But really, if BS exists on the internet, either your kids will find it or it will be shown to them. There's nothing you can do.

You can force them to use browser like firefox if possible. I had seen some extension that you can block the shorts!

Have you tried creating a YouTube Kids profile? What you’re describing sounds like what they already have. It is not the default but there is a setting that allows you to create a list of allowed channels. The setting is called “Approved Content Only”.

YouTube kids is a wasteland for non English content. And also, there is whole world of content I would be more then happy to encourage my kids to watch that is unavailable there.

While also containing huge amount of unboxing toys crap I would not give to my kids in my own watchiles.

You can share almost any video on YouTube to the kids app. You use the YouTube app on your phone to share it, not the UI in the kids app.