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?)