YouTube is the most popular social network among the youth. According to the latest information, 93% of the juniors are 9-12 years old. (source: Avast - Safe Online) This online platform records about 400 hours of videos every minute. Considering how extensive it is, we can hardly define how much it is beneficial and whether it can harm those who follow it. Especially if we focus on children and adolescents. But what we can tell with precision is that videos watched by millions of low-age users are very popular, as well as the personality associated with them. Since prohibiting children from watching YouTube is definitely not the solution, we offer rather some elegant tips on how to ensure that your kids watch "safely" and you can be at ease.
Different countries have different minimum age requirements for creating a user account on YouTube. The most stringent are these rules in the Netherlands, where the age limit is set at 16 years. South Korea and Spain allow children to be an official part of the community since the age of 14, with the rest of the countries including the Czech Republic allowing it to be 13.
What YouTube offers: Limited mode
Several basic safety steps are provided by the social network authors themselves. An elementary step is to alert you to content being played, which is inaccessible to viewers under the age of 18. However, this alert will only be displayed if you have restricted or restricted mode within your YouTube account. If you do not operate this mode, no warnings will be displayed and all your video content will be played. It is also important to think that restricted mode is enabled at the browser or device level. You must therefore activate it separately in every browser used on your computer. If your browser also supports multi-profile functionality, you must activate it for each profile separately.
Not only safety on YouTube, but also on other social networks and the Internet in general will be devoted to part of this year's Utubering. Utubering is an event that allows face-to-face meeting of fans with video-internet stars, with the most respected Czech and Slovak Youngsters having an incoming prepared program. As part of the accompanying parent program, various interesting lectures are being prepared - in part about just steps to protect children on various Internet channels. The festival will be held on April 28 in Prague and May 5 in Brno.
What you can do yourself: talk
There are a few steps that experts recommend to keep YouTube safe watching. And all are mainly in communication with children or teenagers watching YouTube channels. Rule number one is to talk to the offspring about the privacy policy, so it's important that they do not give private data anywhere, such as their home address, where they are going to school or where they live. This includes not sharing passwords with other people, even if they are schoolmates or buddies. It may also occasionally happen that someone else is a YouTube employee - even those who work for the largest online video community - would never ask any user to pass the password. So do not let your children deceive you. Another principle is - talk about YouTube. Especially if your children are over 13 years of age, meaning they may have their own user account and do not have to use the "kids" version through your (or simply someone else's) account. Explain to them that they will not be afraid to tell you when they find something inappropriate on the web. Or, to give them a sense of maturity, you can teach them to report that content straight away - YouTube has a special team that 24 hours a day tells about inappropriate videos.
Signing up for videos - it can be a miraculous formula. If you (and therefore your children) are subscribing to YouTube from a certain author, this social network will always automatically offer you new posts. So you do not have to drive around for a long time, so you can avoid finding other, perhaps even misplaced, posts.
Keep track of yourself and be active yourself
Take a look at what your children are watching on YouTube. So another recommendation. The easiest version is to make sure the child watches videos in a shared space, such as in the kitchen or in the living room, where you also move. And, of course, without headphones. Alternatively, have a family account. But if you are a teenager and wants to have more privacy, you probably will not be able to watch the videos for your presence, and maybe you will not even be pleasant to look for the history of watching the videos actually watching (which is also one of the options). Then you are advised to take YouTube into your own hands. Let your teenage child create a list of your favorite videos to know what interests him. From time to time, watch some of the videos and talk about what they were about, why your child has fun and why he's watching them. It tells us something about his behavior in this community. You can also focus on who your collectible videos download and who they are watching - find out something about these authors, try to get to know them. You better evaluate if your YouTuber is your child's appropriate age. By sometimes looking at your favorite offspring channels, you'll also find out what they're having fun and whether the content is okay, what's its content, what's going on. In addition to having better insight and less concern, you can get closer together with your children, especially in the problematic teenager age.
Are you not familiar with YouTube? Here we offer a few names that most likely your children watch as they move Czech and Slovak internet video content: A Cup of Style, GetTheLouk, Anna Šulcová, Bára Votíková, World by Katka, Jirka Král, Ková, MenT, Gogo, with Martin .
Source: tz, edited editorially