We understand that parents and guardians sometimes have questions about their teen's behaviour and wellbeing online. We've put together some tools and resources to help you manage their experience on YouTube.
What age does my teen need to be to use YouTube?
To sign in to YouTube, your teen must have a Google Account that meets the minimum age requirements in your country or region.
If your child is under the required age, learn more about what experiences are available for them in our YouTube For Families Help Centre.
Tips and advice for online content creation
If your teen is interested in creating content on YouTube, we recommend:
- Reviewing our Community Guidelines, as they outline what content and behaviour is acceptable on YouTube.
- Reading this Family Guide to learn more about responsible teen content creation. The Family Guide was created in partnership with Common Sense Networks, an affiliate of Common Sense Media.
Privacy and safety tools
- Inappropriate content: If you or your teen finds a video that seems inappropriate or like it may violate our Community Guidelines, flag the video.
- Privacy: If you feel that your teen's privacy has been violated, learn more about our privacy policy and how to file a privacy complaint.
- Harassment and cyberbullying:
- If your teen is being harassed by someone on YouTube, direct them to block the user.
- If the harassment persists, review our harassment and cyberbullying policies for harassment prevention info.
- You or your teen can report harassment in videos, channels/profiles or comments.
- Restricted mode: Enabling this setting on your teen's device screens out potentially mature content on YouTube. Learn more about Restricted mode.
- Moderating channel comments: Your teen can remove comments posted on their channel or moderate them before they appear. Learn more about moderating channel comments.
Supporting wellbeing
- Take a break reminders: This feature is automatically turned on for teens and reminds them to take a break while watching videos or YouTube Shorts.
- Bedtime reminders: This feature is automatically turned on for teens and appears when it's time for them to stop watching YouTube and go to bed.
- Auto-play turned off: This feature is automatically turned off for teens. While off, videos won't continuously play for your teen and they'll have to select the next video that they want to watch.
- Responsible video recommendations: YouTube has a video recommendation system that provides more responsible recommendations for teens. This system automatically minimises exposure to content that could negatively impact their self-image or behaviours. Learn more about how we build content recommendations to meet the unique needs of teens.