How to limit YouTube on a child's phone
Short answer
For younger children use the separate YouTube Kids app. For children who have outgrown it, set up a supervised account through Family Link and pick one of three content settings: Older kids, which Google aligns with ratings for viewers 9 and up; Teens, aligned with 13 and up; and Older teens, which allows almost everything except content marked 18+. Supervised accounts also switch off comments, live chat, uploads and purchases. None of the settings limit how long your child watches — that is a separate control.
YouTube is the specific worry behind a lot of general worry about screens. Pew Research Center surveyed 3,054 parents of children aged 12 and under in May 2025 and found daily screen use had risen from 43% in 2020 to 51%, with much of the increase attributed to YouTube.
There are three different tools depending on your child’s age, and two of them have confusingly similar names.
YouTube Kids, for younger children
A separate app with its own catalogue, not a setting inside YouTube. Content is curated, and the surrounding machinery (comments, uploads, recommendations from the open platform) is absent rather than restricted.
It works well and children grow out of it noisily, usually somewhere around nine or ten, when the app becomes socially embarrassing and the videos their friends are discussing are not in it.
Supervised accounts, for after that
This is the middle ground: the real YouTube, with limits. You set it up through Family Link and then choose one of three content settings.
Older kids
Google says this “generally aligns with content ratings for viewers 9+”. It allows a broad range of vlogs, tutorials, gaming, music, news and educational content, including mild language, non-graphic violence and age-appropriate treatment of sensitive subjects.
Teens
Aligned with ratings for viewers 13 and up. Everything in the tier below plus a wider range again: more frequent profanity, fleeting graphic violence in shows and films, realistic weapons in scripted contexts. At this tier a child can read comments but not write them.
Older teens
Almost everything on YouTube except videos marked 18+ and other content deemed unsuitable. The comment restriction stays.
Whichever tier you pick, a supervised account also switches off comments from your child, live streams and posts, channel creation and uploads, purchases including memberships and films, personalised ads, incognito mode, and apps like YouTube Studio.
Choose the tier above the one you want
The instinct is to set the most restrictive option and see how it goes. In practice, a tier set too low for a child’s age produces a search that returns nothing useful, and a child who has learned that YouTube is broken on their phone and better on a friend’s.
The setting is meant to be moved. Starting one notch tighter than you expect to end up and adjusting after a fortnight works better than starting at the bottom, because the direction of travel is upward and a child can see that.
What none of it does
It does not limit time. Every setting above is about what can be watched, not for how long. Duration is a separate control — a per-app limit in Family Link, or Digital Wellbeing on the phone itself.
It does not cover a browser. A supervised account governs the YouTube app and signed-in sessions. A child watching in a browser while signed out is in a different system, which is why the Play Store PIN and the browser settings matter alongside this.
It does not follow them to a friend’s house. Every control here is attached to an account on a device. The unfiltered phone on the sofa next to them is still an unfiltered phone.
The last one is the one worth sitting with. The tiers are genuinely useful for what a child stumbles into, and they do nothing about what a child is shown by someone else. That gap is closed by a child who knows what to do when something appears that they did not go looking for, which is a conversation rather than a setting.