We went from using YouTube as a babysitter to accepting that we have to reduce our personal time allotment and be more engaged with the child.
The television was removed from the living room wall and the only screen time is shared activity screen time with a parent on the weekends for an hour or so. Lots more board gaming, reading, talking, crafting, playing. Way more parental involvement required.
If there was some way to limit YouTube to specific channels and disable recommendations we might still allow it. Maybe you can do that with premium. In any case, we chose a household solution rather than trying to work in a technical solution.
> If there was some way to limit YouTube to specific channels and disable recommendations we might still allow it
I do exactly this by mirroring a list of channels to my NAS and serving it with Emby. It's not 100% "educational" material; there's Dude Perfect and alongside Physics Girl, Bob Ross, Primitive Technology, and Technology Connections.
(My ancient wish that Google+ had created personas/facets crops up once again: there's a fair number of creators whose channels have some gold but which I won't add to the mirror because they have a bunch of unrelated content that is far more marginal. Some creators set up multiple topic-focuses channels or playlists but it's not the common case.)
I don't have a content block for youtube.com and the kids can still technically get there, but they know I don't want them going there and they know why.
I was pretty good at policing the YouTube content, but one day I came in and found my wife without a care in the world while my child was mimicking horrible YouTube behavior. Turned it off and never looked back.
Now my friend with an 8 year old is telling me how YouTube returned to his life. I’m not ready for that and instead trying to build a device that will pause time
The television was removed from the living room wall and the only screen time is shared activity screen time with a parent on the weekends for an hour or so. Lots more board gaming, reading, talking, crafting, playing. Way more parental involvement required.
If there was some way to limit YouTube to specific channels and disable recommendations we might still allow it. Maybe you can do that with premium. In any case, we chose a household solution rather than trying to work in a technical solution.