YouTube gets redirected to YouTube Kids? Here’s what you should know

The internet is a vast place with tons of information and data, both good and bad, and is pretty easy to get lost in. Thus every family has a different set of expectations and conditions when it comes to internet usage for their child.

Some are okay with their child taking up the role of free explorers and going about in the wild unmonitored. While many others like to keep their child under the radar.

Google helps tackle the latter with Google Family Link which is designed to help parents keep track of what a child under the age of 13 is doing on the internet. There is also a built-in safe mode within YouTube that effectively helps filter explicit content.

Now, there have been a bunch of complaints from concerned parents about YouTube getting redirected automatically to YouTube Kids when their child uses it with their account.

With my kid’s account, YouTube site redirects me to YouTube Kids which then tells me that YouTube Kids is not yet available in my country. I.e. he’s stuck without YouTube… unless he signs out his account which removes all restrictions that we had before.
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Due to this, YouTube becomes accessible only through another account or without any account logged in for the child. This poses a great risk since the child can only be monitored through accounts that are part of a Family Link.

The main reason behind this redirection is the fact that YouTube is only available to ages 13 and above. The reason is that even after the safe mode is turned on, there is still plenty of content that’s unfit to be consumed by tweens or even young teens.

Nonetheless, Google is now testing a new feature to solve this problem. It aims to provide a supervised experience that feels more like regular YouTube than YouTube Kids but has some tweaks to make it more kid-friendly.

As clear from above, the feature isn’t yet rolled out but an early beta is set to commence soon, perhaps in the coming months, for families to test and provide feedback.

Of course, a complete rollout still seems distant at this point given that a preview version is yet to release but it seems promising enough to be something worth a wait.

The feature will allow parents to let their children access YouTube through a supervised Google Account. This supervised experience will come with content settings and limited features.

Some of these include three different content settings: Explore, Explore More, and Most of YouTube. These can be selected depending on the scale of content restrictions you wish to impose. More details about it all here.

Nonetheless, for those that want quick solutions and results, we also have a few workarounds in store that may help.

1. Sign out of all accounts:

2. Use an alternative browser:

I found a working solution on my Android tablet for my daughter to access her teacher’s YouTube videos:
1) Install Firefox
2) Set Firefox as the default browser
3) Click on teacher’s link to YouTube video
4) Learn
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Hopefully, these helped. We agree that they’re not the most perfect of workarounds but are all that are available at the moment. For now, be sure to keep an eye on our dedicated YouTube bugs/issues tracker.

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