The amount of time and energy that I have to put in to keep my 3 individual kids safe online while still allowing some access is mind-blowingly high. It shouldn’t be as hard as it is. It’s so hard, in fact, 99.9% of parents give up on it. I’m not one to do that but I’ve strongly considered it many times.
Parental controls are fractured across every platform, they can’t enforce everything in one place, domain filtering isn’t practical, some sites (like YouTube) are needed for schoolwork and they include adult content intermingled with no sane way to bifurcate those. It’s also impossible to disable the forced short-form video push onto toddlers and teens.
There is a simple and better way to do this, which is device-wide age status attestation. That is, the whole device or user account has a 'minor' flag set, and passes it on to software, and so on.
Governments are not pushing for this because this is not about protecting children, it is about removing privacy and increasing control.
This only addresses one axis of your concern, but if they are accessing YouTube via desktop browser (or Firefox on Android!), the "Youtube-shorts block" extension gets rid of the Shorts UI. You can still watch Shorts, it will just display them in the normal video UI without infinite scrolling. It's a huge quality of life boost.
Although obviously this does nothing for those using the mobile or TV apps.
I sympathize with this a lot. What you’re describing really is exhausting, and it shouldn’t be this hard.
My take is that parental controls fail because they’re trying to solve a social and psychological problem at the technical layer. No amount of filters or settings can keep up with the internet, and kids are better at routing around them than we like to admit.
What’s worked better for us is treating this like other hard topics. We talk to our kids directly about social media, disturbing content, and strangers online, the same way we talk to them about drugs or sex.
We’re explicit about why some things aren’t allowed, what kinds of content exist out there beyond just sex, and that if something upsetting happens, telling us is always the right move and won’t cost them our trust or love.
That doesn’t remove all risk, but it shifts the burden from constant surveillance to shared understanding. To me that feels more realistic than trying to centrally control an environment that isn’t controllable.
We do that too of course. It’s not even the content that really bothers me. What bothers me is the targeted capitalization of kids’ attention. The instant gratification content model is changing behaviors for an entire connected generation in a way the world has never seen before. The real reason parental controls don’t exist is because it’s counter to what makes money for megacorps.
Parental controls are fractured across every platform, they can’t enforce everything in one place, domain filtering isn’t practical, some sites (like YouTube) are needed for schoolwork and they include adult content intermingled with no sane way to bifurcate those. It’s also impossible to disable the forced short-form video push onto toddlers and teens.