YouTube
YouTube Shorts Never Runs Out
Shorts is a video feed that never ends, and it's built right into YouTube, so a family that decided against TikTok usually already has something almost exactly like it on every device in the house.
It behaves nothing like YouTube
Regular YouTube is mostly searching and subscriptions, where your kid goes looking for something. Shorts is a feed that decides for them and never ends, so it's a lot closer to TikTok than to the app it lives in, and whatever rules your family set for YouTube usually don't fit it.
Why it's easy to miss
It has its own tab and its own recommendations, and it's on the TV app too. If you checked YouTube and felt better after looking at the watch history, you probably haven't looked at the Shorts tab, and that can be a completely different story.
What you can do about it
You can set the Shorts feed limit to zero in the app's settings, and on a supervised teen account you can lock it there. You can also look at that tab specifically when you check in. Just calling it its own thing helps, because then you have a rule about the feed instead of a rule about YouTube.
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