YouTube, like many other user-generated sites, has a lot of great videos and music to offer to the entire family. One can look up old Bugs Bunny cartoons, or even shorts from Sesame Street on YouTube, and usually find a lot of terrific content. Videos that are inappropriate are usually flagged within a day of being put up, and people who violate YouTube appropriateness clauses can lose their membership.

While at first, this sounds like the YouTube site might prove safe for a child to use, in fact the opposite is true unless one wants to expose a child to a great deal of obscenity, both in pictures and words. Sometimes a video on YouTube isn’t offensive but comments following it by users are, or a title itself uses profanity. As well, searches for videos can often lead to inappropriate content immediately, which has not yet been deleted or flagged. When one uses a search for favorite kid-friendly things on YouTube, one is also given a list of other possibly related topics. A child navigating YouTube is likely to come across a lot of material that parents would not dream of allowing the child to see.

What one can do with user generated sites like YouTube is set up a membership account, and perform parental searches. Membership allows one to create a page of favorites that doesn’t have unnecessary or unmentionable content showing up to disturb or give your children a needlessly advanced education. While searching, children should be out of the room, since things that seem innocent can suddenly turn quite ugly, like drawings of cute animals that begin to spew swear words.

By searching when a child is not present, one can sift through the muck of inappropriate YouTube content, and figure out which videos are great for kids and are family friendly. One can also set one’s preferences to not receive inappropriate or flagged content, however this is not a failsafe. Unfortunately, inappropriate content may leak through in the most innocent searches conducted on YouTube.

As with many Internet sites, the use of YouTube should be carefully watched by parents, and ideally, first navigated by parents in order to help children avoid child-inappropriate material. Even for older children, YouTube can dip into pornography, violence and obscenity quite quickly. Posting videos on YouTube by children may also pose problems since comments added to videos can be quite obscene.