How to Limit or Turn Off YouTube Shorts for Kids (2026)

Short answer: YouTube can now cap — or completely switch off — the Shorts feed for a supervised child account. In the YouTube app, go to Family Center → your child → Time management and set the daily Shorts feed limit: anywhere from 2 hours down to zero. Your child can't dismiss it, it applies on every device they're signed into, and it resets each morning.

Two gaps remain: it caps how much, not when — 30 minutes of Shorts can still land in the middle of homework — and it tells you nothing about what they watched.

See what they're actually watching →

Why Shorts is a different problem from YouTube

A regular video ends, and the ending is a natural exit. Shorts never ends: every swipe serves a fresh 30-second video chosen by an algorithm that learns exactly what keeps your child swiping. That's why a child who handles a 20-minute episode fine can lose two hours to the feed — roughly 200 videos — without noticing.

So treat Shorts as its own problem, not a subset of "YouTube time". Three steps.

Step 1: Set YouTube's own Shorts limit — ten minutes, do it today

YouTube added a parent-set Shorts limit for supervised accounts, and it's genuinely good — strict, not a nudge.

Your child's Google account must be supervised through Family Link and linked to you in YouTube's Family Center.
In your own YouTube app, tap your profile picture → Family Center.
Select your child → Time management.
Set the daily Shorts feed limit — from 2 hours down to 0 minutes, which switches the Shorts feed off entirely.

When the limit is reached, the Shorts feed stops for the rest of the day. Your child can't swipe past it or change the setting, and regular videos keep working — which is right, because search-and-watch YouTube is a healthier mode than feed-scrolling.

The catches: it follows the account, not the phone — signed out, or signed into another account in a browser, there's no limit. And it needs supervision: the self-set version in Settings → Time management is a reminder your child can dismiss with one tap.

Step 2: Give Shorts time a shape, not just a number

A cap without a routine becomes a daily negotiation about the cap. What works in practice:

One window, not scattered access. "Shorts after homework, before dinner" beats "30 minutes whenever" — the end point is an event your child can see coming, not a decision you defend every evening.
A hand-off, not a cliff. End the window into something that starts immediately — food, going out, a show you watch together. "Stop scrolling and do nothing" loses; "stop scrolling, dinner's ready" mostly doesn't.
Weekday and weekend rates. 15–30 minutes on school days and up to an hour on weekends works for most preteens. Zero on school nights is fine too — the supervised limit makes it stick without a fight.

But nothing in YouTube's settings enforces a window — the Shorts limit is a daily total, spendable at any hour. The window needs its own enforcement.

Step 3: Enforce the window with a device-level rule

This is where ParentalEdge does something neither YouTube nor Family Link can:

Time Windows — the routine from Step 2, as a rule. YouTube available 5–7pm, shut during homework and after bedtime. Family Link can't schedule a single app (its downtime switches off the whole phone), and YouTube's Family Center has no schedule at all. The schedule ends the session, not you.
A daily cap on the YouTube app itself. The Shorts limit doesn't stop three hours of regular videos. An app-level limit ends YouTube when the allowance ends, whatever mode it's in.
See the actual Shorts. On Android, the Shorts your child watched show up by title in the activity feed alongside regular videos. Two hours of Shorts becomes something you can talk about, instead of a number you argue about.
The browser route, closed. youtube.com in Chrome — signed out, incognito, any browser — goes through the same web filter, so the signed-out loophole in Step 1 stops mattering.

The honest catch: ParentalEdge can't meter Shorts separately from the rest of YouTube — only YouTube can, which is why Step 1 comes first. Our job is everything around it: the app cap, the schedule, the browser, the visibility.

Set it up in a few minutes →

The three mistakes that keep the spiral going

Relying on the dismissible reminder. If your child can swipe the limit away, you don't have a limit — you have a suggestion. Use the supervised-account version or a device-level cap.
Banning YouTube outright. The feed just moves to a browser or a friend's phone, minus the educational half and minus your visibility. Capped and visible beats banned and hidden.
Counting minutes with no idea of content. If all you can see is "YouTube: 1h 40m", every conversation is about the number. Kids take "I saw you watched 40 prank Shorts" very differently from "you're always on that phone".

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I turn off YouTube Shorts completely for my child?

Yes — if their account is supervised through Family Link: set the daily Shorts feed limit to zero in Family Center and the feed stops loading entirely. Regular videos still play. Without supervision there's no way to remove Shorts from the app.

Does Google Family Link limit Shorts separately from YouTube?

No. Family Link's app timer covers the whole YouTube app — Shorts and regular videos together — and it's a daily total with no schedule, so it can't keep YouTube shut during homework hours. The Shorts-only limit lives inside YouTube itself: Family Center → your child → Time management.

My child just dismisses the "time to stop scrolling" reminder. Why?

Because it's the self-set version, which anyone can swipe away. The parent-set limit on a supervised account is different — when time runs out, the Shorts feed stops for the day and there is nothing to dismiss.

What about Instagram Reels and other short-video feeds?

Same spiral, same approach — but Instagram offers parents no Reels-only limit, so the control sits at the device level: with ParentalEdge, set a daily limit on Instagram (or block it) the same way you cap any app.

Can I see which Shorts my child watched?

YouTube doesn't show parents this — Family Center reports time, not content. ParentalEdge on Android reports the actual Shorts your child watched by title in the activity feed, alongside regular videos, so a conversation about "two hours of Shorts" can be about what was in them.

Bottom line

Shorts is engineered not to end, so the fix can't be willpower — theirs or yours. Set YouTube's supervised Shorts limit first; it's strict and free. Then shape the time, cap the app as a whole, and keep visibility into what's actually watched — the limit tells you when scrolling stopped, not what filled it.

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