Safer Internet Day: Empowering teens and parents with tools to support wellbeing

In today’s digital-first age, teens face unique challenges when it comes to nurturing and preserving their mental health and wellbeing. We know teens now are more online than ever, and it’s all of our responsibility to step up and provide the knowledge, tools, and protections to support them through the new experiences and pressures that come with navigating the online world.

YouTube aims to be a leader in this space, and it’s our practice to work with third-party experts in child development, mental health, safety, and more to provide healthier experiences for teens on our platform. This Safer Internet Day, we’re detailing some of the tools designed – many with the help and input of our third-party expert partners, such as our Youth and Families Advisory Committee – to support teens’ wellbeing as they learn, create and thrive on YouTube. We’re also launching our newest partnership focused on mental health content for teens.

Equipping teens and parents with new and updated tools to support teen mental health

You can see our teen wellbeing and mental health focus at work in many of our new and existing product features. The following tools – all of which are new or newly updated – can be used by parents and teens anytime, anywhere to manage teens’ experience on YouTube and support their wellbeing online.

• YouTube Supervised Experience for Teens: In 2024, we launched a voluntary supervised experience for teens and their parents. This experience is an expansion of our existing supervised experience for pre-teens and was designed in partnership with our Youth and Families Advisory Committee. It gives parents and teens the option to link accounts in our YouTube Family Center, where parents will be able to see shared insights into their teens’ channel activity, including what channels they own and the number of uploads, comments, subscriptions and more. Linked accounts can also receive email notifications about channel activity and access to resources created with external experts to support conversations between parents and teens about responsible content creation.

• YouTube Bedtime + Take a Break Reminders: We recently launched improvements to Bedtime and Take a Break reminders on YouTube, both of which help parents strike the right balance for their families between watching and wellbeing. Take a Break reminders can be set at certain frequencies as a reminder to pause from watching videos, while Bedtime reminders trigger at specific times to encourage viewers to stop watching videos and go to bed. Now, reminders appear as a full-screen takeover across Shorts and long-form videos, and Take a Break has a default trigger setting for every 60 minutes. Both features are globally available and continue to be on by default for users under 18.

• Uploads Private by Default: Anyone who uploads a video to YouTube can control where their video appears and who can watch it by choosing to make it public, private, or unlisted. For creators aged 13 (or the applicable age of consent in the user’s country) to 17, upload settings are set to private by default. This setting can be changed if the user so chooses.

Partnering with experts to help teens understand their mental health

We work with a number of leading experts and organizations in the teen mental health space, and we’re proud of the work we’ve done with so many of these partners – including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Canada, and Institute Vita Alere in Brazil – to create features and experiences that center the needs of teens.

The latest example of this work is our new partnership with The Jed Foundation (JED), a leading national nonprofit that protects emotional health and prevents suicide in teens and young adults by building resiliency and life skills, promoting social connectedness, and encouraging help-seeking and help-giving behaviors. Together with JED and the team at Room 1041, we’ve developed a series of engaging and evidence-based mental health videos for teens featuring top YouTube creators – including Crash Adams, Ashely Yi, Tim Chantarangsu, Lexi Hensler, Matt Peterson, Cassandra Bankson and Dylan Lemay – with the goal of equipping them with the knowledge and tools to understand their mental health, cope with challenges, and seek help when needed.

For Safer Internet Day, we’re launching the first two of 40 videos in the series on JED's YouTube Channel called Mind Matters: Creators Open Up About Mental Health. The series features creators like zoeunlimited, Symmone Harrison and others discussing loneliness in addition to creators Gavin Magnus and Nevada talking about breakups. Each of the videos in the series will feature a recognizable teen-focused creator alongside a mental health expert and will cover important mental health issues that many teens face – such as social anxiety, stress management, depression, anger, and more – in a way that’s compelling and age-appropriate.