I let my kids try out YouTube kids and I thought all the content was total garbage. Mostly toy unboxing videos, video game walkthroughs, and creepy knockoffs of cartoons they liked. Deleted it very quickly. We stick to DVDs and Netflix now.

Yeah, there's youtube kids!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9EKV2nSU8w

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-for-kids-videos-prob...

2018 you say? surely they've fixed things by now?

nope

https://boingboing.net/2019/06/03/youtube-sexualizes-childre...

etc.

and that's why none of my kids' devices have youtube on them anymore

Just a warning, if anyone tries to use youtube kids, you'd better use whitelisting.

Yes Guided Access is great. I default it to a 20min timeout. So if I let my 8 year old play Minecraft on it, and he runs off to some corner of the house to binge, I don't have to worry about hunting him down. He'll get a nice warning around 3min out, and then the phone will essentially brick itself. It's great knowing that he will absolutely be coming back to me with the phone in 20min.