Speaking from experience: there is just no usable way to limit youtube to certain types of content, or disable "discovery" UI. Recommendation engine gravity is just too strong. Whatever useful kid/educational content they have is swamped by the ocean of attention sinks.
Shorts only made this worse.
Depends. I struggle to follow video content, and do better with text. YMMV.
I then show them my playlist on youtube (veretassium, tomscott, redvsblue, pbs eons etc)
they go back to scrolling though shorts right after.
you can lead a horse to water but well...
Admittedly children have ignored well meaning adults trying to educate them for all of history...
OS vendors, which are now more interested in selling ad space, than actually developing operating systems - and thus have a vested interest in separating my childs' eyeballs from my agency and responsibility as a parent.
If there were a way for me, in a default out of box OS install, to observe my kids screens, safely and securely in the context of a family unit - the same way I look under their beds for stray socks, and sort their bookshelf, and so on - then there would be less of an issue for "Daddy Internet" to be raising my kids for me, as either bullies or victims.
But in the Western world there is a very strong inclination to separate children from their parents, and abrogate the parents' rights and responsibilities with regards to raising their children - and this totalitarian-authoritarian action from the UK and Australian governments, which are both wholesale rights-abusing entities - is just more of the same.
OS vendors could solve the problem for social networking - give me better tools to administer my childs' computers, and return my agency as a parent that has for the last few decades been utterly deteriorated by the OS vendors' desire to sell more ads.
I would wager that anyone who thinks its a good idea for 'banning' to be the hammer for this nail, probably also thinks that the family unit also needs to be disbanded, for greater social control outside the family home ...
Without capitalism that resource wouldn't even exist.