YouTube rolled out a new parental control on 20 April that lets parents set the daily limit for the Shorts feed to zero minutes. When the limit is set, Shorts disappear from the YouTube homepage and the Shorts tab, and a full-screen notice appears if anyone tries to scroll the feed. YouTube is calling it an industry first, and the description is fair.
The detail that actually matters for parents sits one click below the headline.
The supervised account distinction is the whole story
On adult YouTube accounts, the new zero-minute limit is a soft setting. It can be dismissed with a tap. A determined adult who set it on their own account in a moment of resolve will find it easy to bypass.
On supervised teen accounts the limit is enforced. The teen cannot override it.
That is a meaningful change. Parental controls on YouTube have, for years, been the kind of thing that worked until a teenager noticed they could turn them off. The Shorts feed limit on a supervised account is the first time YouTube has shipped a control on the short-form feed that holds. If your child has a supervised account and you set the daily limit to zero, the Shorts feed is gone from their YouTube experience until you change the setting back.
Why this is worth doing
The evidence on short-form video and adolescent sleep, attention, and mood is among the more consistent findings in this whole field. Pew Research published a major study on 15 April that found 37 percent of teen TikTok users say the platform hurts their sleep, the highest reported sleep impact of any social platform tested. Shorts works the same way, with the same algorithmic infinite scroll and the same hold on attention.
A parent who has watched their child slide from one fifteen-second video into another for twenty minutes already knows what the research is finding. Until 20 April, the only real defence was conversation, removal of the app, or relying on time-management settings the child could turn off. There is now a strict, enforceable lever for the supervised-account version. That is the change.
How to set it
On the YouTube app, sign in to your child’s supervised account or open it through Family Centre on your own device.
Tap the profile icon. Then the settings gear. Then Time management. Then Shorts feed limit. Set the limit to zero.
The change applies immediately. Parents of supervised accounts can also now set custom Bedtime reminders and Take a Break reminders from the same menu. Both are useful in their own right.
The whole process takes under a minute.
What this means for you right now
If your child has a supervised YouTube account, set the Shorts feed limit to zero tonight. There is no reason to wait. You can change it back at any time, and you can use it flexibly. YouTube has suggested setting it to zero during homework windows and raising it at weekends, which is a sensible pattern if your family wants the control without the absolute.
If your child is on YouTube without a supervised account, this control will not hold for them. The same setting exists on adult accounts but it can be dismissed. That is worth knowing as you decide which kind of account makes sense for your child’s age. If you have an older teenager on a regular account who used to be on a supervised one, this is the moment to think about whether moving them back to supervised is something you want to do, while the Shorts setting is the strongest argument for it.
If you do not currently have a supervised account set up at all, the easiest route is through the YouTube app’s Family Centre on your own device. The setup is straightforward, and once it is done you have the new Shorts control along with the older parental settings YouTube already had.
One honest note before you finish
This is not a fix for everything YouTube does. The recommendation algorithm on the main YouTube feed remains its own problem, and the Family Centre controls do not solve it. Long-form video can still take an hour out of an evening. But Shorts is one of the better-evidenced harms, and now there is a setting parents can change tonight that genuinely does what it says.
Sources: YouTube Official Blog — Updates to YouTube supervised accounts for teens, 14 January 2026 RTÉ News — YouTube announces new screen time limits for teens, 20 April 2026 MediaNama — YouTube option to turn off Shorts expands time controls, April 2026 Pew Research Center — Teens’ Experiences on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, 15 April 2026
