It’s Time to Check the Notification Settings on Your Child’s Devices
We didn’t really need a reminder, but yesterday he gave us anyway: bad news can happen quickly and – thanks to notifications on many of our electronic devices – we know about it almost instantly. This is normal for us adults who want to keep abreast of the latest political or pandemic-related disasters. But now is a good time to make sure our kids’ devices (or any of our devices they may be using) may not have notifications or alerts enabled.
As one mommy on Twitter notes, news alerts aren’t the only potentially problematic alerts our kids might see. Elizabeth Picciuto says she recently added YouTube to her son’s iPad, and since notifications were turned on, he began receiving video suggestions on right-wing news outlets and topics. And this despite the fact that he watched “literally only the video of Elmo,” she tweeted . While YouTube notifications are designed to recommend videos based on a user’s browsing history, they are not a reliable algorithm.
Fortunately, there is a simple solution; if apps on your child’s electronics give alerts telling them what to read or watch, just turn them off. And if you have a phone or tablet that they use a lot, you might want to consider turning off alerts there too, because no one can predict when all hell is going to start and they might get scary or inappropriate information.
The notification or alert feature can usually be found and disabled in the app’s settings section. For example, in the YouTube app, click your profile in the upper right corner, then click Settings . Scroll down to Notifications and tap that. From there, you can activate or deactivate many possible notifications, including recommended videos and product updates.