What Is an Allowlist?

How an allowlist works

An allowlist starts from nothing. Before a parent adds anything, your child can reach nothing; every channel, video, app or website on the list is there because an adult put it there. Anything new, whether a channel that launched yesterday or a video a stranger uploaded a minute ago, stays out until someone approves it. That is the whole mechanism, and it is why allowlists are called closed by default.

A blocklist works the other way round: everything is allowed until a parent names something to block. YouTube's supervised accounts work like this. You can block a channel, but the block covers only what that channel uploads, and Google says it does not block videos re-uploaded on other channels or similar channels with related content.^{[2]YouTube Help. “Block channels for supervised kid accounts”.} Content filters such as Restricted Mode sit in between. An automated system reads signals like a video's title, metadata and language and hides what looks mature, and YouTube says that system sometimes makes mistakes.^{[3]YouTube Help. “Your YouTube content & Restricted Mode”.}

The list itself can live in different places. YouTube Kids keeps it inside the app: with Approve content yourself, your child can watch only the videos, channels and collections you handpicked, and cannot search.^{[1]YouTube For Families Help. “Parental controls for YouTube Kids profiles”.} Family Link keeps a list of approved websites for Chrome, and its Only allow approved sites option limits your child to the sites on it.^{[4]Google For Families Help. “Chrome & your child's Google Account”.} Apple's parental controls for iPhone and iPad have Approved Websites Only for Safari and other supported browsers, and Ask to Browse lets your child ask for a new site.^{[5]Apple Support. “Set up parental controls to manage your child's iPhone or iPad”.} Separate allowlist video players keep a list of YouTube channels outside YouTube's own apps.

What an allowlist does not do is look inside what you approved. If a channel you allowed posts a video you would not have picked, the list lets it through, because you approved the channel, not each upload. That is a trade-off rather than a flaw, and it is worth knowing before you decide at which level to approve.

Setting names on this page were checked against Google's and Apple's help pages on 4 November 2026.

Types of allowlist

There are three common levels. They differ in what a parent approves and in what gets through afterwards without anyone looking.

Channel-level lists are the usual middle ground for video: the list stays short and the content stays fresh. Video-level lists are the tightest and take the most time to keep up. App and website lists are coarse, and they have one catch worth naming: approving YouTube as a website or app lets in all of YouTube.

Example of an allowlist

A family with a 6-year-old sets up an allowlist of 8 channels on the tablet: two nature channels, a drawing channel, a science channel for young children, two story channels, a music channel and the channel of a favourite cartoon. On a Monday evening at 6, after dinner, your child gets 30 minutes. The screen shows videos from those 8 channels and nothing else. There is no search box to type a classmate's favourite game into, no Shorts feed and no column of suggestions. When the drawing channel uploads a new tutorial that afternoon, it appears without the parent doing anything. When a friend mentions a gaming channel, it stays out until a parent adds it.

The same family could build this in several ways. In YouTube Kids they would use Approve content yourself and add the 8 channels inside the app.^{[1]YouTube For Families Help. “Parental controls for YouTube Kids profiles”.} With a separate allowlist video player such as Pepelly, they would pick the channels on their own phone and pair the child's tablet. With a shared TV and a paper list on the fridge, they would get a similar result with more supervision. The tool matters less than the decision: 8 named channels, chosen by an adult, and nothing that arrives by itself. If you need ideas for the first channels, the guide to the best YouTube channels for kids sorts them by age.

Advantages and disadvantages

The American Academy of Pediatrics advises parents of children aged 2 to 5 to limit screen use to 1 hour a day of high-quality programmes and to watch together with their child.^{[6]American Academy of Pediatrics, Council on Communications and Media. “Media and Young Minds (Pediatrics 138, no. 5, e20162591)”.} An allowlist is one practical way to make "high-quality" mean channels you have actually looked at. It is a choice, though, and it has costs.

The thing people get wrong about allowlists. An allowlist is not a stricter filter. Filters guess; lists do not. A parent who "allowlists" by blocking one channel after another has built a blocklist, and blocklists only grow: block 40 channels in autumn and you will be at 80 by spring, because new channels and re-uploads keep arriving. The useful question is not "what should I keep out?" but "which 8 or 10 things would I be glad to find on the screen?" Answer that, and the list stays short, and the conversations at home are about which channel to add next rather than what slipped through.

Allowlist vs blocklist

Both are lists a parent keeps. The difference is the default, and the default decides what happens with everything nobody has thought of yet.

Many families use both: a blocklist or filter on the shared TV, and an allowlist on the child's own tablet. A content filter such as Restricted Mode is a third thing. It needs no list at all and decides automatically from signals, which is also why it cannot be complete.^{[3]YouTube Help. “Your YouTube content & Restricted Mode”.} How to switch each of these on, step by step, is in the YouTube parental controls guide. If Shorts are the part you most want gone, the guide on how to block YouTube Shorts for kids covers the settings that exist.

The bottom line

An allowlist flips the default. Instead of keeping a list of what your child may not see, you keep a short list of what they may, and everything else stays out, including content that did not exist when you set it up. It costs an evening of choosing and some upkeep, and it does not judge single videos inside a channel you approved. For most families with children between 3 and 12, 8 to 10 well-chosen channels are enough to start.