# You can now switch YouTube Shorts off without losing the rest of YouTube

When Barnevakten tested YouTube's separate time limit for Shorts in April, it leaked. A child told their time was up could leave Shorts, come straight back in and pick up a few more videos. Barnevakten reported it to Google, and in a fresh test in September the limit holds. It can be set all the way down to zero.

By Øyvind Østmo · Published 29 Sep 2026 · https://www.balansebarn.no/en/articles/turn-off-youtube-shorts

## What changed

Shorts now has a time limit of its own, separate from the one covering the rest of YouTube. You set it in Family Center, under “Time management”, anywhere from zero minutes to two hours a day. Zero is the interesting number: the Shorts feed disappears, while ordinary YouTube videos stay exactly where they were. The zero option arrived in March this year.

For a parent, that separation is the whole point. [YouTube](https://www.balansebarn.no/en/app-guide/youtube) is the place where children learn to plait hair, solve a Rubik's cube and make sense of fractions, and at the same time a feed of short videos built to the same recipe as [TikTok](https://www.balansebarn.no/en/app-guide/tiktok). Until now you either took a view on both at once or trusted your child to leave Shorts alone.

> Asking a twelve-year-old to stop swiping is asking for something most adults can't manage.

## How to set it

1. The account has to be supervised. For children under 13 that means [Family Link](https://families.google/familylink/); for teenagers it means a [supervised account](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/10315420).
2. Open Family Link, or the YouTube app while signed in as the parent, and go to Family Center.
3. Pick your child's account, then “Time management”.
4. Set the daily limit for the Shorts feed. Zero minutes switches it off.

The limit resets every morning and applies on every device your child is signed in on. If nothing seems to happen at first, restarting the app is worth a try.

## Two things it doesn't solve

The limit follows the account, not the device. If your child signs out, or opens YouTube in a browser without signing in, Shorts is back. That isn't a flaw in this particular setting, it's how every account-based limit works, but it's worth knowing before you file the problem away as solved.

It also depends on the account genuinely being supervised, and a teenager over 13 can choose to end that supervision themselves. So this is still an agreement you make together, with a switch that keeps the agreement, rather than a lock you fit while nobody's looking.

> What I like about this one is that it removes something instead of counting something. Most parental controls hand you minutes to ration out, and minutes are exactly what vanish unnoticed in micro-sessions: two and a half minutes at a time, fifteen times a day. Take the feed away and there are no micro-sessions left to count. It's also easy to explain, because everything your child went looking for is still there. The only thing gone is what they were being served.

It's also a limit that lives in the system rather than in willpower. Switching the feed off is a decision you make once, at a calm moment, instead of forty times a day.

## Something you can do today

Set the limit together with your child rather than behind their back, and talk about why as you do it: “Shorts never stops on its own, so now it's getting some help stopping. Everything else on YouTube is exactly as it was.”

**Read also:** [Kids and social media, a parent's guide](https://www.balansebarn.no/en/articles/guide-to-kids-and-social-media) — Shorts was one feed. The other apps have switches of their own, and the guide goes through them app by app, alongside the age limits and the agreement you make before anything is downloaded.

## Sources

- [Google: Shorts feed time limit on supervised accounts](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/13877231) — Google's own help page for parental controls on supervised YouTube accounts. It sets out where the daily Shorts feed limit is configured, that it applies on every device the child is signed in on, and that from March 2026 the limit can be set to zero.
- [Barnevakten (2026): How parents can limit YouTube Shorts (in Norwegian)](https://www.barnevakten.no/begrense-youtube-shorts/) — The Norwegian media watchdog walked through the setup step by step and tested the limit themselves. When the feature arrived in April, children could get around it by leaving Shorts and going back in. In the test published on 25 September 2026 it worked as intended.
- [YouTube Blog (2026): Updates to supervised accounts for teens](https://blog.youtube/news-and-events/updates-youtube-supervised-accounts-teens/)