You never know what's going to come up on a particular channel, since all the content is user-generated. And digging into the videos themselves - watching with your kids or on your own - is wise. Reading Common Sense Media reviews of YouTube channels is a good way to get a sense of their age-appropriateness and quality. So if your kids really love it, you'll have to strategize. In September 2019, it was fined $170 million for violating the Children's Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and ordered to change the way it tracks users. Data privacy is another major problem with YouTube. Anyone can create YouTube channels, they crop up seemingly out of nowhere, they don't follow program schedules, and they're cast out among thousands of other videos. And the bottom line is: kids want to watch the original. However, YouTube Kids has problems of its own.
It would be great to be able to just download YouTube Kids and have your kids watch something hopefully more age-appropriate than regular YouTube. And unfortunately, information about YouTube channels - the content, quality, and age-appropriateness, for example - isn't easy for parents to find. But YouTubers are super influential on kids, garnering millions (and, in the case of disgraced Swedish gamer PewDiePie, billions) of views.
You may never have heard of half the folks your kids watch on YouTube.