Questions parents ask
Last reviewed September 8, 2026. Anything missing to support@lantern.family.
What is Lantern?
A page of YouTube videos for your child, on the web, where you set the ceilings on what is allowed through. Your child opens their own link, sees only what got past your settings, and can search inside that library. There is no autoplay into the open internet and no recommendation feed pulling them onward.
How does a video reach my child's page?
It is read twice. A first, fast reader looks at the title, the channel, and how the video describes itself. A second reader watches the video: the pictures, the audio, the whole thing. Nothing reaches a child's page on the first reading alone. If the second reader finds something the first one missed, the video comes off every page it is on, and you are told why. How Lantern decides walks the whole path.
What can I actually control?
Fourteen dials, one per child rather than one per household. They cover things like how scary a video feels, how loud and busy it is, how hard it pushes a child to want something, and how much pressure a host puts on them to like, subscribe or buy. You set the highest number allowed on each. A video over your number on even one dial is dropped, however good the rest of it looks. Evening hours can carry a stricter number than daytime.
What happens when a reader cannot tell?
That dial counts as unsafe. It never counts as safe by default.
What does my family's data do?
Your settings, your children's names, and what they watched stay with your family. What is shared is the reading of a video itself: what a judge saw in it, which is a fact about the video and not about your child. Your ceilings, your decisions and anything derived from them are never pooled. The child's page collects nothing about the child, and the privacy policy says the code records no IP addresses.
Does my child see the whole of YouTube?
No. They see a wall: the videos that were watched, scored, and left under every ceiling you set. Search works inside that wall and nowhere else. You can look at a demo wall without signing up for anything.
How much does Lantern cost?
$7.99 a month or $79 a year for the first 250 families, then $9.99 a month or $99 a year, for up to four children. A founding family keeps its founding price at every renewal for as long as its subscription runs without a break. You can cancel at any time from the billing portal and the time you already paid for runs to its end, and a full refund is yours on request within 30 days of the first charge, which is the whole refund promise in one clause. What you pay for is what running Lantern costs: the machines that read and watch every video before your child sees it, and the person answering support. The four prices and what locks are on the pricing page.
What can Lantern not do yet?
It is a beta and we would rather say so than claim it away. The child's page is built for taps and works best on a touch device. Captions are YouTube's own, so whether a video has good ones is up to whoever made it. Videos still waiting to be watched are simply not on the wall yet, rather than being let through while they wait.