Can I only allow certain YouTube channels? What Lantern does
Last reviewed September 8, 2026. Anything missing to support@lantern.family.
Can I only allow certain YouTube channels?
No. Lantern has no way to pick a list of channels and show nothing else. Some apps call that a whitelist, or parent approved channels. Here is what you can do instead.
You can block any channel, and it stops reaching your child. You can mark a channel you trust, and Lantern pulls in more of it, still reading every video. And every video on the page, whatever channel it came from, was read against your limits first.
A channel list is one decision, made once. One bad video on a good channel gets in with it, and nobody is watching for it. Lantern judges the video instead, so the moment a bad one is caught it comes off every page it is on.
How do I block all YouTube channels except one?
You cannot, not on YouTube and not here. The closest thing is YouTube's own "Approved content only" mode, and it turns your child's search off completely.
What you can do here: mark that one channel as trusted, so Lantern pulls in more of it, and block the channels you do not want. Your child can still search, and only finds what already passed your limits.
What is Lantern?
A page of YouTube videos for your child, in a browser, where you set the limits 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 checked twice. The first AI agent reads the title, the channel, and how the video describes itself. A second agent then watches the video: the pictures, the audio, the whole thing. Watching costs money, so it runs in the order your child is most likely to see next, starting with the videos already on their page. If the second agent 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 limits, set for each child rather than once for the house. 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 how much of each you will allow. A video over your number on even one of them is dropped, however good the rest of it looks. Evening hours can carry a stricter number than daytime.
What happens when an agent cannot tell?
That score 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 limits, your decisions and anything built from them never leave your family. The child's page collects nothing about the child, and the privacy policy says we never store your IP address and explains the one scrambled tag we do keep.
Does my child see the whole of YouTube?
No. They see a wall: the videos that were watched, scored, and came in under every limit 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?
Lantern is young 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.
Your first day is free, and we do not ask for a card to start. Ask inside 30 days of the first charge and we refund the full amount.