Go Caboodle: New site gives parents control over what content kids view
By Alexis Crandall
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SAINT ALBANS CITY, Vermont (WPTZ) — Monitoring the content your kids are watching can be hard.
That is why one St. Albans dad is offering a new alternative to help parents take back some control over what kids can find online.
Go Caboodle is a free site for parents and caregivers to manage what kids are viewing.
“The idea is parents have control,” said founder Galen Dow. “You can have learn your ABCs or learn to draw or sports content or dinosaur content or whatever it is, knowing that, within the child’s app, they can’t wander off and go to anything else other than what you’ve approved to put in.”
Parents create their account and set up one for their kids.
They can search and add videos uploaded by other users to the junior account. Topics range from drawing to music to sports.
“It opens up this universe of organizing really interesting things that could be for any child,” Dow said. “You don’t have to be a child of means. It’s free. That’s important to us.”
Renee Carrico, psychology program director at St. Michael’s College, said screen time can have positive effects, especially when kids are viewing high-quality educational content.
“That’s helping them learn social emotional skills or increasing literacy or academic skills or improving executive function,” she said. “Those are cognitive skills like planning and problem-solving and behavioral control.”
Grandparents, coaches and other caretakers can be added to an account to help add videos. They are responsible for filtering the content.
“The idea is it presents content to your child in alignment with your values. Is it up to us to say that a WWE video has something in it that isn’t right for an 8-year-old child? I don’t think so,” said Dow. “Someone else might not think so, so they might flag it, and that might cause the parent to take a little bit deeper look and make sure this is something that they want.”
With new users joining daily, Dow said he is hopeful the site will continue to improve.
“There are a lot of minor problems that we could help solve, but very long term, there’s an endless roadmap of parents getting control back of these tools and apps for their kids,” he said. “Then, second of all, learning from that and maybe creating better experiences for everyone.”
Dow encouraged parents to join the site and submit feedback on things they like and things they think can be improved.
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