Amazon gives parents the ability to create Kids profiles and restrict content by age rating. But there is one surprisingly basic parental control missing: the ability to block an individual programme.

Parents can choose to “hide” a title, but hiding is not the same as blocking. A hidden programme may still be accessible through search or surface elsewhere on Prime Video. For a child who knows the name of their favourite programme, this makes the control largely ineffective.

Age restrictions don’t solve the problem either.

Parents may have perfectly reasonable reasons for not wanting their child to watch a particular programme while being happy for them to watch other content with exactly the same age rating. It might be because of behaviour they are copying, frightening or overstimulating content, inappropriate themes for that particular child, or simply a family’s own boundaries around screen time and content.

Amazon shouldn’t need to decide whether those reasons are valid. That’s a decision for parents.

We are asking Amazon to introduce a simple parental control for Prime Video Kids profiles:

• Allow parents to BLOCK individual programmes, films or channels.
• Blocked content should not appear in recommendations, browsing or search results on that child’s profile.
• The block list should be protected by the parent’s PIN.
• Parents should be able to view and remove titles from the block list whenever they choose.

This isn’t asking Amazon to remove content from Prime Video or decide what children should and shouldn’t watch. It’s simply asking Amazon to give parents meaningful control over what is available to their own children.

Other parental controls such as age ratings are useful, but they cannot account for every child or every family’s preferences. Parents know their children better than an age-rating algorithm does.

A “Hide” button that doesn’t prevent a child from finding and watching the programme isn’t a parental block.

Please give parents the ability to make that choice properly.