Kids aged 2 and 3 should watch any content together with their parent. Or at the very least, the content that parent watched and approved before. No 2 or 3 year old should be mindlessly browsing Youtube
"Daddy finger, daddy finger, where are you? Here I am, here I am, how do you do?"Yes papa?
Eating sugar?
No, papa!
Telling lies?
No, papa!
Open your mouth!
Ha, ha, ha!
The videos that most children like are of a very poor quality at which most adults would cringe.
I've tried to redirect my children toward more high-quality children's programming. You know, stuff with scripts and budgets. Nonetheless, they want these toy porn videos produced by these toddler whisperers.
As the article begins, children crave autonomy. YouTube Kids gives it to them. It's an amazing application. I have a Google Music subscription, so my kids get to watch these videos ad-free. It's a pretty good experience for everyone.
I wonder how good/bad those "toy porn" videos are. I don't know, hence I prefer to play it safe and follow AAP recommendations regarding screen time.
It ain't easy being a parent, a 9 to 5 worker and a household manager within a 24h schedule. If parents leave their children to do some mindless thing while unnatended, it's often because they don't have enough time to give attention to all the stuff which is immediatelly pressing them.
In my experience, kids are willing to watch the same content many, many more times than an adult. This makes this strategy reasonable.
One of my favorite parts about it all is that my kids have been taking selfies, pictures and videos of each other. They are up into the thousands. They put on hats and shoot little films of them jumping off the bed. They interview their uncles, and make cooking and painting shows.
There's a lot of really cool things they do if you limit the non interactive, blob mode of the devices.
I immediately switched her to kindle fire for kids and she improved a lot. I don't like Amazon per say but there is no competition to choose from.
It also has a timer built in, and when the time runs out an animated face shows up and "goes to sleep" which is incredibly effective in avoiding a tantrum when screen time is up.
You can block channels, but there are so many of them that it's a losing battle. I would really rather just whitelist some specific channels, but I haven't yet found a way to do that.
I want to encourage my 2yo to be able to use technology like the tablet (and in fact, it's frightening how good she is at figuring it out) but I also don't want her watching this garbage. If she picks one of these and I turn it off, she gets annoyed at me and doesn't understand. I'd rather be able to let her pick her own show without worrying about exactly what it is, by having things like PBS, Sesame Street, TVO, etc pre-approved.
One of the channels I watch the most is Ashens. It's a British man playing with toys / retro goodies (and loosely reviewing them) on a brown couch and the videos last up to 30 minutes.
Of course, I am not an authority for other parents, but I hope AAP (American association of apediatrics) is.