Letting a child wander around the Internet without adult supervision is something akin to child neglect. Way too much clickbait, way too much malevolent content.
Sure, there are some which are easily identified by the title or an obviously unofficial animation style, but if all of them were like that then I suspect YouTube would have had an easier job training their AI to detect and remove such content.
And it's very easy to blame the parents, since it is their responsibility. I don't let my kids watch youtube at all.
Sure you could blame the parents complacency or whatever but where do you draw the line? What happens if someone causes a scene that scares my kid when we are at a restaurant? Or walking him to school? You can't predicte the actions of every arsehole in communal spaces so blaming this stuff on the parents is more than a little unfair then society owes a little responsibility for its own actions as well.
But as I also said before, if these shock videos were just bad knock offs etc that a quick watch when the kids aren't around highlights their content, then I suspect YouTube would have found it easier to train their AI. The problem is some of those videos even get past parent moderation as well (such as the one I described above) and thus don't become apparent as a shock video until the damage has already been done.
Where it doesn't work is cases like your friend where a single unexpected event can cause a lot of harm. But most of these videos aren't that, they're just mildly "disturbing". If anything, they're a good warning that worse things might be coming.
And I don't believe no one should be blamed. I believe the blame lies heavily with the uploaders of those videos because they're deliberately releasing content that they know isn't suitable for children in a way that is intended to lure children into watching it. Sure there will be instances where the parents are also at fault for not overseeing what their kids watch. I'm not in anyway trying to shift responsibility away from the parents. However while I'm one of the biggest advocates for free speech and all that jazz, ultimately if you're creating content that you know is inappropriate for children then you should not be targeting children with said content. Period.
I don't understand why some parents find electronic gizmos so essential for day to day activities.
But thanks for the patronising tone bud. Just because someone admits to playing YouTube to their son once in a while it doesn't mean they don't still spend nearly every waking moment at home interacting with them. Just like how feeding them fries occasionally is completely fine if their usual diet is healthy.
The reason I said go for a walk was that's exactly what I did last time we took the kids to get their haircut - asked them how long it would be, they said 15 minutes, so we went for a walk for 10 minutes
Its ironic you make that confession after judging me for saying something similar - particularly when I don't tend to give my kids electronic devices on long journeys instead favouring conversation (like you suggested I should be doing anyway). Which just goes to show that you don't have to understand how other families work, you just have to accept that it does work for them and not pass judgement like you had done.
> The reason I said go for a walk was that's exactly what I did last time we took the kids to get their haircut - asked them how long it would be, they said 15 minutes, so we went for a walk for 10 minutes
Honestly, I genuinely find it quite rude when people do that as you lose all sense of how many people are before you and when you'd be up next. I'd rather teach my kids to wait patiently than have them think it is ok to leave and rejoin a queue whenever they get board. But as I said, that might be a cultural difference.
This is ridiculous, you can simply go ask how many people are ahead of you if you want to know your place in the queue, which is the proper way to do it.
Sometimes people do disappear when it is extremely busy but when they come back (typically an hour or two later) they expect to join the back of the queue. Literally the only time I've seen anyone leave queue and rejoined it where they left was when they were there with their larger family and one of the kids urgently needed the toilet. And even then I've only seen that happen once in the decades (literally!) I've been frequenting barbers.
You can use all of the patronising terms you like to promote your preferred etiquette but if it's not shared with the rest of community then your method simply isn't the "proper way to do it".
The only difference here is you make the appointment in person.
It's really not a hard concept to grasp but after reading your other comment about how you love to talk confidently about subjects you no nothing about, I'm starting to question if this is one of those subjects. Perhaps you don't even have kids at all and this is just another one of your attempts at trolling which you also described enjoying.
In any case, the real crux of the matter isn't what you consider logical but rather what the generally agreed social etiquette is. So you can argue until you're blue in the face but if it's not how barbers currently work then that simply isn't how barbers currently work. Period.
We’ll just have to end it here.
It's relevent because this topic is about parenting and kids waiting in line for stuff like barbers.
> I've also never known a barber that didn’t take an appointment.
As I've repeatedly said, this might be a cultural thing. Most UK barbers in UK towns don't take appointments. Trendy ones in the big cities might well do, but in terms of your typical UK barbers shop you would just turn up and wait in line. So to that effect, I've also never known a barber that does take an appointment.
> We’ll just have to end it here.
For what it's worth, I did try to end this tangent several times already when I compromised with "it might be a cultural thing". Which, weirdly, is when you decided to rejoin the discussion. Go figure.
For example, search for the strictly inaccurate phrase “copyright not intended” on YouTube and observe the type of result.
So it's not really worth getting to hung up about copyright law in the context of this discussion as I could easily just replace "Peppa Pig" with "Kids Nursery Rhymes" and still make the same point.
There may be great content on YouTube, but that content could go anywhere. Is there maybe a market for a YouTube where a human reviews the content that gets posted and guarantees it is family-friendly?
My kids got help to find kid-friendly things but were essentially free to do pretty much as they pleased online. They were given two tongue-in-cheek guidelines: No porn and no learning how to make bombs.
I think the key is to assume they are good kids who need some help finding what interests them, not bad kids who need a parent jail keeper preventing them from doing bad things.
Having said that, I was fortunate to be stationed in Germany when they were really little with access to only one American TV channel. I had lots of videos for them, not to control content but to give them entertainment. Still, content control was largely baked into the situation.
So I am somewhat self conscious that what worked back in the day may not work now and other disclaimers.
Edit: I will also add that when they were little, we had one computer in a public space. Individual computers in private spaces came much later.
I wouldn't. The real world has laws and rules, and people to enforce them. The internet (in all practical situations) is lawless and completly unpoliced.
That's not inherently a bad thing (I like having an open internet). But it's not something I'd ever expose a child to.
I'd easily let my own child wander the neighborhood unsupervised, long before I'll let my child wander the open internet unsupervised.
I too was unsupervised. As a child I used to troll forums, which is like the white collar equivalent of being a troubled youth who joins a gang. But it taught me better reading comprehension, and how to type faster, how to write in different tones of voice, how to imagine other people’s point of view, how to figure out what they care about and what makes them mad, and how to sound credible when I’m clueless.
When I grew out of trolling, these skills continued to serve value to me throughout my life.
Skills like this only develop when a child’s usage of the internet is at least equal parts consumption and production.