ChuChu TV is responsible for widely-viewed toddler content on YouTube
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Do anything else, Netflix at least has some barrier for kids content... but torrent a bunch kids shows if you have to.
It's been good to teach him colours, but it's all very low quality videos with clearly chinese-english influence.
My biggest concern is not the content of those, it's the automatic skip after the episode is over, to "whatever" youtube feels right afterwards, and also the ads being played between episodes, some are about gaming, but violent, and a toddler takes everything he sees as "real".
We had a computer set up with Windows 98 for the kids to play games (this was a long time ago...). The computer was in the family room so we could always see what was going on, and the kids really did stick to playing games and other benign activities.
One day I watched my youngest to see what he was doing as he sat down to use the computer. He was about 5 or 6 at the time, and he would open up a web browser and type "sonic" to search for Sonic the Hedgehog pictures. At the time, at least, this was the kinds of things he would find, and I'm not aware of the kids stumbling into anything awful. But another term they used often was "chao" for the little creatures that you care for in the Sonic Adventure games, and since that can also be a name, other material would eventually come up as well.
We quickly realized that this had the potential to lead them into bad territory. It was an eye-opening experience. Seeing what's going on on YouTube these days is whole new level of scary.
I wonder if there's some kind of startup here. A service that whitelists YouTube content and curates the list. There could be an app you sign into before you hand it off to the child, it permits only whitelisted YouTube videos to be played. Possibly the videos are separated into tiers - educational, entertainment, prosocial. Then, you come up with a mix that you want to expose your child to for auto play - e.g. 40, 20, 40. Content could also be flagged for themes that are potentially undesirable - death, sex, religion, etc.
Pay 15-20 dollars an hour for people to watch and annotate videos. Get the same video to go through the process two or three times to catch potential errors. Your evaluators can easily watch content at 2x speed and not miss much. How much does processing an hour's worth of YouTube video cost? 60 dollars?
Invest a hundred grand, whitelist a thousand hours of YouTube content (assuming you reject half), build a simple mobile app to play your whitelisted YouTube videos, sign people up for 5 dollars a month and you can use the proceeds to keep growing your whitelist.
I found an article talking about it. It's pretty mild stuff, but an interesting illustration of how what we consider appropriate changes in all kinds of small ways:
> What parent today would want their child to see kids running through a construction site or jumping on an old box spring? Scenes like the ones included on the new DVD would probably not make it into today's program now.
> "We wouldn't have children on the set riding without a bicycle helmet," Rollins Westin says.
> And what's that little girl doing with that man?
> "In the very first episode, Gordon takes a little girl's hand who he's just met on the street, befriends her and takes her into his home to give her ice cream," Rollins Westin said. "That's something we wouldn't do on the show today."
(From https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sesame-street-for-adults-only/ )
With this kind of normalization of hanging out with strangers on TV, I am not really surprised that children were more likely to be abducted in the 70's and 80's.
Anyway I don't have time to teach caregivers how to use social media (YouTube) so I just teach my 5 y/o she's not allowed to watch youtube without me.
Warning: Pretty creepy stuff and definitely NSFW.
Very conspiratorial but it's one of the more evidence-backed conspiracies out there (in that you can do a search on YouTube and see the actual videos). Basically, there is some really weird stuff on YouTube directed at children.
"Disturbing Peppa Pig videos, which tend towards extreme violence and fear, with Peppa eating her father or drinking bleach, are, it turns out very widespread. They make up an entire YouTube subculture. Many are obviously parodies, or even satires of themselves, in the pretty common style of the internet’s outrageous, deliberately offensive kind. All the 4chan tropes are there, the trolls are out, we know this."
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...
The internet feels a lot darker than it did when I was a kid.
4chan has turned more into a whipping boy for any sort of inconvenient issue, which is certainly not to say they aren't indeed heavy into trolling and other stuff - but they're also not this hive from which all issues originate from.
People seem to forget that things like worldwide organized pedophilia networks, and worse, exist. And the internet provides an excellent venue for these people to organize and try to further their ends. Many of the 'elsa style' videos extensively feature sexual and sadistic content alongside drugs and alcohol. And then you get into the bizarre messages in the comments for each video. Those videos have been watched for billions of hours by children, on loop.
Yeah, I feel the same way about cable news.
Surprising that most of my generation didn’t become devil worshipers since we listened to that dangerous rock and roll music. My great-grandparents were corrupted by that evil Jazz music.
A whole lot of get off my lawn but the real message should be: be a mindful and engaged parent. We could argue that kids should never eat ice cream either: but what kind of fun is that?
The gist of the explanation is a combination of decreased parental interaction, owing to kids learning less words when their parents aren't talking to them and hardly learning any words at all when watching TV, and the constant interruptions owing to the TV's sound and animations, which distracts toddlers as they're playing (including when they're not actively watching, like when the TV is on while a parent is ironing or cooking), leading to a decreased ability to concentrate that might ultimately be tied to an uptick in attention deficit disorder.
I'm admittedly no specialist in the matter so I can't speak for how accurate and reliable the research is, but I thought the explanation convincing enough to rule out any TV being turned on in the household while our toddler is around.
The difference is they all had a quality and decency barrier. YouTube videos are just made by random people with the absolute minimal of moderation. A kids TV show in the 90s wouldn't use an image of a woman dressed as Elsa cutting off her tongue with real scissors to try and clickbait children into watching it.
The actual video it's replaced with a gummy candy tongue, but the thumbnail it's her own tongue with real scissors and YouTube allowed this for months, it was an extremely popular video and channel.
and this is all before we get into the fact TV was consumed in the family room and tablets are solitary harder to control consumption.
I personally feel like the best approach is moderation for everything, but hey, people who don't watch media probably have more interesting hobbies than I do.
It's completely within your control to stop them.
But holy crap do they learn fast. He's 20 months old and he can navigate the iPad from off to unlocked to another tab to the baby shark shortcut.
At a certain point it's going to be such an uphill battle. Things like pihole gives me a fighting chance. I need a pihole like housebold-wide filter for YouTube.
The Internet is an incredible tool for parents, with endless educational and legitimately beneficial videos, but there's so much noise (and malicious intent) to filter through that it's absolutely never worth trying to blacklist stuff, just block the Internet entirely and locally cache anything relevant until they're old enough to understand things better.
We have an RPi plugged into the TV with a folder on a USB stick, shared on our LAN, where I can use youtube-dl (command line or the GUI) from any computer to scrape videos we've found for the kids. They go straight to the shared folder, and she can access them on the TV or our phones via VLC. I then keep a couple dozen specific favourite videos on my phone's SD card for "emergencies" (road trips etc).
She gets to watch shows without us worrying, and doesn't feel like she's missing out when friends talk about YouTube, but we don't ever have to worry about what she's watching.
The restrictions on the iPad are rather mature at this point. I've blocked all unrestricted internet holes and just keep her within apps i've vetted.
It’s like giving crack to a little kid. Impossible not to have them get sucked in
YouTube is 100% not kid friendly in any way at all, not even with their parenting controls or their kids app. It should very much be seen as an adult platform with what gets pushed through there these days.
Sorry if my comment implied I had kids, I do not. But in terms of access I see a lot of other comments further below talking about downloading everything locally and serving it through plex, which seems like a solid idea.
They barely ever watch shows or play with the phones, and most the time just want to colour in, play with Lego, or play with toys. They use the phones maybe for an hour every 3 days or so (or if we're waiting at the Doctors office or on a road trip), and watch shows maybe half an hour to an hour each day (usually in evening when they're too tired to physically play and we're preparing dinner). YMMV of course.
I wonder if that robs them from the experience of ever being bored. And if that might influence them.
They're very imaginative, and we regularly find the eldest just sitting in a sunny spot in the room and "dreaming in the warm" as she calls it.
The only problem we struggle with as far as technology is that a lot of her friends already have unlimited access to TV and talk about shows she's never heard of because we don't watch (or have) TV. We purely do Netflix/Stan and YouTube, so she gets a bit upset not knowing what they're going on about, but she's starting to understand that everyone has different things they do.
Those that react get picked on. If they can't single out lack of clothes, or knowing current music, they dig at too fat, too thin, wears glasses, wrong hair colour, wrong accent, you name it. In short if you react you lose.
I am much less open to the having all the same things to fit in argument than I was when I started on the parenting journey.
There's a big personal preference there about whether or not you want your kids (or you yourself regret being or not being) involved heavily in the mainstream pop culture of your peers as children.
Experiencing more than just whatever is popular is important, but being very isolated can have effects as well. Whatever choices you make will have a strong impact, and there are very often not clear rights and wrongs.
Before being a parent I'd have inclined to agree with GP. The experience of seeing my kids progress, and their differing experience, through school leaves me believing it's nearly all down to personality. That of course is far harder for parents to influence. Course a kid with a sensitive disposition might well blame the lack of the right things as the reason to feel an outsider.
The one certainty is parenting ain't easy. :)
As mentioned in another comment, kids don't need the latest/greatest, they're perfectly happy with what they know, and you just slowly introduce stuff you want them to watch over time by adding it yourself.
I remember reading that somewhere. Young children actually prefer watching the same episode over and over again, because it's rewarding when their expectations (of what happens next) get fulfilled.
The only downside was that he for some reason really liked it if I sat next to him watching it, but I don't have the ability to rewatch them countless times :P
Still, kids definitely get hooked on stuff and stick with it through countless repititions.
* we watch what we liked to watch when we were young (we are from Czech Republic and there is a wealth of local animation series, usually ~7 minutes/episode. If you want a sample, "Pat & Mat" is silent-duo home-improvement slapstic comedy that we kinda like :)
* we talk to other parents (i.e. you can't really escape Pepa Pig or My Little Pony - Friendship is Magic)
* we like animation, and sometimes watch even more grown-up things togehter, i.e. we liked various series from the How To Train Your Dragon universe
Three more things that I think kinda help as well:
* if she watches alone, she know she has a limit (usually 3 stories in one sitting at most?) I am really proud when she manages to close the app on her own.
* I often sit her in front of my thinkpad instead of tablet. This limits her ability to binge-watch, somewhat :P
* She has an mp3-player of sorts and a cd-player with few radio-plays. She know how to operate both of these. We don't really limit her using of the audio-only entertainment :-)
Did you know that Pat and Mat became a very popular export product of the Czech Republic? You might be surprised to learn that most Dutchmen know who Pat and Mat are (though not their names).
Something odd happened when it got imported into the Netherlands in the eighties: a soundtrack with spoken voices was added, and it gradually became a cult hit. Blasphemous as this may sound, the dialogue is as silly as the episodes themselves, and actually works.
The popularity of the show in the Netherlands actually helped create the demand for the new episodes made in this century.
Have a look at 'Buurman en Buurman' (neighbour and neighbour) on Youtube to see the Dutch rendition of Pat and Mat.
Most of the videos we watch are in German. I'm wanting to learn German and she is, too. So I'm getting educated along with her (and German children's videos talk more slowly and use simpler vocabulary so it's great for learning).
One does have the option of finding higher quality video entertainment for children. Another option would be to find them something useful or interesting to do that doesn’t involve being a stationary recipient of an audio-video feed.
This has forced us to be aware of and involved in his media choices. I've spent a lot of hours watching stuff with him and critiquing/unpacking it (he doesn't always like this of course) but also enjoying it. We've encountered lots of those unboxing videos and had lots of conversations about what's good to watch and what not, how to spot advertisements, etc. Knowing something about how YouTube channels work and get funded really helps lift the veil: A grown man playing with kids' toys??? Do those kids really own all those toys? Is that a story or an advertisement? How are PBS Kids shows different from Stampy, and how are both of these different from fidget spinner unboxing videos? What did you learn from that video?
After a lot of these conversations I see a real difference between the stuff he watches on his own and the kind of things his friends watch with him when they come over. I'm sure he watches all kinds of crap at his friends' places but at least I feel like I've given him some cognitive tools and defenses.
I've also set up his devices on their own separate wifi network that shuts off at 20:30 and doesn't come on again until he's at school. Between his afterschool programs and dinner and the bedtime routine, he can't watch much more than an hour a day. Weekends are still a problem though.
A few years back when my kids were toddlers I’d rather naively give them my phone with YouTube on it, and after ignoring them for just 15 mins they’d have switched from whatever edutainment programme I’d put on to a video of a burly pair of hands unwrapping toys - for 4 hours...there are no studies on the long term effects of YouTube on cognitive development in young brains but why wait? It’s not like it’s rocket science to infer that if you show growing minds poor quality content you’re going to get poor quality results.
I don’t feel comfortable leaving my kids to watch Netflix either. It’s too easy for them to binge watch a half season of Paw Patrol or Omizumi or other similarly lite content. As a kid I remember eagerly waiting for the next episode of He-Man or Ghostbusters but to have had several seasons of dozens of episodes on tap would have been too much to resist. With auto play on these services too it’s not like they have the interests of us or our kids at heart.
We need to be super careful here, this is new territory with early indicators showing declines in ability to concentrate in adults from these forms of distraction - god knows what it’s doing to our kids.
I mean it's the same as children's TV on cable, with the main difference that it's infinite instead of constrained to at most a couple of hours.
We have poor quality skills
The very existence of the so-called "gig economy" tells us something is rotten.
I try to teach my kids that these things are tools: we want to know how something works --> there's definitely a video on that --> we found out and turn it off again. And as with any tool, you can use them to become better or to hurt yourself.
Maybe the problem isn't Netflix and Youtube, maybe
the problem is letting them watch for 4 hours?
Wouldn't surprise me if that feedback loop was damaging even for many adults, but at least they are responsible and already have some grasp of how the world should work.
However, my point is this: different things require different amounts of moderation. Candy all day is probably worse than carrots all day. In moderation, candy is great. Same as YouTube.
You go to YouTube and order a salad. When you're done with the salad, they put a donut in front of you. When you finish that donut, they immediately put another donut in front of you.
Adults should be able to reject those temptations, but YouTube doesn't make it easy.
Is that true for YouTube kids app too? I thought you could put timers using parental settings. When the timer goes off, it will lock the device. And, some N minutes before, it would show a warning as well.
That seems way better than state of the art (dumping kids in front of TV or video game consoles etc.)
The only thing I really want is for foreign language videos not to appear in the list of suggested videos. Sometimes he gets trapped happily watching videos in Russian.
I actually think the problem is specifically binge watching services like Netflix and services with very variable quality of content like YouTube.
Whilst it’s not ideal, as a kid I’d watch the BBC children’s afternoon segment from 3 till 6 after school and whilst 3 hours of TV is unlikely to have been great for me, I received a variety of programming, some ok and some great. My problem with Netflix and YouTube is a child can binge watch a whole season of average content without any variety whatsoever. It’s not just a question of quality which I’m raising but quantity of the same show episode after episode.
As far as teaching kids sure, by all means we should teach them to moderate themselves but as a 34 year old I find it takes discipline and will power to regulate myself, what hope does a toddler or infant have when faced with video services which are designed to encourage consumption?
Might be more appropriate to demand universal child care or sth along those lines instead of bashing the parents.
Spending time alone in a room with Lego is very different from spending time alone with some dark-pattern-studded UI, even if a parent is beyond viewing distance and within shouting distance in both cases. Do I need to argue that?
Yes, you do need to argue that.
Humans are good at learning to interact with things; neither Lego nor YouTube were present in the ancestral environment but we manage just the same. If anything I'd say that people who grow up with "dark-pattern-studded UI" all around will probably learn to handle the tricks much better than people who only encounter it as adults (just as those who grew up with social media tend to have a much healthier relationship with it than the older generation).
I will, though.
I'll argue my point by RAA. You may recall my phrase, "spending time alone doing <x> is very different from <y>, ….". If spending time alone doing X is not very different from Y, then it follows that pairs of activities are roughly equally educational, roughly equally dangerous, roughly equally healthy, and so on, or at least roughly equal in sum of the qualities parents care about. Ie., if one activity is more educational than another, then the other must necessarily be less dangerous for the child, so as to conserve equilibrium. This is absurd. QED.
I interpret you as saying that people are better at learning to cope with dark patterns as young children than as adults. Right? Please argue.
"This is absurd" is pure assertion. The same argument would say that spending time alone playing with lego is very different from spending time alone playing with toy trains, or with dolls, or with crayons, or in a treehouse, or ... . If you're saying that all these things are "very different from" each other, then sure, youtube is different from lego in the same way that lego is different from crayons. But very few parents seem concerned that their child spends too long playing with crayons and not long enough with lego, or vice versa, or would want to ban one in favour of the other.
> I interpret you as saying that people are better at learning to cope with dark patterns as young children than as adults. Right? Please argue.
I gave an analogy to that effect already. More generally, people are better at learning anything (particularly things that are largely subconscious) as children than as adults - languages, riding a bike, performance arts...
I’d say that leaving kids in a an environment of addictive substances (say, cigarettes?) is a great way to get them addicted.
Why would YouTube be any different?
Just as with social media, my general impression/experience is that people who were kept away from addictive substances (cigarettes/alcohol/coffee/...) growing up tend to be more likely to have problems with them in later life than people who had them around when they were growing up.
(There are specific health reasons to keep particular substances away from young children, but that's a distinct thing).
Whilst I agree with the sentiment of less tech = probably better for young kids, your comment reads as FUD. 15 minutes a day watching youtube is probably fine and will likely have minimal effect on development compared to other factors.
- He also mentions something about four hours somewhere in the comment
- Less tech is not the same thing with less TV
- How are 15 minutes fine? Compared to how many?
- finaly, how is your opinion not anecdata?
My memory of it is hazy and likely warped by pastiches like adult swim's Too Many Cooks.
Is this the same child that was convinced sleeping under a tree would be fatal?
That trust was shaken the other day when they said "daddy did you know you shouldn't sleep under trees because you can't breathe properly?" I'm like who told you that. "A video."[1]
Turns out it was a "learning" video produced by one of these outfits, not ChuChu but a competitor called AumSum. It's some weird urban myth that has traction in south asia.[2] It's a bastardization of tree respiration biology. They think it puts out enough CO2 at night to impact humans. So don't sleep near it because then you'll be oxygen deprived.
So yeah, apparently someone green-lit that stinker and turned into a cute animation. Which is funny until you realize AumSum as a whole has 139M views. Their singular mission is to make educational science videos.[2] And my kids are 100% addicted to YouTube Kids.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6_L7JOYz7U
[2] Compare the locations of the authors with pro-myth vs anti-myth answers. https://www.quora.com/Why-do-trees-produce-carbon-dioxide-CO...
[3] "We try our level best to create highly creative and refreshing videos of Physics, Chemistry and Biology. This channel can prove to be useful for students studying in schools, colleges as well as for people of all ages who have a curious scientific mind." https://www.youtube.com/user/Smartlearningforall/about
The problem is these content farms and ultimately the low payouts. Listen up YouTube: I would happily pay for better quality kids content. I'm about to trial Amazon FreeTime...
Personally, I don’t let mine near YouTube unless we’re looking something up together. They’re allowed kids Netflix but even that has plenty of content I don’t let them watch. Annoyingly, there’s no way to remove a show from Netflix. I’ve been meaning to make a chrome extension so I can blast the likes of Horseland into another dimension.
The American Association of Pediatrics recommends no screen time under 18 months except for video chatting, and only 1 hour a day for children 2-5 [0]
Most of us are engineers here, but as soon as parenting comes up people become so superstitious and irrational.
[0] https://www.aap.org/en-us/about-the-aap/aap-press-room/Pages...
I have a fair amount of experience with this system. Not due to those phone calls but due to other things I did, foster care being one.
I cared for kids, who got placed with us. Some of those people earned that. Not good. Obvious.
On those, my wife and I did a good public service. It is hard.
But, I saw many cases where a disgruntled person ruined families too. Those kids should never have been with us at all. Yet they were, and worse, we had to hold a terrible line or it gets worse for the kids and potentially us!
A few samples:
Baby sitter feels she can do better, phones the father in. Boom. He spends 6 months being psych evaluated, his wife does not know what to think, and part of his struggle is having his johnson in a clamp while being shown suggestive kiddie pictures. That family got past it. We helped once we were free of the system. Labor of love and justice there.
They left the State the moment they could. Cannot blame them.
Ex wife hated step mom. Similar thing, both parents end up in some program. Never did get right. Just a mess, kids with relatives.
Dad loses his mind in the store. Brats got under his skin. Delivered a quick swat, lets go home. Ended up in all sorts of trouble for essentially getting a toddlers attention. Concerned people trump up abuse case. Never did see that one conclude.
People lose their kids these days. It does not take much. You should also know all public servants, teachers, many coaches are obligated to report or face charges in many places. The report bar is very, very low. An angry kid can get another kids family in the system. I saw that happen.
Having frank conversations about parenting carries grave implications these days. It was once not like this, but it is now. Among a trusted peer group it still happens as it always has.
Out in public? Internet? People are crazy to mention specifics. Just don't do it. Ever.
I do not have answers. I wish I did given what I saw.
I can help share hard won understanding. So I have.
Just know the touchy parent convo is systemic, not so much people being snowflakes or something.
It was an answer to the question of why bad parenting discussions often are met with angst.
People get questioned on parenting, and suddenly they are in the middle of a mess and they are there because other people said, "bad parent" essentially.
Understanding how that can happen is germane.
Here is all it would take in many States:
Those parents just leave their kids with an iPad, and do not watch their kids. Follow that with just about any scary scenario and it is likely to trigger people at your door asking questions.
What I did here was share a little from the other side of some of those events gone bad. None of those should have happened. They all were rooted in literally, "bad parent" allegations created out of thin air with basis as thin as "screen time."
Parents here should be aware of what can happen. Comments to the effect of, "WTF is it with parenting discussions?" These potential events are part of WTF.
Frankly, I only shared difficulty to underscore complete disapproval, and I should have shared we quit due to how out of control and abused it can be, and is regularly. Some if those families were of non trivial means too.
"It won't happen to me." Know I have seen otherwise, and that is all.
I rarely downvote myself, preferring to promote signal out of the noise instead. But that's just my preference. What I appreciate is knowing why, that's some understanding right there. I can use it, it's got value. I wish more of us would understand that.
I don't have kids so I'm curious, why youtube? I assume most families don't have the time for a full time parental distraction but is there really no other alternative? I'd imagine Disney or some other media giant would have figured something out by now. Is youtube content just so practically endless and passive enough that no one can compete? Or is it just that they don't like gaming or TV shows that much (or you dont allow it)?
It’s not hard to “distract toddlers”, my daughter is three and LOVES to help cook. She fries eggs pretty well and I figure the worst that’ll happen is she’ll burn herself (which she hasn’t). Given the right opportunities and structure children can actually be much more helpful than we give them credit for, especially in the USA we’re just sort of taught that children are useless ingrates that are wholly incapable of the most rudimentary tasks (I mean I was certainly treated that way).
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy, the more constantly stimulated the kid is, the more difficult it is for them to pay attention when it’s important.
I think this is true for all humans in general. I actually think it is worse for teenagers who have more unsupervised time and don't know any better. --
FYI.. there was a program on about kids in Costa Rica or maybe Honduras where they all had chores. Even the 3 year olds. I thought it was interesting as the kids themselves were very well behaved.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/01/6412662... [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/10/weste...
Maybe I'm over protective, but hot oil around a 3 year old sounds like a bad idea. I get it that they can do it, but it only takes 1 accident to scar them for life and 3 year olds are super uncoordinated. I have been called a helicopter parent before though, so maybe it's me being a bit weird.
I get some judgy looks on the playground for studiously ignoring my kid and letting her play for three hours and everyone else stays for maybe 15 minutes being super engaged with their kids before they get super bored and leave, so I guess I’m not really normal. I consider one of my goals to get my daughter to walk to the park alone at five, since that was the age I had agency to go wherever I wanted. I’m not super optimistic, I may end up moving to a small town to make that possible, if I can get a good remote position eventually.
Are you maybe misremembering your age at the time? I have a 4.5 year old at home and there is no way that I think he will be ready to go the park a couple of streets away on his own. By not ready I mean, in no way capable of judging when to cross a street safely and may get lost on the way, especially if he gets distracted and absentmindedly wanders in an unfamiliar direction.
There was a recent study [1] that showed that kids have a highly elevated risk of accident when crossing the road right up to the age of 14 (!! was surprised to read this). Some points from the research:
- simulating traffic showed accident rates as high as eight per cent with six-year-olds
- Even those aged 12 were hit by vehicles two per cent of the time
- It was not until early adolescence that children crossed the road safely
Just thought I'd point this out in case you were not aware of the research.
Kudos for promoting self-reliance and independence though. I am a long way in the other direction where I do way too much to try and ensure my kid's safety. I know I need to ease up so that he can start to make his own mistakes.
[1] https://now.uiowa.edu/2017/04/why-children-struggle-cross-bu...
Would you cross the road if you were hit by a car for every 12 times you crossed?
> kids are very fast learners and learn to be independent fairly easily if pushed or directed in that direction..
An acceptable level of risk awareness can't be taught to kids under a certain age because their brain development is not yet at the level where they are capable of learning certain things. For example: do you think there is any level of training that you could give a 5 year old to safely handle a loaded gun? Do you think there is a level of training you could give a 5 year old to then leave them unsupervised with a gun? Crossing a street is no different. It's life and death.
If you've ever spent any time around kids 6 and younger you will know that they have very intense tunnel vision and very poor situation awareness. It's not their fault. They literally don't yet have the brain development necessary for accurately predicting future events and predicting the consequences of their actions.
> “Perhaps the most persuasive evidence regarding the attitude of adults toward children acquiring culture through play – without the need for adult guidance – comes from widespread reports of parents’ indifference and even encouragement of toddlers playing with machetes and other sharp and dangerous tools (Howard 1970: 35). For example, from the Kwoma of Papua New Guinea: “I once saw Suw with the blade of a twelve-inch bush knife in his mouth and the adults present paid no attention to him” (Whiting 1941: 25). Aka mothers regret it when their infants cut themselves while playing with “knives but they don’t want to restrain their exploration and learning (Hewlett 2013: 65–66). The Aka provide scaled versions of items in their tool inventory to their very young children and enjoy observing (and, occasionally correcting) their practice strikes (Hewlett et al. 2011: 1175). Four-and-a-half-year-old Okinawan children readily peel the outer skin off a length of sugar cane with a sharp sickle. When a mother was asked how the child acquired this skill she was at a loss for a reply. “‘I don’t know! He must have watched us and learned himself by trying it out!’ she said” (Maretzki and Maretzki 1963: 511)”
They're not stupid and I didn't say they are. They lack experience and do not have the skills (brain development) that are necessary to cross a road without significant risk.
Read: https://now.uiowa.edu/2017/04/why-children-struggle-cross-bu...
From the research:
> "The researchers found 6-year-olds were struck by vehicles 8 percent of the time; 8-year-olds were struck 6 percent; 10-year-olds were struck 5 percent; and 12-year-olds were struck 2 percent. Those age 14 and older had no accidents.
Children contend with two main variables when deciding whether it’s safe to cross a street, according to the research. The first involves their perceptual ability, or how they judge the gap between a passing car and an oncoming vehicle, taking into account the oncoming car’s speed and distance from the crossing. Younger children, the study found, had more difficulty making consistently accurate perceptual decisions.
The second variable was their motor skills: How quickly do children time their step from the curb into the street after a car just passed? Younger children were incapable of timing that first step as precisely as adults, which in effect gave them less time to cross the street before the next car arrived."
Your quote from David F. Lancy’s Anthropology of Childhood is an anecdote. Was there a study done to measure child mortality and injury in this community? Would it be acceptable by modern standards?
My dad was raised in an eastern European village in the 1950s. From his stories child supervision was non existent. He has many stories of children who died due to accidents, e.g. children who misjudged the thickness of a frozen lake, fell through and drowned. Of course most survived into adulthood, but by modern standards child mortality rates were completely unacceptable.
I haven’t read the article you quote and I won’t because the conclusions you’re drawing from it are insane. Maybe the internal validity is good and if the experiment was replicated the same results would be obtained. The external validity is obviously not there. They are attempting to measure how traffic mortality from independent road crossing and they get numbers so high that it’s obvious their experiment doesn’t generalise to the question they’re actually interested in.
If we pretend that children do not cross the road until age 12 and assume 0.99 chance of surviving one crossing a day, after 100 days 63% will be dead.
Or I could just examine my own experience. My father and I both grew up within 100m of a main road with heavy traffic and we survived unscathed. The paper does not support your conclusion.
There may be a sensible conversation to be had on child supervision but my father grew up in the 50s too and it was not the hellscape you depict. If you look at deaths per 100,000 young children 5-14 they’re at worst three times current levels. By the 80s they’ve dropped to less than double current levels and people weren’t going insane wrapping their children in cotton wool and depriving them of all contact with the real world then. Deaths in childhood are so low that accidents are a minority of childhood deaths.
You’re advocating depriving children of freedom under a model of the world where childhood is so dangerous no one would survive when the trends in death rates are pretty much the same across industrialised countries while the insane helicopter parenting isn’t.
www.freerangeparenting.com
They're not my conclusions, I quoted a summary the researchers provided.
>Or I could just examine my own experience
Since when do personal anecdotes trump research?
If you are watching your child for three hours on the playground then it is obvious you either do not have a regular job or only doing this on the weekends.
Check your privilege before you lecture others on how to parent. Also the hot cooking with 3 year olds is idiotic and dangerous even if it’s “just with butter” (??).
Problem being ?
Frying eggs doesn't require hot oil, just a non stick pan and maybe a dab of butter.
You're _going_ to burn yourself cooking from time to time. Should you then never cook? :)
Good luck!
risk vs reward. Have you spent any time around a 3 year old? They are super uncoordinated at this age and can't take off a sock without falling on their butt. GP clarified that it was supervised cooking with low heat and without oil, so that sounds safe to me, but certainly wouldn't have any other pots with for example, water boiling around since they don't have the experience to avoid it and the results can end up catastrophic.
A 2 year old in my wife's mother's group got 3rd degree burns from tipping a hot cup of tea on himself. Luckily it missed his face, but his neck and chest are now permanently scarred (and disfigured). The child required 6 months of physical therapy because the burn was down the neck and under the arm so movement was affected due to scar tissue. Any liquid over about 60 degrees C is a very real hazard for small child.
It really depends on context. A closely supervised 3 year old "cooking" using very low heat without oil and without a boiling pot around? Yup that sounds ok.
I don't doubt that it is, yet this is a problem that humans have been solving literally since the dawn of time. I doubt very much that YouTube is necessary.
We have two under three so I understand the exhausting routine
He would be very rough with my laptop, even pulling out keys and trying to throw it but be very careful with ipad. I'm not sure why.
Are you trying to say that this is a good thing? Do we expect our children to be able, say, to speak English?
What did you think kids did before youtube?
They have legos btw.
I understand it is one of the easiest pacification mechanisms for parents at the moment, but there is a cost.
Don't defer your parental responsibilities to Google's algorithms,designed to increase engagement, not "learning".
Does anybody read books to their children?
Kernel Time?
For example: What about a single mom who puts on youtube for her child while she does the home chores and cooks because she does not have the money to pay for anything else (youtube is free)? Should she force her kid to sit there without any stimuli while she works? I'd argue that is far worse.
My sister has a 10 year old son and has absolutely no interest in even talking about parental controls. He spends all his time watching Logan Paul and who knows what else. I know how I was as a boy coming of age with unrestricted internet, and I worry about him.
did you turn out ok?
when I was a kid in the early 80's kids would bring torn out pages from dad's dirty magazines, we'd sneak in to watch adult movies etc, and as far as I can tell we all turned out just fine.
On the other hand there is liveleak now and I'm not sure what effect that would have on a 10 year old's psyche. I guess we'll find out in the next decade or two.
I really didn’t turn out ok. I don’t really want to go into details, but I turned out very far from ok. Maybe I wouldn’t have turned out different without internet, I can’t really know. I do know that I’m going to be really zealous in keeping the unrestricted internet away from my sons. And my girls, but for different reasons.
> Parenting choices can be a way of harming people.
Sure, but the clarity of the information on which choices are likely harmful outside of fairly direct, physical harm is often far less than the shakers would like to pretend; it wasn't long ago (in fact it still happens even though the recommendation of the AAP has since caught up with the science) people were being shamed for providing early exposure to various nuts (the evidence note suggests the old advice that shaving was based on produced a huge surge in nut allergy prevalence, rather than mitigating risk.)
> People who harm people should be shamed.
And shaming, anyway, isn't all that effective (and certainly not a harm free) method of correction even when based on correct premises; when based on faulty premises it's an unmitigated harm.
So shamers generally deserve, by that standard, to be shamed; by a reasonable harm minimization standard they need to be corrected.
Until you've tried it you don't know how terrible it is. And by that time it's normally too late.
I have yet to meet a Korean who wouldn't defend fan death.
Maybe it is like the Australian drop-bear.
Clearly things got out of hand then.
Also I am exaggerating.. the kids enjoy the television programming they experience on the YouTube and I would prefer if there were fewer errors.
Tell me you weren’t 100% addicted to a television show when you were a kid (He-Man, GI Joe, Transformers...), oh holy one.
> Also I am exaggerating
> 100% addicted
> oh holy one
Perhaps you should use less hyperbole in your writings, it would certainly lead to fewer misunderstandings.
But that was only once a day after school for 1 hour or so. Not constantly everytime I felt bored.
And that would be the first thing I'd do if I had to parent actually. Why dumb things down with tablets ? A computer is affordable for most HNers. Give them computers. They can do the same tasks and learn so much more down the road ! Let them use complex contextual menus and find their own way, type on a real keyboard with keys you actually need to press, move a cursor ... I don't get why tech savvy people give touch screens to their children.
These mobile environments lead nowhere. Whereas when I started using the internet I too wanted my own website and already had the tools needed.
Also you said
>as well as have a large assortment of crafts and novel activities for them to engage in every morning while I do stuff like bathe and eat.
I don't remember my parents having stuff ready for every instant of my life. Sure I was bored from time to time (no siblings) and I probably bothered them (again, no siblings, I guess numerous bored kids is messier, but that should be thought upon beforehand), but I had to find my own occupations. What are you going to do later in life anyways ? Ask friends to keep you untertained ?
When I was 6, I was allowed to use the internet but there were limitations for time and keyloggers.
My parents gave up when they found out I was booting up with linux off a flash drive at 14.
I feel like I learned more about technology when there were obstacles to overcome, rather than instant gratification.
I would start my own kids off air-gapped and then gradually allow access, since for me it gave me a healthy respect for danger and taught me to find solutions.
This TED talk sums up why I'll never allow my child to go on YouTube. What a mess they've allowed.
There's a lot of great content on youtube, but gets buried in this pile of garbage. Chuchu TV is part of the garbage. If you go to their channel and search for 'jonny jonny' (a popular nursery rhyme in india) you'll find a half dozen videos and enough garbage content to fill a whole days watching. This is a 3 minute rhyme.
The only reason chuchu has views is because they know how to game the system. Parents search for a popular nursery rhyme and leave kids with auto-play or suggestions... and guys like chuchu know how to game the recomendation algorithms to keep the kids within their content.
Just curious, what stops other competitors like Disney, Sesame Street and Nickelodeon from doing the same thing?
That being said, it's entirely possible for someone outside of these organizations to start something like Chu Chu TV in the United States. However, it would probably face harsher criticism.
It has songs like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq3yfQnllfQ&t=140s) with a billion views! This means millions of kids are learning their first alphabets. My kid learnt her rhymes from this channel.
It is completely upto us parents as to how much screen time they get. My kid gets 40 mins everyday and no more. I decide what to watch and I watch with them.
I see what this channel is doing with the algorithm and I don't like it. In addition, I don't like the content and don't want my kids trapped by it. I'm sure that there's some educational content in there, but over all is of poor quality.
There are other channels in the toddler entertainment business, I assume from other countries, which do the same thing. I avoid them as well.
There are good Indian channels on youtube. Chuchu TV is not one of them.
Just curious: Why is the comment racist?
Our kids get about 20 min a day, 45 on weekends. I’d like to be rid of the devices entirely. Honestly withholding devices is the best discipline tool I have. What’s sad to me are the kids who are on them all day.
I remember a big anti-video game and anti-tv push when I was in elementary school.
But as a brand new parent, this YouTube stuff seems both tempting (as a distraction) and awful.
Are kids getting worse? Maybe. But teachers who think it's the end of the world and not just that they're getting old and grumpy have been around since teaching began.
Even Socrates was saying kids these days are hopeless. [1]
Kids today will be worse at some things previous generations were better at. They'll also do things that people today can't even imagine. Skills shift through the ages. I bet the average goober here on HN couldn't butcher a hog or build a barn like our great-grandparents could, but our great grandparents couldn't manage server farms either.
Having kids is hard work. Do the work. Take some damn responsibility for your kids. Mine are limited to an average of 30 mins a day, including some days with 0. And never in the car, and we always eat dinner together.
I can't even understand how that sentence exists. It certainly does not in my world.
YouTube is best for deeply specialized content. Generic content has better sources.
as long as it’s in moderation, the exact show doesn’t matter a whole lot. i think screen time matters way more than what’s on the screen
Name three.
All children-targeted TV I've seen these days are pure garbage. YouTube is full of garbage too, but at least you can find something of quality (even if it's some children cartoon from previous century) if you dig deep enough. But then there's issue with autoplay (discussed at length by other commenters), making YouTube dangerous to leave with kids unattended.
That one does get somewhat violent, though.
And be sure to show them Batman Beyond when they get older. It's my personal favorite of the DC Animated Universe.
Most 2 year olds can do that, but not in a foreign language, so for us it has been educational.
https://youtu.be/JFW-2q6_dlc?t=125
Then compare it with what they had in 2013. Notice a difference?
And Nick is basically flatlining since they haven't ended Spongebob yet. Even the guy that made The Fairly Oddparents finally quit when he realized that Nick would just continue beating what they had into the ground. They're still having that DanWarp guy rehash the same sitcom formula he's used for the past 20+ years. It's all so stale now.
It's like every major network went into shock when Netflix started pushing their originals and are only now beginning to recover from it.
* compilations of ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks just driving along with their blue beacons rotating and sirens blaring. It's amazing how fascinating that is to kids.
* compilations of "good kids" happily eating their broccoli, spinach, etc.
That said, I've showed these to the kids for a few minutes on occasion; I don't think I'd leave them alone with a tablet to watch what they want (=what youtube recommends them for maximum "engagement"...) for extended times.
I monitor which videos they are as the sidebar in youtube can suggest videos that are not appropriate for kids.
I think limiting screen time at a young at is what needs to be done. There are other activities the kids can do where they are engaging with their environment and using their senses.
There's a lot of "don't let your kids watch youtube" but you can... if you're present. It's not easy, but there is also stuff I like on there that I'm cool with the kids watching.
Exactly this. Some of my family members leave the TV on while doing other things "for the noise". Before the internet, you usually had what was either on TV or on the radio in terms of instantly finding background noise. TV was generally considered higher quality by most.
A more apt title would have been 'Chuchu TV is pretty great, but could it be greater?'
'Raised on Youtube' might be imperfect on some parameter or another but it's not 'misleading' any more than, I dunno, 'The Power Broker' is a misleading title of a biography. The title it's been replaced with is literalist butchery.