Do anything else, Netflix at least has some barrier for kids content... but torrent a bunch kids shows if you have to.
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.
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.
It's completely within your control to stop them.
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.
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.
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).
It’s like giving crack to a little kid. Impossible not to have them get sucked in
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.