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Comment by lynguist | Hacker News Reader

During the Facebook hearing, they said that its internal data shows that Facebook is most harmful for 14 year old girls. I believe that if you can somehow shield your daughter of that age from social media, she will be fine.

I had a no display rule for our toddler but during my absence, her mother introduced her to the iPad, and now she watches YouTube on it whenever I’m not around. I know that the American Pediatric Association recommends limiting screen time to 1hr a day, which I also agree with. I don’t know yet how to proceed once she gets older. I think I want to teach her programming and I want to disallow social media. Already now I disallowed her watching Russian videos on YouTube and she doesn’t watch them any more because I said to her that I don’t like those videos.

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We took away Youtube Kids access after a few days. It's filled with so much very low quality "spam" content. E.g. random indians with thick accents singing to random recordings of them playing with toys and 5k iterations of that for every single kids song imaginable. And that's even excluding the potential of them finding content along the lines of "Elsa Gate".

Youtube-dl is your friend. Download (or pirate) quality content for them to consume offline. Disney streaming is also a no-go these days, not going to touch that with a 10-foot pole.

I found that she likes watching Blippi and that there are specially produced Blippi episodes on Amazon Kids, but I couldn’t find those videos anywhere to download nor could I subscribe to Amazon Kids! (It’s not available in my country!)

There is a Blippi stage musical on YouTube she watched already more than five or six times. I also see that it actually helps her language acquisition.

My young kids also watch(ed) plenty of Blippi. He has some episodes on Netflix too (different actor though) if you want to try that out. But it sounds like your best bet is to use a VPN and search "Blippi" on Youtube for videos to download.

Amazon Kids, you could probably allow a file/music app that can play specific files. Overall definitely a big gap in the market.

Glad I'm not alone on that. I tried youtube kids before showing it to my daughter and I was shocked at the kind of content it was selecting. I was hoping for interesting videos, more like a video version of a kids wikipedia or something, with an educational purpose. But everything is about dumb jokes, toys, songs, and consumerism in general. At least for english speaking kids there are a few other good resources available

Agreed on YT Kids, it's a lot of garbage with very little educational value. But what's wrong with Disney streaming? My 3 yo is allowed to play with a tablet for a few hours per week, locked so he can only access Netflix, Disney and a few games.

Something like this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8

I eventually gave in and gave my toddler a tablet to watch cartoons on YouTube. I noticed a few things:

1. She keeps it way to close to her eyes (even after I move it further away)

2. She gets way too much blue light

3. She doesn't get tired of watching cartoons if given the chance (e.g. on long road trips)

4. She now wants cartoons to be playing in the background while she plays with toys

I didn't see any improvements after some time, so I decided that the tablet medium must go away. I now cast videos on the TV from my phone and that has solved most of these, since I have better control over what, when, and or how long she's watching cartoons.

The issue here is that teenagers are also the most likely to rebel and ignore your orders / circumvent your "shielding" attempts, and also be already capable enough that you're going to lose most of the time.

I'm not sure what the best solution is

- giving regular (but not too frequent) and detailed real life examples of things that went horribly wrong with other teenagers, combined with total freedom (in this domain)

- or reverse psychology combined with a heavy handed approach where they're going to quickly learn how to fool you and also how to hack your countermeasures, which would supercharge their learning ? (With the risk of a decade+ of bad relations...)

Shielding is never a good idea - there will always be a time when the shield drops. I guess we will follow Montessori's methods regarding knives and other dangerous things. Teaching responsible use while accepting minor injuries.

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