YouTube has become the world's nanny | Hacker News Reader

YouTube has become the world's nanny

qz.com

305 pointslaurex395 comments

As a parent, screen time vs no screen time is a fine line that we have to continually renegotiate.

Screens can be great, there is so much good information out there that can enrich our lives. I wouldn't go the "no screens ever" route because that's just being a luddite, robbing them of the change to experience, and acquire expertise in, the digital world that they will be interacting with for the rest of their lives.

However, I am not letting my kid roam the internet, there be dragons. In particular YouTube's recommendation algorithm, even in their YouTube kids app, seems to default to serving up horrible brain melting crap instead of anything pedagogical. I am against kids content that is designed solely to entrance and keep them sitting still, it's the equivalent of digital candy floss. For example, the whole "surprise egg" trend, which basically is a video version of the lootbox / Deal Or No Deal, mechanic, is some of the most popular and recommended videos to children on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEB&search_query=surpris...

All three of the frist vids we were served by YouTube kids were surprise egg videos. Hard uninstall.

Curating content and setting limits on screen time is your job as a parent in this era. We cannot outsource this responsibility to companies and AIs because there is simply no way an algorithm find the stuff that is just right for your child.

>Curating content and setting limits on screen time is your job as a parent in this era.

This, 100%! We're at the point where the tablet is for podcasts, and we can watch instructional videos with a specific topic in mind (e.g. tips on drawing anime characters). And that's it. It's been a month and we saw a noticeable change literally overnight in quality and amount of sleep, quality of conversation, and the child is generally happier

What age are you talking about?

9-11

To be clear, we were strict up until the pandemic when we let things slide. Then all the friends were on messenger and if that's the only source of socializing, well ok. We didn't have YT on the tablet, but through ad clicking she discovered it would sometimes open in the browser, then she just figured out how the browser works.

I'd say there was close to a year of virtually unfettered access, up to 2 hours a day, always simultaneously with Messenger Kids for chatting/calling friends.

Cutting off was tough, but it happened over the holidays so we all took a full digital diet, and it gave the opportunity to gently introduce the concept of addiction

Curious about the use of the word messenger. Do you mean Facebook's Messenger? Isn't that only for age 13 and over?

> Isn't that only for age 13 and over

If your child has their own tablet set to their age, sure, but I know plenty of people who just let the kids use Mom's iPad

All apps are 13+, it's a law thing. If companies go under that, they face intense scrutiny. Epic lost a case because of that already ($200M+ fine & years of supervision), Rovio is in hot water too.

Same issue with WhatsApp for example, but it's pretty much a requirement to have any social life after first grade over here. Also there is no way for anyone except a parent to report an underage WA user, so there are no repercussions.

"Parent permissions" is how they get around that one for underage kids. It's either a notification through the parent portal or you login with the Google account on the kids tablet. Not sure of the mechanism on iOS, but I imagine it's similar.

Once you give permission, it's free reign

Nope, not even parent permission. It's used as one factor to prove that they are not "marketing to children".

If you are considered as targeting your product to children, you get hit by a different set of laws than if it's an "adult" product.

Source: I just spent a few hours listening to our lawyer give a presentation about this and why we need to be clear in marketing to adults only.

Epic got hit with a $245M fine because they were seen as marketing to kids (along with other crap): https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2022/12/245-milli...

There's marketing and then there's using. Obviously they do restrict certain apps like Tinder and PH, but it's only those that are exclusively 18-over (and Epic since the fine).

Other apps like FB, TikTok, XBox and the rest that no child should go near (or anyone else for that matter) gives a prompt with something along the lines of "Ask your parents for permission". If I say OK, either from my account or by logging in on hers, the app is installed and can be used, even though her profile is under 13. They don't market to kids, but it's still available and still shows up in search.

It would be great if these legal actions do show real restriction for all apps that are rated 13-over, but then no more tablets for kids. That's going to cost manufacturers and ad-driven apps a ton of money so I don't see it happening outside of the FCC going directly after Apple and Google.

Source: I have a kid with an age-restricted tablet and just tested

To be clear: all of this happens when the device is set up by the parent to mark it explicitly as kids' device? I've never seen such things before.

When I was a kid, knowing what year to put in a DOB form to put yourself safely over 18 y.o. was the most basic "Internet 101" life skill, second only to knowing where to type a website address.

On Android they have something called Family Link where you link a device and mark it explicitly as a kid's device to set restrictions like time usage, banned apps, etc. The only way to change settings is through the parent account. And yes she ran some very clever social engineering to try to get in.

Almost got me once - my wife left her phone unlocked so my kid opened WA and wrote me a message asking to lift the time restriction for the rest of the day. Her mistake was sending an extra "thank you so much" with heart emoji, which I though was off. If not for that misstep she would have got me.

Obviously she was rewarded and we listened to one of the Darknet Diaries episodes on social engineering

There's a version for kids (0). Contact approvals go through the parents, there's a weekly report so you see who they spoke with, settings to prevent link sharing, curated GIFs (but that's as curated as YT Kids), etc. It's the only reason I signed into FB in the past decade.

Obviously they can just set up their own fake FB account and lie about their age (which frankly I already told her to never sign up to anything with any real information) but the rest of their friends need to as well for it to be of any use. At this age, we're not there yet

(0) https://messengerkids.com/

Thanks, this is new since my kids were under 13.

I understand why parents let their children lie in order to avoid social exclusion. Kids can be very cliquey and being excluded hurts.

I counseled my children that it is immoral to misrepresent yourself to someone in order to get them to give you something they otherwise would not (or are prohibited by law from doing so). I still remember my (now 24 year old) daughter gleefully signing up for Facebook on the morning of her 13th birthday.

I think if a 9 to 11 year old doesn't understand that there's a web browser already, and how it differs from the YouTube app, you've failed to teach your kids vital information, and are putting them at risk. You're leaving them defenseless under the guise of keeping them safe. You shouldn't have given them a tablet in the first place until they understand basic things like that.

Ultimately, as you have learned, your child will circumvent your restrictions. You could go ahead and teach them how to be safe, or you could let them fall unprepared into monster-infested waters.

I get what you're saying, but "the internet" has evolved alot. Even knowing the dangers that are present, and how marketers try to short-circuit your brain etc etc (which we did do, I'm very clear with my kids that every law needs an explanation and they are provided with explanations) I think 13 is still too young to be left alone. Really I don't believe there is a minimum age, it's more who can resist addictive behaviors, so you tell me.

I'm not going to presume your age but at least when I was growing up, the internet was more like a giant flea market: you go in, and yes there could be things that might be bad or useless or creepy or diddly, and you really learn where the quality stuff is by poking around. Internet then was very analogous to going out into the real world where you learn risk through experience and can walk away. With the walled gardens we have today?... it's more like dropping an open kilo of cocaine in front your kid, saying "you can snort it, smoke it, shove it under a toenail, put it on your wee-wee and it will make you feel good for a bit, but then really, really, really bad. So be careful" then turning on a fan pointed in their direction as you walk out of the room... Everyone working on user engagement at FB, TikTok, Insta and the rest, they know how to keep you on with dopamine hits. The second a kid logs in, the hyperoptimization forces the most addictive, useless crap in their suggestions or feed no matter what their search is, such as the box opening junk, or mash-ups that don't have anything but popular characters giggling for 2 minutes, and it gets weird in a hurry [0]. And no matter how hard you try, there are always more suggestions that take you into a corner of dopamine hits than quality information, and it's very difficult to tell the difference. It's unavoidable, and to say "just let them learn the dangers" just tells me you need to observe a kid while they navigate (it always ends in a sinkhole) or one who just put the tablet down. I'm not going to presume your life experience, but I know someone who's jonesing for a hit when I see one.

I highly recommend you try setting up fake child accounts (minimum age, or if you want the full experience, set up a Family Link and say you're 8) on YouTube, TikTok, and the rest. There is no chance for a learning curve, there is no chance for evaluation. It's just immediate click-and-addict.

These are the new cigarette companies and I'm treating them as such. In my case, we're learning as we go along. So she can use the laptop for writing (podcast scripts, stories and essays), research for school and any activities/hobby with one of us in the room to help with tips and, as we put it, help to make sure the algorithm doesn't short-circuit her brain), and introduce her to coding by making her own Roblox games (played locally). The tablet is for listening to podcasts and recording her own episodes/thoughts and there are good drawing apps.

As to how we're going to approach things moving forward... Awareness is key but at least with drugs you can say no and not ingest. When she's in high school, just saying no is probably not a viable option, so we're still figuring out and trying to learn what works for others.

[0] Video is 5 years old, and the weirder did is probably gone, but the gaming the algo is still valid https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8

"Just say no" and the rest of the D.A.R.E program weren't just useless, they were actively harmful. I really hope you don't teach your kids to "just say no".

> It's been a month

all diets fail after 6 months on average. ppl gain even more weight.

you are going have the same results with this screen cap thing because you are using willpower to supress the urge which is still there and isnt going anywhere

Right, just like I wasn't able to quit smoking after a 25-cigarette a day habit over 10 years ago and haven't looked back? Or how no one is ever able to keep weight off? Or get off heroin? Or change their lifestyle?

Maybe ask: "What are you doing to try to ensure you'll keep your kids off screens and active?"

"Do you have any experience trying to give up addictive behaviors, and how are you helping your child deal with it?"

Snarky comments, especially those that involve assumptions ("you're using willpower") just make you come off as 1- a person who has never accomplished anything of note and isn't worth paying attention to, and 2- a naval gazer with neither the curiosity nor intelligence on how to approach discovery.

Learn how to be inquisitive, then you can be judgemental

sorry my comment wasn't directed at you( i was using generic you) specifically. I was just comparing it to dieting using willpower as the means.

Doesn't apply to 100% of people, you obviously had good success with it.

I used to be 220lbs and winded going up steps. Now I'm 180lbs and weightlifting and running, going on 7 years.

Not all diets fail. Willpower is the way.

>all diets fail after six months on average; ppl regain even more weight

This is not true and is also potentially harmful if people believe it. In reality, weight regain after "cutting" occurs over a period of years and tends to be around 50%; that is, less than the amount of weight lost in the first place. Several meta-analyses have been conducted, e.g.:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240545772...

It's also worth noting that adults under 60 tend to gain weight over time on average, so the actual effect of the intervention versus no intervention may be underestimated by simply treating the baseline as a constant. Losing ten pounds may seem small, but losing ten pounds instead of gaining ten pounds is more significant.

> In reality, weight regain after "cutting" occurs over a period of years and tends to be around 50%; that is, less than the amount of weight lost in the first place.

Interesting. Perhaps I missed it, I am not seeing that claim in the link you posted in the comment.

It's shown most prominently in in Figure 4, which tracks post-weight-loss outcomes to 160 weeks (about three years). Sorry if it's not showing, I'm afraid sometimes I'm not sure what's open access anymore, since the journals have all done their best to make institutional logins automatic and invisible.

Practically all studies and reviews on the topic emphasize the large individual variability in outcomes. One in six Americans who has ever been overweight or obese loses at least 10 kilograms and keeps it off for at least a year, for example:

https://www.nature.com/articles/ijo201094

That study tracks a sample of adults in the general population, not a group assigned to diet. But evidently a significant fraction of people find success on their own. Most studies on the subject emphasizes substantial individual variability. Furthermore, a strong predictor of long-term weight-loss maintenance is just the initial weight lost:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ijcp.12300

https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/74/5/579/4737391

and another one is self-monitoring:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.2147/CIA.S25389

In another study, around 30% did not experience significant regain:

https://bpsmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s1303...

The notion that "all diets fail" seems to be perpetuated by a few unscrupulous journalists seeking clicks and social media slacktivists doing the same. It's not true, it's not helpful, and it's not defensible.

Time spent reading = 2x amount received in screen time works for us. Books (comic books count) have no screen time, neither have any kinds of crafts or other interactive things.

Games are more OK in my mind than just passively staring at someone open surprise eggs on Youtube or watching a "let's play" of some game or a "influencer reacts to X" crapfest.

Thus we have a separate more generous screen time set for games and another for passive video watching. Now my kid is playing Pokemon Violet/Scarlet with their friend using a WhatsApp video call for communication, all good in my book. I showed them PokedDB and they spend time reading stuff about Pokemon in there while gaming :)

We do something similar and cap the time on screens. Also, if the kids start showing signs of wanting screens too much, we refocus them on something else- sometimes for several days or more. When they ask why, we remind them that screens are a tool for us to use, not the other way around-- and it's time to take a break. In fairness, we do this for anything they get overly attached to that could be harmful in excess.

I hope you're also a role model for this. Do you take multi-day breaks from screens, and take care to avoid wanting screens too much?

I'm spending most of my leisure time in front of a screen. Explaining to my children why it's OK for me and not for them would be the hardest part for me.

I do take breaks from things I start to like too much, yes. Currently that's a few months from alcohol.

Yep, you should always be able to take the screen away without causing a nuclear meltdown in the child. If that's not possible - you've got work to do.

Any recommendations on good pedagogical content channels/playlists on youtube?

Piggybacking off this, is there a way to allow only certain channels. Unless i missed it, even on YouTube kids I only have the option to block...and to my horror one day I let my kids watch the Peppa Pig official channel and find out later through YouTube recommendations they were watching some grown man playing with Peppa Pig toys.

Also, my eldest is 6 and already knows you can get to YouTube via browser -__-

"Also, my eldest is 6 and already knows you can get to YouTube via browser"

That's a good thing, they won't be completely ignorant with computers. You need to teach them how to be safe, not keep them away from it.

These hyper-restrictive measures are the equivalent of the D.A.R.E program. They will ultimately harm your kids more than any good they could do.

Some of our favorite pedogocial youtube channels and topics:

Younger Kids:

Bounce Patrol: a cut above your average nursery rhyme channel, with singing, dancing and some ABC / 123 lessons.

Pocoyo: Very well crafted and entertaining show, slipping in some good lessons.

Yo Gabba Gabba: Such a joy, with fun new topics each episode.

Older Kids:

Science Max / Science Doug

Minecraft redstone tutorials: Mumbo Jumbo

Scratch programming tutorials: Griffpatch

Keyboard / xylophone how do I play this song tutorials

Making stuff (out of cardboard) tutorials

pre-kindergarden: https://www.youtube.com/@KidsTV123

100% with you on this one. And we need to make sure parents have the resources to learn themselves. So many parents these days are not even aware how accessible bad content is, or they even consume it themselves, not knowing why it’s bad.

As always with parenting there is no 100% right way to do it, but parents need to be educated first, so that they can make reasonable decisions by themselves.

I’d argue that our current algorithms can absolutely find the right stuff for your child, its just not in their financial interest to do so. Sad stuff from capitalism, as always.

That's it exactly; surprise egg videos get repeat views, kids open them up and just hyperfocus and/or zone out on them for hours on end; it's low energy watching. Give them something intellectualy stimulating though, and they'll have brain drain after a while and be too tired to keep watching that kind of content. Bad for revenue, it's better to have them accrue those minutes watched counters all the time.

There is absolutely no technical reason this problem could not be solved. It is not a technical issue. It is a human issue. Just like most issues of modern society.

Is there an existing service I can pay to curate YouTube?

Is it allowed to sell a YouTube app that only offers curated content?

Right. I.e. it's a hard problem. Technical problems are the easy ones.

Very well said, can't agree more!

Nailed about the algorithm. As an internet user since 1998, I'd be not so worried about "horrors", but of the algorithm and the "screen-sticky" junk it funnels to my son.

But on the other hand, it's my duty to actually be present with him. I see too many parents just paying "gadget ransom" to their kids, to just avoid distraction in unnecessary moments -- like on bus.

I still think that treating the problem as screen time is the wrong approach. It is too low resolution. What happens on the screen matters. Many parents end up using screen time as a very blunt tool because we simply lack better tools.

But curating content as a family is close to unfeasible because it goes against sponsored algorithmic curation to which others are still exposed and once a kid is socialized they face the problem of peer pressure.

Even if you have a private Jellyfin server that automatically downloads approved fresh content, kids will still complain they do not have access to Youtube like other kids. And now you have become an antagonist. A rule maker to be subverted.

I find that caring parents are put in an impossible position of at the same time trying to maintain trust and also be a curator and censor.

This is why it is simpler to set time limits and let the kids do what they want. It’s too much management and friction and negotiation otherwise. For now, I’ve done so anyway: games (even dumb ones) are fine but video is only available under special circumstances (e.g. on an airplane). I’m sure even this very coarse line will eventually erode though.

We had the same rule, and modified it to include type of games. Phone games have time limits, unless it's things like Dragonbox, flow free, or other "educational" games (at least games that require some kind of thinking) approved by us beforehand, including minecraft. Because 99.999% of games for children are just absolute trash stuffed full of ads.

Any PC game that is age appropriate gets a pass, but only if it's evening and we're inside already, or if it's really shitty outside.

As a non-tech person, the one thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to encourage 'tinkering' in an active way. So much technology today is meant to be set and forget. I had my oldest build a linux pc last year, and that seemed to pique his interest, but it was short lived, because so much is just apps and consumption with no backend. Even age appropriate apps for programming and learning about that sort of thing are very boxed in.

> As a non-tech person, the one thing I haven't been able to figure out is how to encourage 'tinkering' in an active way.

Let me know if you ever figure out - I feel I'll be facing the same problem in the next few years.

From my tech person perspective, I agree with your summary: advances in computer tech and consumer product design have done away with tinkering: where it isn't actively discouraged, it's still hard and doesn't seem that fun anymore.

Yes, people will bring up BBC Micro and those 8-bit handheld boards and Arduinos - but the truth is, even if they replicate the experience of 20-30 years ago somewhat, a big part of the motivation (to me) was knowing you're doing something unique, that you can't just trivially buy a ready-made product that does the same thing but much better.

I feel you can't get people to "tinker" in general - this happens when they have a goal and tinkering is the best way to achieve it. For me as a kid, this was building model rockets and writing video games - it's what got me to do electronics and programming. Without such goals, I wouldn't sustain my interest in learning and playing with these things.

And why should tinkering be easy ? The whole point of it is understanding things beyond the initial use and this is the mindset that, I believe, only handful of people have (like one in ten). I distinctly remember that when I was tinkering in high school with things most of my peers were tinkering with people (a.k.a living life). So maybe, just maybe, it does not really matter if tinkering is easy or not - because its mostly character that decides if You will be into it or not (I subscribe more to nature then nurture side).

And I honestly question if my children should waste their life on things instead of people.

I'm not a kid now :) but I tinkered a lot with tech as a kid and still do today as an adult.

Most of that came from the fact that I didn't have a lot of the stuff others had - no cable TV, outdated computer, etc. Thus the tinkering came out of necessity and over time I started to like it. That stuff broke constantly and I remember searching for troubleshooting info on school computers to bring home and try.

I did have the Internet though, and soon began exploring Linux, finding ways to make the computer faster, learning to repair secondhand equipment, and so forth. Not having easily accessible entertainment also had the bonus of getting me into other hobbies like writing, drawing, and music which I still do today. The more you do these things, the more you like them - and the satisfaction of making or fixing something is always greater than mindless consumption.

And before you ask - yes, my social life suffered a bit as I couldn't play the games others played, talk about the shows they watched, etc. I knew many other kids who were "good" with tech, but they didn't really have the motivation to tinker as they could easily buy stuff that just worked.

> And now you have become an antagonist. A rule maker to be subverted.

Good, then you can teach them to subvert you productively. Keep the tablet locked down, but put an unlocked Linux machine in the house and tell them they can watch whatever they want in Firefox. Once they've done that, make them launch Firefox from the command line. Once that's mastered, make them connect to the wifi manually. Then make them start the DE manually. Then make them configure the router to get online. Then disassemble the PC and force them to put it together. Better to learn computer literacy skills in the process than just be a drooling, gormless consumer.

Incredibly based

> [Fifth grade classmate] Did you watch the new Wednesday episode yesterday?

> [My kid] I could only catch the last half hour, it took a little longer than I thought to solder all the components on the TV's motherboard before I could turn it on again. The real issue is getting the forge hot enough to heat up the screwdriver I use as a soldering iron...

I’m not sure that slicing yourself up assembling a machine is part of computer literacy. If job interviews are anything to go by, computer literacy is a familiarity with trash apps like Teams.

Having their concentration broken 100 times an hour with surprise egg content will prepare them well for a life on Teams.

Caring parents aren't in an impossible situation. The problem is that we have given up on the old adage that it takes a village to raise a child. Corporations have, intentionally or not, contributed heavily to the destruction of our villages, physical and online. I think with just five sets of parents sharing a similar worldview, it would very practical for them to curate enough good educational content for all their kids. Having four other families on the same program in their own community will reinforce to the kids that the parents aren't antagonists, but that this is what their mini-"society" just does regularly, and so mitigate resentment.

I think "screen time" is this generation's "Dungeons and Dragons" boogeyman. Everyone feels like it's turning kids into zombies or hurting them in some way, but people really aren't articulating how. What's the mechanism, and how did it differ from similar kids entertainment of the past? Is "Algorithmically Generated Spiderman/Frozen Mashup #45501" or "Streamer babbling on about nothing" really that much worse for an 8 year old than the crappy cartoons I grew up on in the '80s?

Our household has pretty simple rules. Keep your grades high (straight A's, one B allowed) and kid can have as much screen time as she wants. Grades drop, and entertainment (including the dreaded screens) proportionately goes away until they come back up. That's it. We've had to limit her once, and she got the message and course corrected.

> Everyone feels like it's turning kids into zombies or hurting them in some way

It didn’t take a lot of My Little Pony before my child’s accent whet from that of a New Zealand child to whatever the accent is that the horses have (Texan?).

Yeah, there is some truth to your D&D scaremongering analogy, tho I don't think anyone is calling for parents to lock arms and drive Satan out of the Apple Store.

I think there is a big difference in the devices and content of yesteryear and the magic phones filled with an unlimited library of today. Eventually the cartoons would end and we would emerge bleary-eyed into the daylight.

I wouldn't be surprised if there is a quantitative difference in the life outcomes between kids who were given firm boundaries by their parents and kids whose parents just gave up and let them watch any old shit. We are running this experiment on live humans, so time will tell.

Curating content is also borderline illegal because the only effective solution is synonymous with copyright violation.

I think the solution wrt youtube would be supervised browsing and then adding approved videos to jellyfin/plex. or even a folder on their device if you don't want to get fancy.

above all, I would try explaining how media sites try to capture your attention and helping kids recognize when it's happening. easier said than done of course.

And you'll have to remember that curating content won't be possible forever. At some point they will be alone with an unlocked device and the internet, probably much sooner than you're comfortable with.

We've got filters set up at home; they worked fine for a while, but teenagers are easily impressed and soon we had to add stock photo websites to these filters. Then there's free VPN services, going around the (consumer grade) filters and time limits entirely.

Next up, schools give kids laptops, but they don't have the necessary IT prowess to lock them or the school internet down (and there's unrestricted public wifi everywhere, of course). The amount of shit I've found on there is unreal, and of course the thing breaks because of caggy-handedness.

Thanks for this reminder. I am dreading that first flight into the unrestricted internet, but I guess I had better get my head around it.

Maybe try to actually prepare your kids for these moments instead of trying to restrict them so hard. Teach them how to use a computer for real, instead of sitting them down at a hyper-restricted one for an hour a week.

Would you let your kids get a driver's license without teaching them the rules of road safety? Would you let your kids cook without telling them the stove is hot and will hurt them? Do your kids know not to let random people in the house?

Or do you just helicopter them so they never experience danger?

Curation is key and there need to be better tools. I strongly limit my kid's screen time, and was pleasantly surprised by the PBS kids video app (and to some extent the games app). I felt very comfortable leaving her alone with that at the designated screen times, as most programs had at least some educational component... or at least had some generic but positive moral lessons. And (key!) she gets personal choice in what she watches, out of a curated garden.

As she's gotten older these programs are not cutting it, though, and she is asking for Netflix more and more. The problem is that the vast majority of kids shows are just garbage. Basically the equivalent of sitcoms or (worse) dramas about girls being cliquey or mean or whatever. I'm looking for another garden with a wide variety of bigger kid shows that have some positive qualities to them.

Sure, there are great programs on there, but I wish I could pre-select those programs and give her a selection out of them. Netflix lets me set age limits and block programs, but I'd rather spend some time selecting 20-30 shows/movies that allows her to feel free while still giving me some control

yt-dlp works quite well. Why even bother with internet?

Torrent the shows you want her to see and setup Jellyfin server. I run one on a Xeon SOC from 2016, but i would be surprised if a Raspberry Pi 4 couldn't handle the transcoding.

Install Jellyfin app on a tablet, you just built a curated version of Netflix.

You really do have to do this if you want your kids to be able to pick what they're watching without you right there all the time. If only all these video services would just let parents add content to allow-lists for kids' accounts. But no. It's literally all we need, but they won't do it.

[EDIT] Incidentally, Jellyfin doesn't have an allow-list, either. You have to put kids' content in a separate library. They have block lists based on tags, but not a more-useful allow-list. It's been requested and I've thought about doing it—I've looked at the code, looks pretty easy—but, LOL, I have kids! Which I expect is why all the other kid-havers requesting the feature haven't gotten around to it, either.

[EDIT AGAIN] The reason the separate-library solution kinda sucks is it fragments your content, so if you're browsing based on library you have to think "wait, did I decide this was OK for the kids' library?" and it doesn't de-dupe so if you put content in both (say, with hard links to avoid wasting disk space) they'll show up twice on accounts that can access both libraries, plus it means shelling in to move files around to change what's available, plus it's a huge PITA if you want multiple kids' accounts with different content (tags are easy—older kids gets all the kid tags as allowed, younger kids get a smaller set of kid-tags allowed). I'd also personally really like to be able to not display all my kid-friendly content to them all the time (too much choice, same as adults experience on streaming services) and change it up periodically (this also lets me push better things on them that they might not pick from a list of 100 but might pick from a list of 10) which makes the separate-library especially painful, since it means file-management actions every single time I want to change up the kids' library, rather than just some quick tag-shuffling on the Web UI, which I can just do from my phone in a pinch.

There is an easy solution to this. Make 2 folders. One with stuff for you, one for stuff for kids. Make an account for the kids that can only see kids folder. Make an account for yourself that can see BOTH folders. Isn't stuff like this normal for plex/jellyfin/kodi? Before these media servers I used to organize everything based on genre and if I liked the video or not (watch using vlc)

It works, but it's worse than a tag-based allow-list.

With tags you don't need to shell or sftp in to move things around.

You never have to wonder which library something is in ("wait, did I put Star Wars in the kids' library...?") which, admittedly, matters more for some Jellyfin clients than others (the natural way to browse in the web UI or on Roku is by library—the natural way to browse on my 3rd party tvOS client is by type, which browses across libraries, i.e. movie, TV, et c., so it matters less on there).

Since it's easier to make changes, you can swap material in and out on a whim, from any device with a web browser.

Could you download episodes of those shows (on Netflix), and then disconnect from the internet?

I’m not sure that most TVs would allow much of that. But disconnecting them from the network seems wise after I saw the amount of connections mine was making (via Pihole).

>Curation is key and there need to be better tools.

It's annoying that Youtube, a flagship product for a massive multinational company, has worse curation and discovery than even a low tier porn site.

Whoever is in charge of design/recommendations in YouTube is failing at their job

They're probably doing fine at their job. Building better tools for curation would be nearly antithetical to the goal of serving an endless stream of highest-bidder ad-supported content algorithmically chosen to keep a viewer engaged to maximize impression counts and duration.

I use Plex and just only input shows I want my kids to watch. It's more work, but allows me to have a garden. It's probably not Kosher legally for me to be pirating shows, but I'm only doing shows that I have access to via Netflix, Amazon, HBO etc. So morally, I feel I'm justified.

You also now know where the show resides. Having your content spread over several services is horrible.

I also think the quality is higher when you have it local, though maybe this is wishful thinking.

Google TV is pretty good with the exception of Netflix. It hits multiple services.

I think most stuff is riped from streaming sources anyways, so I'm not sure if its better or just the same.

Not like 4k Bluey is needed anyway though!

"Designated screen time" makes my stomach curl. That's a surefire way to make sure a kid who has interest never develops any skills and resents you for ruining a career opportunity later down the road (I know from experience).

I find it odd that most people in this thread are equating "screen time" to "watching videos". My parents were like that, they never understood that mucking around in OSes and writing crappy software is a totally different thing from watching YouTube videos about eggs.

I think you should modify your limits on screen time. Make limits on mindless entertainment kind of screen time, not on productive learning screen time. I'd consider it abusive to force your kid off the computer when they're in the middle of configuring a kernel "for their own good".

Like I said, I know from experience. I feel like I'm a decade behind because my parents thought I was "playing" on the computer instead of learning valuable professional skills which is what I Was doing. I doubt you're actually that kind of person, but to a point they were suspicious of my attempts to learn those things. They thought I was up to no good because I wasn't mindlessly glued to YouTube or whatever they do on their computers.

Nope, not surefire -- speaking from experience. My parents also set limits to screen time, but I have worked in software for over a decade now and see it as my main creative expression.

We used YouTube for a few months with our first kid but we stopped again because you quickly end up in a rabbit hole where it mostly recommends videos that look weirdly auto-generated, are devoid of any meaningful content and have an uncanny pacifying effect on children - exactly like the surprise egg videos you linked to. We were the ones controlling the app, but the kid quickly learns to recognize the bright thumbnails and requests them. We ended up making up a story about YouTube being broken, and we are still very happy with that choice.

I really don't think watching this kind of brain-melting content is healthy for anyone. I think we all know the feeling we get when we have binged a show for too long, that bored and slightly depressed feeling where you want to stop, but you keep going for a little while longer than you should simply because you crave the continued stimulation. I get that feeling almost instantly when watching one of these videos, and I am truly worried about the mental state of kids who watch this stuff for hours every day.

> I really don't think watching this kind of brain-melting content is healthy for anyone.

I spent two hours yesterday transfixed by the AI-generated Infinite Seinfeld stream. Afterward I felt the mental equivalent of the feeling you get after eating an entire tray of cookies in a single sitting. This algorithmic crap is brain poison.

I'm guessing the meta thing we're going to have to become robust to (after 'the system is trying to sell you things you don't want/need' and 'the system is trying to make you feel bad about yourself', 'the system is trying to make you believe that you are more clever than everyone for discovering a cabal', 'the system is trying to get you angry for engagement', 'the system is trying to have you invest in a thing you'll have to pay exponentially to keep enjoying at all') is going to be 'the system is trying to engage you in getting you to watch predictable things'.

So many horrible human tech we're teaching our kids to harden against, how powerless is our society that this constant violence is accepted.

As far as educational screentime goes, my child has learned addition, subtraction, and multiplication purely from Number Blocks. To the point where we have to do supplemental learning because the fellow kindergarteners are just learning numbers and letters.

I don't think this is the own you think it might be.

Our oldest child's kindergarten class (at a very rural, poor school) was doing multiplication and division within the first month, because they all attended a pre-k that encouraged the use of educational games, like Prodigy for math.

Like everything, It's what is on the screen and how the child is using it and how involved the parents can be. Number blocks are the same way. They're a great way to learn basic reading and writing, if that's how the parents use it; they are also a great chew toy without some input from the parents.

What part is supposed to be an own? I think number blocks is a fantastic program given the alternatives. Makes math fun for the kids.

Numberblocks is such a good show! We made an exception to our no-cartoons policy for this one and I don't regret it.

Use tube-archivist which lets you grab your favorite youtube videos and serve them locally. You can basically build a locked down youtube clone for your kid.

We've had good success with our three-year-old with Khan Academy Kids. We have an old Android tablet that has a few FOSS parental control apps (TimeLimit and App Lock), and he's allowed 30 minutes of Khan or Scratch Junior per day. All other apps are locked by App Lock.

Khan Academy Kids strikes a good balance between activities and videos. He enjoys and uses both, and all the content is intentionally teaching something.

I found that "screens after N pm" worked well for us. It created a zone where there was no consideration, expectation, or backsliding onto screens. We also kept a VERY consistent bedtime, so that "N pm" to just before bedtime rituals timeblocked screens.

If you get on a screen at 4pm it can be hard to suggest putting the screen down to go outside or do something else.

Was that a "no screens after N pm" or a "screens only between N pm and bedtime" rule?

I can imagine the latter working well, but we never tried because we're worried about screen exposure close to bed time causing sleep issues (blue light, but also because content on screens seems to excite and energize kids somewhat) - we're already having way too much problem getting kids to sleep on a sensible schedule.

The latter -- and getting to sleep on a regular schedule wasn't really a challenge in my situation. We did consistently start it at a certain hour, though.. so it would be, say, 7pm to 830pm and then start the bedtime rituals.

Would you change your rules if your kids showed interest in developing actual computer skills? My parents had rules similar to yours and wouldn't budge, and it effectively killed a decade of potential programming experience. I still resent them for it to a point, but I realize they were just ignorant and thought learning to program was equivalent to playing, because I was at the age they thought I was supposed to be playing.

Just... try to avoid making your kids be something they're not, in general.

I created a site, Smart Kid, that removes "Likes" from videos that meet the list of blocked keywords.

https://smartk.id/

Our younger kids were always very eager to "hit that like" button on every Minecraft video known to man, so this was attempt to mitigate that issue.

It may help a bit in diversifying your children's recommendations.

> Curating content and setting limits on screen time is your job as a parent in this era. We cannot outsource this responsibility to companies and AIs because there is simply no way an algorithm find the stuff that is just right for your child.

Plus the incentive for YouTube/Google to do it right is not that strong as their goal is to make money first.

It's hard for even a parent to find the right stuff for a child... because it is really up to the child in terms of what they find engaging. A lot of PBS kids content is good but not all youtube is bad.

The surprise egg thing is a thing almost a cultural thing and it does pass. Kids watch those videos up to about age 5. You find these eggs in Target and Walmart now too so you end up with a junk drawer of fidgets. All the kids end up trading fidgets for awhile as well. Lots of tears but they learn to negotiate. If you are lucky you might skip Pokemon.

They then move on to watching Minecraft and Roblox videos. I let my kids facetime and play roblox with their friends at the same time.

Yea I don’t have kids but I’ve seen it with all kids in my extended family.

I like Youtube, there is content of tremendous value, for knowledge and entertainment.

However, one thing I’ve personally observed is that too much of it can destroy your focus and motivation. There is some science in there about brain chemistry and reward systems, in line with what some pop scientists with Cal Newport and Andrew Huberman are preaching.

I don’t know the details of said science, and I don’t feel like I need to, because my own experience and observations have cemented a strong belief that an excessive usage of the proverbial bottomless digital wells (be it Youtube or other usual suspects) have deleterious effects on focus, motivation, and happiness.

I can only imagine the effects on the developing brain. But again, I don’t know the science so maybe the answer is “a kid’s brain is so malleable that there is nothing to worry about”. Wouldn’t that be convenient for big tech?

Well I for one, am not going to take risks. If I ever have kids I am not going to deprive them of watching a bit of Youtube or playing Mario. But there are going to be some serious authoritarian vibes around time limits and sequencing (ie, only after you’ve fulfilled your obligations)

I'd think a kid's brain's malleability is reason to limit bottomless pits even more strictly.

As a father of three I know it's not always convenient. But kids usually find something else to do at some point. It's just really grating to wait that long.

I started using bottomless digital wells at 9 years old and it has led to compulsive browsing behavior with severely negative long-term consequences for my life.

> it has led to compulsive browsing behavior with severely negative long-term consequences for my life

If I can offer practical advice that has worked for me in pulling me back from bad browsing habits:

1. Meditate ~10min every morning

2. Start a reading habit, even if it's modest (start with 10 pages a day)

3. Create physical barriers between you and devices:

3.1. Do not sleep with a device in the room (if you use it as an alarm clock buy an analog one)

3.2. Physically remove non-indispensable devices (TV, console, any extra screens) from around you, if only temporarily (put them in storage, give them to a friend for keeping)

4. Write a to-do list with objectives for the next day in the evenings, then revise it in the mornings after waking up

5. Pick up some exercise, preferrably with a social obligation (ie, an instructor, a group). The latter may be important because as an experienced weightlifter I can say that it's way too easy to do solo sessions where you're constantly slacking around and looking at your phone.

6. Quit other vices (eg, drinking) temporarily

Many of these have nothing to do with browsing, but that's precisely what does it for me. Artificially limiting browsing (by using apps, timeboxing, etc.) does not work at all for me and I need to work on adjacent goals to build my chemistry back up.

A really important addition there is to make sure you get your sleep routine in order. If you don't sleep well then sticking to any of the other habits is going to be incredibly hard. Decide on a sleep schedule that gives you between 7 and 8 hours in bed with no distractions, lights out. Even if you can't fall asleep easily just disciplining yourself to stick to this schedule will help. I can't stress how important it is to not use your phone in bed, no books either. If you're going to read before bed then do it before your scheduled bed time and make sure you have a reminder set to tell you when you need to drop what you're doing and go to bed. Set an alarm to wake yourself up and try to stick to it even if you didn't get much sleep. You'll be tired but that should make it easier to fall asleep the next night. If you can get this routine locked in then the rest of the habits will be much easier to stick to.

Good sleep hygiene really is a prerequisite for this stuff.

I would recommend removing the phone from the bedroom entirely. If you want to use your phones alarm clock, make sure that no other notifications can come through during your scheduled sleep time and put it on the other side of the room (this also forces you to stand up in the morning because you can't turn off your alarm otherwise).

You say 'no books either', and I agree with it, a bedtime routine works best if the bed is only used for sleeping, but I had great success with first replacing my phone with my ereader and allowing myself to read as much as I want. And then later on I removed the ereader. That was much easier than just removing the phone at once.

I've never admitted this online but screw it.

I've been a drug user for about 2/3 my live. Battled with prescription pills the longest.. managed to kick the habit with meth.

YouTube is as addictive as anything i just mentioned. More so if you're in a group testing future services in return for an "ad free" experience (you know the ones which claim to"improve Google services").

Everything else everyone has said is true. I've managed to leave social media, my friends, most of my family, several jobs, but you know who i can't get rid of? Can't even use a damn mobile phone without agreeing to let it continue. FML it sucks and it's never going to get better for any one given the ineffective laws get made which constantly favor everything about that business model.

ublock blocks YouTube ads.

One way I manage the addictive problem with YouTube is to heavily use the do not recommend channel feature when I find something garbage or unproductive.

Here in Australia the govt forces YouTube to surface local (read: Murdoch) news channels in the home page despite them all being mostly hated and consistently downvoted by me (no way any recommendation system would continue to recommend me their stuff).

Thankfully, you can "not recommend" those channels and the whole "news" section goes away. You can still search "news" when you want to see it but tbh I hardly ever do unless I hear something is going on that I'm concerned about.

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I'm so amazed by what ChatGPT can do these days.

I'm lucky that I've never battled with addiction to hard drugs, but I have struggled for 10 years with cigarettes and all of my adult life with weed and being online. Personally, while weed has had the most detrimental effect on my life (partly by synergizing so well with mind-numbing time-wasters), the hardest one for me to get rid of is 100% my toxic relationship with the Internet.

It's incredible to me that we all have the powerful dopamine dispensers in out pockets; trained on billions of users and well calibrated to our personal pitfalls. I find the mechanisms of addiction and the emotional loop they put you in to be virtually the same between the 3, despite them being so different in how they are "ingested" and affect your brain.

Thanks for that comparison. I have never truly experienced addiction without losing self control for whatever reason. I can start and stop smoking, drugs never took a hold. I feel the pull for sure, but am able to stop.

But I lose several hours a day to YouTube. Ever since Shorts made their way into my life, I start and end most days with an hour of watching bullshit I don't even like. And before I open it I tell myself "don't.. this is that moment" and do it anyway. I usually stop a session due to real life commitments or battery life.

Deleted the app but use browser. I've considered getting a dumb phone. I've never hated something that my body loves so much

I was in the same exact boat as you. If you have uBlock origin, you can add these custom filters to remove shorts: https://ronangelo.com/how-to-hide-shorts-videos-on-youtube/

I have not missed them one bit, nor had any desire to unblock them. Like you, I would mindlessly watch them in between tasks at work, and felt duller and worse for it every time my little binge ended. I also got a dumbphone, which I honestly love.

Good luck to you and kudos for caring about your health!

Thanks. Good tip for desktop, will install. But the main vector for me is my phone. Which dumbphone did you pick up?

You can use ublock origin on firefox mobile, which will let you use those filters.

I ended up grabbing the light phone 2. I really have been enjoying it!

Nicholas Carr's book "The shallows - What the internet is doing to out brains" is a little old (2011), but an eye-opening read.

"One thing is very clear: if, knowing what we know today about the brain’s plasticity, you were to set out to invent a medium that would rewire our mental circuits as quickly and thoroughly as possible, you would probably end up designing something that looks and works a lot like the Internet. It’s not just that we tend to use the Net regularly, even obsessively. It’s that the Net delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli—repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive—that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions. With the exception of alphabets and number systems, the Net may well be the single most powerful mind-altering technology that has ever come into general use. At the very least, it’s the most powerful that has come along since the book."

He's railing about the internet being a designed distraction machine, rather than youtube specifically.

Nope, nope nope.

My kid is 10 and still doesn't know a single Youtuber by name and doesn't really watch Youtube. We did try Youtube Kids at one point, but it was just 99% toy ads masquerading as authentic content.

Netflix has a pretty good age limiter and well produced TV-shows. Disney+ has Bluey and a ton of other content. AppleTV+ has a few good ones too, but not as much as the two big ones.

Paying the few coins for a streaming service w/ age limits is highly preferable to risking your kid ending up on some Elsagate[0] video because of the algorithm. Or ending up in a parasocial relationship to some screaming jumpcutting Youtuber who shills their merch on literal children.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

>>My kid is 10 and still doesn't know a single Youtuber by name

Authentic curiosity - does your child not go to a normal school? In my experience you can literally detach your home from the internet and live without electricity, but the second your kids go to school they instantly know all the latest fads and videos and what not. To make it to 10 without being at least somewhat familiar with youtube through that exposure seems....almost impossible?

Dunno if the school is a weird outlier, but none of my kid's friends are obsessed with Youtube influencers either.

I haven't banned the kid from Youtube, just didn't specifically direct them there. Except for a few times. I think we looked up sign language tutorials (that was a big deal 3-4 years ago) and some drawing tutorials for watercolours.

I think they see Youtube as a source for information instead of entertainment? At least that's my theory.

Also: I'm not from a native english speaking country, so the amount of content is even more limited. Most of the local YT influencers are 100% insufferable.

I think your kid's school is a weird outlier. [USA here] All my 10 year old and her friends talk about is YouTube, Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnight, and so on, but primarily YouTube because it's the one unifying entertainment everyone has in common. The girls think the boys are stupid for being obsessed with Fortnight, and the Minecrafters sneer at the Robloxers, but everyone can agree on YouTube.

My kids know about youtube but that doesn't mean they are lost in it.

If anything they'd rather watch the harry potter series 100x times before asking for generic youtube access.

No YouTube for my kids either. What's really freaky is that some kids in their grade (elementary school) have YouTube accounts and make videos supposedly!

Also, Bluey is an incredible show. I'd probably watch it independently, the parents are hilarious.

but is there any better alternative?

Actual produced content, made by professionals who don't get paid per view or swag sales.

Netflix and Disney+ have good content, you pay for it and they give you content. There is no parasocial relationship or algorithmic suggestions that direct the user to a dark hole of exploitative content.

Most countries have a PBS equivalent, a non-commercial public broadcast channel that produces quality content without.

Let’s not kid ourselves, Netflix, Amazon, etc put out a ton of crap content too (e.g. Blippi). PBS Kids, KIKA, etc put out a lot of kids content on YouTube as well. Heck there’s a ton of great public media on YouTube in general. My subscription list is mostly public media from various countries and I don’t have the algorithm issues what most are describing here.

My kid had a blippi phase but has moved on now. Blippi may monkey around but it’s educative after all. There are many other inane brain melting options to avoid

Nothing is perfect.

Amazon Kids+ is a huge step up from YouTube, with curation and categorized time limits. They sell Kindle Fire hardware with a year's subscription included.

https://www.amazon.com/ftu/home

ABCmouse advertises a lot, which is inversely correlated with effectiveness in my experience.

https://www.abcmouse.com

> We did try Youtube Kids at one point, but it was just 99% toy ads masquerading as authentic content.

To be fair, this description fits a lot of regular (non-kids) platforms too.

Most "content" is made by "influencers" and thats kinda the point

True, Transformers, He-Man and My Little Pony were just toy ads in cartoon form, but they were mostly honest about it.

Youtube influencers form a "friendship" with the audience and are more sneaky/non-obvious about the stuff they're advertising, masking it as a "review" or something else. Just having a YT influencer play a game is a HUGE boost in sales.

My Little Pony has pretty serious storylines and developed characters. There is a reason why that particular show had rather full on fandom.

The new series yes. I'm old, so I'm speaking of the ye olde version that was ... not so good. =)

The irony of the “gate” postfix, being such an old concept!

> We did try Youtube Kids at one point, but it was just 99% toy ads masquerading as authentic content.

Essentially like kids TV in the 80-90s. A lot of shows were made explicitly to sell toys, with Transformers being one of the best known. I don't know if it is still the case now.

Yes, but those 30 minute ads actually had content and you could enjoy them without the toy in hand.

I briefly let my son watch YouTube Kids and soon his stream was endless unboxing videos or weird knockoff cartoons with no words.

I’d gladly take 80-90s finite TV interspersed with PBS than infinite junk food.

Two of my sisters have in total 3 kids (4 to 6 years old) and all three of them need to watch youtube videos while eating.

Just few days back, my sister had a 'gathering' to announce her 2nd child (making it total 4 kids combined) and the 3rd kid needed to watch few youtube videos (usually they are of other kids playing or doing some stuff) to eat his dinner, which I found quite odd.

This thing is not only related to my sisters kids but for every new kid born in recent years, they will not eat 'peacefully' without youtube.

Also, TV cannot be used, it needs to be youtube where real kids are playing.

Edit:- Found the channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCmSidxfQmY

Part of reason I 'think' is that these new kids born were not allowed to visit outside, leave home, make friends with neighbours kids, visit other families during Corona crisis and lockdown and they sub-consciously got attached to watching other kids doing fun things on youtube.

Someone should look into this as they are not watching Peppa Pig on youtube (which is also a kids show with characters as kids) but other human kids playing.

I don't think it's so much not being allowed to be outside but the education that they got, the confinement ended 2 years ago and kinds have very flexible brains. My older niece will be 5 next month and she is NEVER allowed to have cartoons while eating and she doesn't do it and doesn't miss it. However one of my best friends has a kid born the same month and she always has a phone every time I see her.

I also tell you that if I have a child of my own they aren't trying fucking ketchup, the thing with my niece and ketchup isn't even close to reasonable. Kids can get a nasty habit very easily, youtube, ketchup, etc. Pretty much everything can become a problem if it's not cut down.

The "solution" is to not expose them to YouTube in the first place. Worked so far, for several families I know.

And/or be “the bad guy” who implements rules and limits

Trying to be good at all times is a tremendous trap. They don't say that good intentions pave the road to hell for no reason.

Be the bad guy. As a parent, you're not your kids beast friend. You shouldn't be. You should be setting examples and teaching them to be good, upstanding, reasonable adults. This involves telling them no and setting boundaries. Fair, firm and consistent.

Agreed - though I would add rationally empathic.

I've found that if I follow-up, immediately, with an understanding of my child's perspective, they are more on-board with what I am modeling. Then, it's not just about me being the authority, but me demonstrating why I have 'a better idea'.

It makes it almost effortless to be fair, firm, and consistent, and was the one thing missing from my own rather draconian childhood.

COVID absolutely warped kids’ brains in ways we will not understand for decades, but also kids seem to have a hardwired affinity for other kids. For example, I have a two year old who has never seen Youtube/Netflix/TV and has a revolving door of playmates. She loves “reading” books with us, and her non-negotiable toddler “preference” is always for books with photos of other kids. Not animals or cartoons or fun drawings etc. Occasionally we show her photos on our phones and she swipes fast until she finds photos of babies/kids.

Covid didn't do anything to children, the reaction to covid from governments and parents did.

Technically correct! The best kind of correct.

Those silly parents, overreacting by dying, losing their jobs, and and not being available 100% during a generation-defining global crisis of confidence.

hmmm I was generally not that much available during confinment while the kids were kind of let on their own at home...

But there are so many things they did with just fabrics, colored papers, pencils, paint, glue, tape and things in general. I let my daughters on their own for hours without a screen. Sometimes they would complain about not knowing what to do and wanting to watch a show but when I give them hard no I perfectly knew I will find them hours later totally entertained having made a big mess in their room by building things, be them clothing for their puppets, decors for their figurines, cardboard swords and axes, building a giant lego construction, among other things.

Those silly governments, making sure the medical system was slowly whittled down from something that was once actually pretty good at taking care of it's citizens to a system that forced/required society to completely grind to a halt from a pandemic because of exterior motives (votes, profits, etc.)

Those silly large media/news companies, not being responsible and considering the results and after-effects of their always-online, constant fear-mongering instead of focusing on delivering factual information and minimizing sensationalism.

Governments and media worked together to cause this mass panic resulting in mass lockdowns and a failure of healthcare systems in the first world. The world should have been ready for this but governments were focusing on profits and ulterior motives over people.

It's a massive shame that so many children will have been mentally affected by the short-term and long-term damage of these relatively short but extremely harmful lockdowns - socially, mentally, and physically - not to mention all the adults whose lives have been irreparably changed by the inactions of their governments. "Society" should be ashamed of itself for causing so much harm but we're all too busy being distracted with perceived differences between each other and trying to survive with the after-effects of a mis-managed pandemic (inflation, food/supply shortages) still running rampant.

I hope when/if I have children that we don't have another pandemic - I don't want the government forcing my children to stay locked in their home from panicked officials and a broken healthcare system.

> Those silly governments, making sure the medical system was slowly whittled down from something that was once actually pretty good at taking care of it's citizens to a system that forced/required society to completely grind to a halt from a pandemic because of exterior motives (votes, profits, etc.)

Lockdowns were almost universal, and also happened in countries where the healthcare systems are robust.

Healthcare systems are statistical mechanisms. They can't treat abnormal amounts of people at once. And no, we can't overbuild them to cover extreme contingency, it's not economically viable.

It's the same thing as with bank runs or your ISP's network bandwidth.

The overrunning of the hospital system never happened. All sorts of impromptu covid facilities were constructed all around the country but never used. This was not because of the "flatten the curve" efforts - it just was not necessary.

We now know that, by far, the overwhelming majority of folks that needed medical treatment and/or died from covid had existing health - specifically respiratory - conditions that made them far more likely to succumb to the virus. The rest were elderly and at risk of all sorts of virus related deaths, including the common cold and flu.

We panicked, and overreacted as a society, and made an awful lot of mistakes and bad decisions. In the process we crushed a lot of people and children unnecessarily.

There's an entire generation of kids that are simply broken for life now. We just swept them into the next grade level and said "they'll make it up, don't worry"... except they are not making it up. There's a lot more to childhood than reading text books and solving multiplication problems - we robbed all of that for literally no good reason.

There's a lot of lessons to learn from the pandemic. Can we pass the final exam though? I think probably not...

> This was not because of the "flatten the curve" efforts - it just was not necessary.

Citation needed. How can you be sure of a broad conclusion like this?

Because the overwhelming majority of people who contracted covid did not require any medical attention. Even the CDC admits covid statistics were largely projections because of significant under-reporting (because people did not visit their medical provider).

Additionally, the "flatten the curve" efforts were based on falsehoods issued by NIH and CDC, such as cloth masks preventing transmission. If there was going to be an overrun of the hospital system, it would have occurred during the time the public was being mislead about prevention techniques. It didn't...

It seems the forced termination of a significant portion of hospital staff would have had the greatest impact on overloading the system - yet even that didn't matter.

So, flipped on it's head - I think a citation is required when we argue these efforts prevented an overloaded system.

Well except to the ones that died from it.

While tragic, the numbers are so close to zero they are statistically zero.

Over 3 years, CDC has logged 650 total (~216 per year)[1] covid-related deaths for the 0-4 age group. 5-18 years is a grand total of 997 (~332 per year)[1].

These numbers rival fatalities that we don't even blink an eye at, such as automotive related deaths[2].

WHO statistics indicate the US loses around 20,000 - 30,000 children under the age of 5 every year[3].

None of this is to say child covid related deaths are not tragic - of course they are. But the numbers are so small that it makes little sense to worry about them.

[1] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-Focus-...

[2] https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/child...

[3] https://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-detai...

Eating is immensly boring and I hated it as a kid. I wish I had something to distract myself from the boredom of eating.

Despite not having anything like that as a child I now, at 43, eat all my meals in front of a computer while gaming or watching or reading something.

> Eating is immensly boring and I hated it as a kid. I wish I had something to distract myself from the boredom of eating.

This is usually the time people use to have social multigenerationnal social interactions. Outside of weekends parents have stuff to do all day long, kids have to do their homework, then like to immerse in playing. Sometimes kids and parents spend sometime on a specific game, cards and board games are nice for that, but time is usually against them midweek. Meals and Dinner are those time when family member reconnect and chat. There is no reason to be bored unless your family is totally dysfunctionnal.

I would say even as a single adult, meal can be a perfect time to have that disconnected moment and just think for a little while. Maybe you should try it as an exercise if you don't have those moments in other times of the day.

When I was a kid, I too ate in front of TV even if parents/elders told to eat on table, and not in front of a screen.

It is what kids will do.

And I myself have seen this behaviour, presently for kids upto the age of 10 years old (born around 2010), but the behaviour of newer kids born 3-4 years back is quite weird/concerning to me.

Eating is immensely boring and I still hate it as an adult. The food is nice, but I really need to have my mind occupied by something even remotely useful/interesting during that time. Which is why I'm writing this comment now while eating my dinner.

I still wolf down my lunch at work so I can get back to the problem I was working on. Just like I wolfed down my dinner as an 11 year old so I could get back to my Commodore 64. Finally, a comment thread from the point of view (and empathy) of the immensely bored kid. Kids throughout history couldn't wait to get through dinner so they could go back to the TV or to the radio or to whatever other fun thing they wanted to do. There's nothing abnormal about this.

That's why the have (had?) all that fun stuff on the back of the cereal box. Or the morning paper. It's not a new phenomenon that we strive to fill our idle time with some kind of stimulation.

I have three children in the 4-10 yo range. They like screens, and very occasionally they might continue watching a movie while having a snack or weekend dinner, but otherwise it's avoided 99% of the time. I've observed other children unable to eat without a screen adjacent and would never allow it to develop as a habit. I find it incredible that parents have allowed this to form as some sort of crutch. Just boggles my mind.

I don't think it has much to do with the pandemic era. It's parents caving when they should hold firm. It would've happened regardless.

On the other hand, I know one couple with children who are quite firmly against screens almost at all, but it seems unnecessarily miserly. There is excellent content on YouTube (I watch Asian street food videos with my children, or woodworking or Mark Rober's channel occasionally) and I'd rather my kids experience many games ahead of passive TV viewing. Better to play (e.g., Minecraft or Goat Simulator) than watch another kid play the same thing.

In our family we have the older kids read aloud during dinner while the younger ones eat (0-11 age range).

I think there's also some "monkey see, monkey do" at play.

Many parents scroll their devices endlessly. It's no surprise their kids want to as well. If you don't want your kids to do it, lead by example. That's easier said than done though.

Honestly that is probably because the parents themselves are watching stuff. Having a screen powered on in the room you are eating* and or generally having social interactions sounds mind blowingly stupid to me.

*I would say except from the occasionnal twice a month pizza / popcorns in front of a movie.

My kids are 9 and 12 now and their computer/tablet/phone/switch is in a shelve in a specific room and they perfectly know they will be punished if they use them without asking me. And time is always limited. They are now using the tablet more as a drawing tool on Krita and to play music than anything. When asked for music I sometimes allow more time but I am doing regular checks that they aren't glued to the screen.

While this isn’t good I certainly recall having TV on during meals when I was a kid in the 1990s and know many older people who eat watching TV. Not sure this is new.

I have replied to another comment on your topic

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34640384

My kid has had youtube since birth. I would play nursery songs before 1 y.o. Later he was onto toy car and lego videos. Now he is 5, a couple months ago he discovered NumberBlocks and learned to count, first in English and later in our native tongue.

And not just counting, they also teach addition, subtraction and simple multiplication. He can count to 100 and has concepts of thousand, million and even minus one - he wants to know if it is between 0 and 1 :) Then he discovered AlphaBlocks and learned most letters, but he says the letters in English.

Youtube has really been one of his nannies. I don't believe in restricting his access unless he gets obsessed with the tablet. But he plays with legos and blocks most of the time. And the future is digital, I want him to be a digital native. Maybe not all kids react the same way, so every case is sui-generis.

I'm similar. My approach is "guidance and bumper guards, not rules and restrictions."

I don't meter or numerically limit screen time, but I make sure my kids understand they should have a healthy balance between activities (guidance) and if I feel like they've been e.g. watching TV all morning, I'll tell them to turn it off and pick a different activity (bumper guards).

I only really have three rules:

1. I don't negotiate with terrorists. If you throw a fit, I will help you calm down, but any negotiation for whatever it is you wanted immediately ends, settled in my favor.

2. Everyone sleeps in their own beds. I'll make exceptions for exceptional circumstances (severe illness etc) but I haven't had to yet.

3. Family dinner is at the table with all devices off while the whole family is there.

I've never felt like this served me poorly, and (so far...) none of my kids have some problems I've noticed or heard of family members or friends having with their kids (kid is 5 and won't sleep alone, kid throws fits in the supermarket for toys or snacks, etc). I obviously don't know that has a causal relationship with my parenting style, but like everyone else, I like to think it does.

How many adults would eat happily if you took their phones and TV away? I reckon most of them would get just as perturbed and restless as the kids. I think it’s fairly normal really and we only find it odd because it’s an ipad now… I always had a book at the dinner table as a kid, there’s the stereotype of dad reading the paper at the breakfast table, many families eat dinner with the TV on, restaurants give kids activity menus, etc.

As a new(ish) parent, I'm astonished at how readily most parents hand off their kids over to YouTube/tablet/phone. I even saw a stroller the other day with a permanent mount for the phone.

I haven't banned YouTube (yet), but I have limited it almost completely due to concerns about the long-term effects of extended use from such an early age. Those concerns will only deepen as my son gets older - there's a lot of good content on YouTube but it's sitting under a mountain of mindless, click-bait, influencer drivel.

I tried YouTube Kids a few years ago, the experience was not great - content isn't pre-screened, so weird stuff can slip through the cracks. It's also obviously not being maintained with a sincere attempt to solve the problems that parents actually have - for example, as your kid gets older and they get a google account, they can't sign in to YouTube Kids, you have to sign in with an Adult account, but then that account is on their iPad and available to any other Google apps they have installed.

Parental restrictions on Google accounts also don't let you easily limit a child's account to an allowlist of approved channels. I would love to let my kids use their daily screen time to learn/enjoy a mix of channels my wife and I have vetted, but it's excruciatingly difficult to actually do this, to the point that I've given up trying.

Our approach has ended up being that when the kids ask to watch a youtube video about something, we send them a link to a video via iMessage - watching the video in the Messages app shows just the video, no comments, no "suggested" videos, and it's sufficiently high friction to get us to do it that they don't ask very often.

My next experiment will be using https://github.com/Tzahi12345/YoutubeDL-Material to download videos from our allowlisted channels, but I super resent that I'm having to engineer solutions to Google's disinterest.

>content isn't pre-screened, so weird stuff can slip through the cracks

You can individually add channels with acceptable content, so unless you're adding sketchy channels, nothing is going to slip through.

>as your kid gets older and they get a google account, they can't sign in to YouTube Kids

I feel like by the time a child needs their own Google account they have moved beyond YouTube Kids, no?

I’m also horrified by the responses of parents here who are lax with YouTube, even to a slight degree. It’s like they feel that they are morally bound to find a middle-ground stance despite not having a good mechanistic explanation for why YT is OK even at small dosages, given how it has already radicalized people and impacted the global political order on the basis of fake news? Why isn’t the concern far more sweeping? Like, what harm can erring on the side of caution actually do and not letting your kids access YT before their cognitive development has progressed far enough so that they have self-control and have explored their own interests without the interference of internet culture?

> why YT is OK even at small dosages, given how it has already radicalized people and impacted the global political order on the basis of fake news? Why isn’t the concern far more sweeping?

That concern comes in during puberty and above, not when the kids are small. When they are 16-23, not when they are 1-9 years old. You have significantly less control at that time and crucially, should be transitioning to loosing control. They are getting ready for independent living or college.

Can you explain how you are sure that the concern is limited to the age range that you specified? You make it sound like there’s just one way that kids can grow. It’s completely possible for kids to gain access to bad internet stuff at a far younger age and they could carry it with them for a long time.

You will never be _sure_ that it's limited to that age range, because what's appropriate for a given age is pretty subjective. I don't know why people are obsessed with making perfectly isolated bubbles for kids, it's just not possible.

Because internet consumption has addictive properties that can negatively impact the cognitive development of a child regardless of age range? Gosh, I feel so irresponsible for intervening with the kind of information that children consume. Perhaps it’s better I expose them to alcohol and drugs sooner than later!

Inoculation against the downsides of socmed is impossible without exposure. Given that we discuss this on socmed, it would be purely hypocritical to argue here that any access is giving in to addiction - unless you believe us no better than meth addicts fighting in the street?

You literally talk about "radicalized people and impacted the global political order". I dont worry 4 years old will do any of that.

You think 3-6 yo kids can get radicalized by YT fake news?

My kids watch a bit of YT kids. I used to be dead against it. Two things happened:

- One, my attention and energy is in fact finite. Perhaps I could work less, earn less, have more energy to give to them, but I just can't.

- There is a lot of good stuff there, and I see positive aspects of it on my kids. They learn songs. One of my daughters knew the alphabet by the age of 2, the other could count to 20. The oldest one comes up with so many nuggets of information: how volcanoes work, where the Eiffel Tower is, and so on. I also find the bad stuff on YT kids is fairly rare, and easy to ban.

In moderation I really think it's fine, and arguably even beneficial. Like most diverse experiences of life.

But why is YT necessary? Couldn’t you have given your kids access to a more curated and education-dedicated video platform instead? Heck, even Disney+ sounds better here.

> despite not having a good mechanistic explanation for why YT is OK even at small dosages

Do you have an explanation for YT is NOT ok even at small dosages?

Did we miss out on all of the HN articles and studies about how socmed consumption negatively impacts people’s levels of happiness, self-esteem, and ability to focus, and have we no experience of it?

We didn't, we just read and understood it - in particular, just because a site is classified "socmed", doesn't mean any kind of contact with it will instantly materialize those negative impacts you mention. Or that just because a site is classified "vod", it's substantially safer.

YouTube is mostly just a video-on-demand site. The social aspects are immaterial to how kids use the platform.

No, it’s not instant. As a matter of fact it starts with a click, then another, then another, and before you know it you’ve lost an hour just doom-scrolling low-intelligence content.

The actual studies are way more nuanced then that. It is actually funny to compare what actual studies, whether sociological or psychological say and what gets written on HN.

"Necessary" is a strong word. It's acceptable IMO, and my kids like it. If you want some more reasons:

- I strongly feel my children have agency, within reason. They like it, more than Disney+, and it's not a strong detractor.

- Frankly, most of the YT stuff they watch is, really, more appropriate. Bite-sized sciency or crafty things, with a silly song. Disney+ stuff I could find myself was genuinely either a bit boring, or a bit naff, or for older children. [EDIT] Timeless classics like Lion King are often too scary for them, and there's plenty of inappropriate stuff there too, just due to the passage of time. Let's just say, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves hasn't aged well.

- There is a much wider selection. My younger daughter is fascinated by aeroplanes. She watches video after video of planes taking off and landing, helicopters hovering and so on. Where do I find it on Disney+?

- Sometimes I see things I don't like on YT, it's a one-click ban for the creator. I have never seen anything wildly inappropriate. It's maybe an issue if your kids are watching it for hours on end, not so much if it's 20 mins after dinner, and I'm in the room.

I was talking to my mum about this, who remembers the same laments about letting children listen to the radio (mindless entertainment, no parental control), and her mum remembers the same thing about children being allowed to read their own colorful children's books, as opposed to adults reading a boring small-print book. When my younger cousins were growing up, there was family lament that they meet up with friends and play video games - yet they didn't grow up to be antisocial psychos. IMO we tend to over-demonise the new.

I get the parallels with past generations but YT is different and you as a parent should be thinking about its specific properties as a platform. It might have some thought-provoking entertainment but it is too huge and assorted, and where I come from, it has been weaponized by corrupt political families to spread historical revisionism packaged as “educational content” which ultimately brought them back to power. Then there’s the flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, etc. It’s not worth the trouble as I’m not going to be able to watch my kids all the time. I’d rather they develop their critical thinking and hobbies through offline avenues before they are exposed to addictive apps that make it too easy to discover disinformation.

> you as a parent should be thinking about

I'm sure you mean it well, but verbatim, you are in no position to tell me what I should be thinking about, especially as a parent.

I sympathise with your view, but I haven't seen a single anti vax or fiat earth snippet. There is a really nice Canadian lady who builds stuff out of Lego, I quite enjoy it.

It seems like YT's horde of psychiatrists has tapped into parents' minds as well, so they are programmed into believing they can't downshift in any aspect of their lives and won't sacrifice shit to actually pay attention to their very own children, because: work, money, stress, no time, no energy. Better let YouTube take care of them.

Society is fucked.

This comment is the kind of doomposting I use HN to avoid. If you seriously think this, I believe you ought to reread the comment guidelines and refrain from sharing this belief in the future.

I believe if your rainbow bubble is strong enough, you don't have to react to any doomposts out there, because everything's good in the world and nothing can shatter your mindset.

Besides: refrain from sharing this belief in the future? Are you from the belief police or something?

YT, like the real world has the same malicious components. Newspaper, TV, dipshit relatives.

If there's a questionable video being watched, you ask questions, walk them through it, ask them their thoughts "does this seem to make logical sense?", and guide them through it.

I have had good experience with using YT Kids:

1. set it to approved content only because the recommendations are horrifying.

2. from the parents account on YouTube mobile app use the share menu -> share with kids when I find reasonable and good content for them.

They watch a lot of JPL documentaries, BBC nature documentaries, crafsman videos, kurzgesagt videos.

I think it has its uses. For example its really handy when changing nappies as my toddler wriggles like crazy and it helps to distract him whilst I getting rid of the poo.

I physically removed our only television from the lounge to behind some furniture because our eldest (who was 6) was behaving more and more like a drug addict: alternating wheedling, begging, pleading, shouting, to get television.

Once I did that, and he saw it really wasn't an option, he changed quite quickly - after around 3 months - and we have it back now, although there's no screen time except weekends (or if someone's ill). Seems to be working so far.

Zero YouTube, though. Don't trust it. Might revisit at some point, but even then I'd want the paid version to remove ads.

But do you watch YouTube or use screens around him? That's my problem with the advice to limit screen time. Why should I be telling my child not to do something that everyone around him is doing?

Because a child doesn't know when to stop.

As an adult, I can always feel the pull of real life. If I keep watching YouTube or playing video games I know it's going to impact my job, wife, kid, etc. Some adults aren't even that good at regulating this, but I think kids are, on average, way worse about it. Many don't know real consequences or regrets for failing to manage their time.

Although I'll admit I do agree with your comment in the sense that I think I should stop using YouTube entirely. People are discussing how it can really mess with a kid's brain, and I don't feel like I'm immune as an adult. Yes, I have more discipline than a child, but this feels like it can be a cheap acknowledgement made as a rationalization, like a chainsmoker saying his lungs are stronger than a kid's, or an alcoholic saying the same of their liver.

Many adults don’t know how to stop either. The UI/UX is tailored exactly for that purpose, to make you consume as much as possible. This is my problem with youtube kids, the content may be okay but priming for later is still going on.

> But do you watch YouTube

I do sometimes, although nothing he can see.

> Why should I be telling my child not to do something that everyone around him is doing

Me doing something isn't the same as "everyone around him".

If you refactor that to reflect reality, you get "Why should I be telling my child not to do something that I am doing?"

Then my answer is: they're a child. Not an adult. I don't let my son drive, even though I can. I work; he goes to school. I drink alcohol; he doesn't. I'm on social media; he's not. I'm married; he's not. I watch horror movies; he doesn't. Brains fully develop by 25. My son is now 7. He isn't just a smaller version of me. He's a child version of me.

You drink in front of your kid?

Haha! Well, if you put it like that...

Yes. I don't drink much, once or twice a month, but if we're all round someone else's house I may have a beer in my hand.

You never had a beer at a restaurant?

No. I find the concept of drinking beer with a meal disgusting on multiple levels.

As a kid I hated when adults were drinking alcohol in my presence. They got even louder and dumber than usual after drinking.

Drinking alcohol doesn't necessarily mean you will go louder and dumber. You know, like youtube, there are limits.

You don't notice it as an adult but kids are very observant. You impair yourself with any amount of alcohol.

Does this no answer your question about my child see me drinking beer? Or drinking coffee, if it's easier to not get distracted by the specific drink he's not allowed?

My point was a bit unrelated to all this, so I'm just checking your original question's answered.

Yes. Thank you for the answer. Sorry for my curiosity. It was off topic.

Not at all - just checking!

Well I know that I have been a non drinker until the age of 27 and I still often don't feel the need to drink alcohol even in a social event especially if I have to drive (better to say I don't drink tonight than starting and count your consumption). I could and still definitely observe it on long family dinners. But it depends a lot on the people tolerance and the kind of drinks. There are worlds of difference between a 4% of alcohol beer and a 6.5% one if you have a pint.

My mother has always been laughing stupidly with a single glass of wine, my father could drink 3 before you notice. Same when I am not drinking and my partner have a beer. She won't speak louder or do act differently after 1 or 2 light beers. But in her case the line is really thin between the virtually unnoticeable state, the moment you realize she should stop drinking and the moment she is completely wasted or start feeling bad, especially if the drinks are stronger. On other people it is more gradual.

It looks like you have unresolved issues (trauma?) from being around alcoholics or people with lack of self control. But I don't. One beer with a meal is not "disgusting" and does not significantly impair an adult either.

It just disgusts me personally. There's probably a lot of factors involved. But there's no such thing as a safe dose of alcohol. Especially ingested routinely.

I don't watch the next suggested video after my video plays.

I admit that the never ending algorithm of YouTube is problematic, but your point about kids fixating on things highlights it is nothing new. When I was a kid it was TV and video games. We had rules about when both could be used, and they were often taken away as punishments.

As we got older, my siblings and I had full on fights over who got the use the phone and when.

My point is YT is just another thing parents need to manage.

> My point is YT is just another thing parents need to manage.

Yet another thing. We manage it by not allowing any use of it.

Screen time for weekends only is a good option. We do the same and so far no issues. There was a bit of nagginging at first but if firm kids eventually accept it. Parents who give in to nagging are making a disservice to their own kids

YouTube is terrifying. Ever since I read about people faking up Peppa Pig episodes with inappropriate content, I keep my two kids (3yr and 7yr) away from it.

Edit: „Elsagate“ seems to be the appropriate term.

https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-39381889.amp

Sadly, the internet is a great place for psychopaths / sadistic people.

There is a lot of gacha content too. Inappropriate cartoons that look like furry animation, that was some weird rabbit hole I went into. And many of those had the "cannot minimize it because it is kids content."

I think it's best to download content to usb stick and plug it in the tv. You know your kids would probably be safer that way.

Elsagate is only going to get worse with the advent of AI-powered content. We're already at the point where passable robo-Seinfeld is possible...

I guess a lot of people must be using YouTube in a different way to how we do. We do allow our 8-year-old to sometimes watch YouTube, after the homework is finished or if sick.

What does he watch? Things like....

* 40-50 year old Russian language cartoons, to help with his language learning.

* Quite a few British shows like Edwardian Farm[1], Victorian Farm[2] and Wartime Farm. Pretty educational stuff.

* Documentaries about stuff he's interested in. At one point it was Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory, another time it was the Cutty Sark[3]. He went through a real tall ships period. We followed this up last summer by visiting both the Victory in Portsmouth and the Cutty Sark in London. It was amazing the way he was able to point things out on the real ships, because he'd watched the documentaries.

* Ski racing. He's mad for it. Races himself on weekends and obsesses with who is winning the World Cup races. Mikaela Shiffrin hitting the record was a big moment.

We never see any adverts on there. I don't know why, maybe something to do with a combination of uBlock Origin and Linux.

We do have a Netflix subscription, because I enjoy watching a few shows on there, but we've never watched anything in the Kids section, because it's 95% crap.

So from our perspective, YouTube is quite a reasonable educational tool, when used under supervision and in moderation.

Edit: I forgot the Australian stuff we watch together! Bush Tucker Man[4] and Fishing the Wild[5] are two worth mentioning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwardian_Farm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Farm

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutty_Sark

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcsZHOD9P8E&list=PL7HSPnTFVA...

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1xGBPQlH_A&list=PLvP8XBCt3L...

It is a tremendous resource. Also later on, the educational content (e.g. Khan Academy and similar) are better than a teacher in most cases.

Your 8-year old ski races on weekends?

Yes.

We live in Austria and it's just what kids do. In Australia, they learn to swim at a very young age, in Austria it's skiing. He's not the only one racing under-10s class!

There's another comment here taking the piss (with the yachting comment), and I too used to have certain pre-conceived ideas about skiing. Sure, if you go to St. Anton and Kitzbuehel, there's a certain vibe. However, at my local slopes it's completely different. It's just regular people going skiing with their families.

In Austria of course they have their football (soccer) idols, but apart from that it's all about snow sports.

Learning to swim young can be done anywhere though that has a public pool.

Yes, that's true and such pools are ubiquitous in Australia. The town I grew up in, 200km from the ocean, population 4,500, had a full Olympic size 50m pool. It was just one of the local amenities. We had school swimming carnivals where everyone was expected to swim in at least one 50m race.

I don't think the same access to pools is true in other more temperate climates, at least not from my experience living in Europe.

Skiing for kids in Austria isn't quite at the same level, depending on where you live perhaps, but my son is off to a school ski race event later this month, with thirteen of his classmates. It's an officially sanctioned school event.

Lived in UK and Australia and both have a decent amount of pools and kids programs. In the UK state high schools often had pools even in not so great areas.

Obviously yeah skiing is insanely more expensive to operate and there would be less of it due to geography.

What limits swimming in other countries has to be culture not the availability of concrete, water and chlorine production needed to allow people to swim anywhere.

Swimming lessons in Australia are very common. General pool safety/ability but also beach/surf confidence. In summer, there are beach swimming programs that are very well attended. Our 4-10 yos did a week-long beach program last month, learning how to deal with waves, signal for help, swim to safety while clothed, etc. Think it was the second or third year running for the older two, who are quite competent in waves and had done multiple years of pool swimming lessons.

Only in winter, summer is for yacht racing.

It's very normal in Northern climates for kids to ski.

Winter sports are like any other - kids join local clubs at early age and compete within their age category. No different then ballet, dancing, soccer, American football, basketball.

It's quite common in Europe for communities that live near the ski areas or have convenient public transport to them. You see lots of kids racing in the Pyrenees. Ski areas here often offer discounted season passes for kids and local residents. It's a relatively accessible sport if you live near by. If you don't then it can be expensive (lodging, ski passes and equipment). Japan is similar. It has a large number of ski resorts and they often have low cost lodging nearby. Kids from the local communities learn to ski young.

So it's great as an educational tool—my daughter is not yet two and surprised both me and my wife this way: when we whipped out a pack of flashcards we had never shown her, she already knew almost all of the shapes and most of the animals, can do the alphabet in random-access order, and was even about 50/50 on what the obverse sides of the alphabet cards depicted, only failing to associate the starting sound of the word with the letter (so e.g. she guessed Frog for the image on the back of the T card, when it was a turtle).

Then there are the disturbing parts. The ad starts “this is a word...” and I skip it but she chimes in to complete it, “smore denna word” from whenever I haven't been able to skip it... and I have to say “no it's not, they're lying to you, it's not even a word.” Somehow AirBnB’s marketing idea is to imprint deep upon the brains of impressionable children? I get the ads where they basically try to interrupt her YouTube channel with some other show about Barbie or Peppa Pig, they're trying to get the baby hooked on a new YouTube channel so that they can get in on this huge industry. But then there's a lot that are just questionably targeted, “Toddlers: I need to tell you all that when I needed to start a business and it needed a website, I turned straight to whatever-the-fuck.com and got it set up in ten minutes!”

The ads aren't the only part that I find questionable of course. There are real questions about her becoming a consumer and us not really being present for a playtime when we are monitoring her watching those programs. Take away the TV and she loves to draw on any piece of paper you give her, she craves walking outdoors and even demands to climb the steep steps up to home (assisted of course), loves to be upside down or piggyback. One of her first words was “hewpfull!” and she demands to help put cans/bottles in the recycling and close doors for us and turn out her own light at bedtime.

Opportunity costs, they’ll get you every time.

They're able to target not just kids, but they know the personalities of so many people, i doubt it's very difficult for them to determine which groups are most susceptible... E.g. Addicts, gamblers, religious nuts, students, or anyone with compulsive behavior (think of anyone who talk to much or rant on forums, like Reddit, community help services, or YouTube comments.)

Watch a single video having to do with games and your labled for life. This kinda data might not be being sold but it's definitely being used to further their hold. Google can't afford to lose users. They're at the top of their game. Only place left to go is down and they'll do it themselves if not for the death grip default services or no services MO they force on people in America. Can't even setup a cell phone without having 5 to 7 hidden carrier service providers checking to see what apps u use and who you share content with, what form of communication u use and how often? So that if you start using it, especially if it's to do business or it's professional, they want to know so they can SELL it to you. Or at the very least hit u with the world wide royalty free persistent electronic License that waives your present and future human rights for Christ sake. It's bad here . Many aren't paying attention or in the mind set that nothing can be done and all is hopeless. That's how my parents act about it anyway.

Mind sharing the 40-50 yo Russian language cartoons ?

To my grandparents / great grandparents generation at the time (70/80's) TV has become the world's nanny would have generated all the same comments as this.

If you watched tv - the idiotbox - for more than 15 minutes your eyes would go square.

That is simply not true, with television you also had the panic of "brain rot" but at least you could still trust public television networks with not showing dubious content.

Youtube for kids seems to be a rabbithole place where you end up with "Spiderman kisses Anna", very obvious advertisements or very trippy shows while on public television you had kid shows with educative touch on them (a visit to the forest, children songs,...)

I allow my children to watch a very curated list of things and free reign on the Belgian "kids channel" but Youtube? Never.

The other difference is that with public TV there will be moments where it shows stuff the kids couldn't care less about, and they'll go do something else. With limitless online streaming, there is always something to keep their attention.

There were plenty of cartoon-only and kids-only TV channels when I was growing up. Of course, I sometimes got bored of the shows, but kids also sometimes get bored of YT.

I don't know about you, but I spent a long time staring at cathode ray tubes when I was a kid and I think it certainly affected my cognition.

Cartoon Network for example has always had advertising aimed at children, and some shows that definitely was considered dubious in my household growing up (in far away Romania), such as Cow and Chicken and that show's obsession with butts. And there was generally no educative touch to these shows, they were mostly interested in children's entertainment. The same was true for most cartoon shows I saw growing up - they usually didn't contain explicitly educational content, though of course they were incomparable in quality to things like the spam on YT Kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influence_of_Sesame_Street

See the critical reception section for highlights including; Sesame Street also introduced children to a shallow pop culture, undermined American education, and relieved parents of their responsibility of teaching their children how to read.

"That is simply not true, with television you also had the panic of "brain rot" but at least you could still trust public television networks with not showing dubious content."

No you couldn't. TV has always been used for nefarious purposes, especially political.

And those children grew up to wreck the world economy.

What if there was some truth to that, and YouTube was 10x worse?

Interesting. It is entirely possible.

For it to be the case I would expect to see a split in the population on many metrics, especially around education, dividing the with / without TV / YouTube groups.

Presumably the adverse effects would overcome the dominant factor which I assume is socioeconomic.

As for the making your eyes go square - I doubt youtube has any more effect that the old tube tv! Its also believed that reading books gives you bad eyesight ...

'Smart'-phones have become defacto pacifiers for teenagers and adults alike. Children are merely imitating adult behaviour.

If you don't want your kids pacified their entire lives, make sure you're not pacified yourself first.

And it continues into adulthood. Millions of adults being swallowed up in YouTube and streaming services for hours every day. Why bother to go outside? That can't be good either.

They shouldn't be going outside, at least while they're kids: they can get their parents arrested!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34625907

YouTube is actively harmful to children, it’s full of crap content, endless ads and the algorithm takes you to the darkest pits in no time at all. You like paw patrol? How about some videos of the pups killing each other? And kids love candy (brain candy) even if it is of no nutritional value - at this age they don’t know better.

We found that no amount of supervision or curation by adults keeps the child completely away from this harmful content. And the YouTube Kids thing is not offered in our region. For us the only solution was to ban YouTube entirely and it’s one of the best decisions we ever made.

There is good educational stuff on Youtube, but you need to actively look for it in the sea of shit.

These two are in my favourites:

https://www.youtube.com/@dianxixiaoge https://www.youtube.com/@cnliziqi

Liziqi had some issues with her production company and stopped doing new videos, and her stuff was WAY too cutesy to be real.

Dianxi is more "authentic", but still relaxing to watch.

Yeah the point is that a young child is not going to “actively look” - they just follow the trail of candy until they end up in the witches’ house :(

That goes back to curation and oversight by the parents though.

We use YouTube premium (so no ads) and there have been no snuff films of the pups. But my kids know not only all of the planets, but all of the dwarf planets. I sure didn't teach them that.

My kids watch Paw Patrol all of the time on YT.

We have not encountered the type of content you outline, at all.

Having caught some Paw Patrol, I don't even know that kids should be watching genuine Paw Patrol. It's just so damn frenetic... Maybe I'm an old man yelling at clouds, but I feel that something slower-paced like Mr Rogers has to be better for you, right?

There's a TV section. https://www.lucieslist.com/guides/screen-time-kids-research/...

It's kind of funny that MTV brought about a collective panic with regard to the content kids were exposed to, but looking back, it and Americas Funniest Home Videos were the start of today's endless algorithmic hellholes. MTV was an endless stream of narratively disconnected images largely detached from the audio. AFV was an endless stream of people falling and getting pranked.

From the founder of buzzfeed: That scrambling of cultural content was starting to happen in the mid-1980s, when Jameson was writing. Peretti's favorite example of this phenomenon is MTV. Whereas variety shows and televised concerts in the 1960s and 70s provided context and structure to the music they presented, MTV instead gave viewers a rapid succession of wildly different sounds and visual accompaniments to those sounds, without any logic connecting one video to another. That, in Jameson's framework, serves to confuse viewers, harm their ability to use culture to build identities, and increase the risk of people failing to build identities altogether — making them "schizophrenic" in his terminology.

"The rapid fire succession of signifiers in MTV style media erodes the viewers sense of temporal continuity," Peretti writes. "To use the same words that Jameson uses to describe schizophrenic experiences, the images that flash across the MTV viewers' retina are 'isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence.'" (As Wolters notes, those rapid fire MTV signifiers are "Not so unlike those GIF-loaded posts on BuzzFeed.") https://www.vox.com/2014/5/20/5730762/buzzfeeds-founder-used...

I think its quite immoral to advertise to children given many forms of advertisement are manipulative. That this now happens globally en-masse is a failure of the species.

It's a shame because I would love to get into this industry given my skill set is a perfect fit and entertaining children is fun and rewarding, but that its driven by advertising makes the notion abhorrent.

Oh, I didn't realize CoComelon was that popular, much less top-grossing YouTube channel in America. Our older kid (3.5yo now) has been listening to and occasionally watching their videos, which we picked just because - unlike most others we could find - they weren't weird or disturbing.

We obviously don't let our kid listen to, or watch, those music videos on YouTube. That would be crazy! We use YouTube only as a content discovery mechanism, and if the kids get to see any of it, it's under our experienced supervision[0]. Normally, we identify quality songs and videos[1], and then use youtube-dl (yt-dlp these days) to create an offline-playable, ad-free copy (usually with a pass through Audacity or ffmpeg to fix quality issues and strip out channel jingles, baked-in ads, and other annoyances). We then put those songs and videos on a spare phone that's not connected to the Internet, and use that for music and occasional screen time.

I honestly can't imagine doing it any other way. Yes, maybe the yt-dlp way isn't the most kosher, but there isn't an option I know of that I could pay for that doesn't have ads, questionable content and/or randomly risky autoplay.

(Relevant context: we're in Poland, but we're exposing our kids to ~50/50 mix of English and Polish songs so they're being constantly exposed to both languages.)

[0] - I can't stress this enough: giving YouTube to small children requires constant monitoring of a person who understands how it works. For example, the other day we left our daughter with her grandpa and allowed him to play her music videos from his phone. Half an hour later, we had to carefully explain to him, that just because the video that just finished playing had Peppa the Pig on it, doesn't mean that the disco rap song on that video, praising sexual conquest and drug abuse, is suddenly OK for a 3.5 y.o.

[1] - Again, you really need to watch a given video yourself first to be sure it's OK for the kids. The first time we exposed our kid to music videos, there was that one song about a fox we played, that seemed all fine until we reached a scene featuring said fox having a shotgun pressed to its head, begging for life to the farmer that caught it. That was the first and the last time I didn't watch the video end-to-end before showing it to my kid.

There is no way that I am letting my kids have unattended access to youtube.

Without careful shepherding its a gateway to some really quite nasty stuff.

Not to mention the fucking adverts for stuff. I get pestered enough for stuff they see in advert breaks for the TV.

We lost the battle with netflix et al for my kids years ago. But they have a time limit because other nothing else gets done. More specifically, they are either watching stuff on the screen or doing something, never both.

Re >> "Plenty of parents have the same debate in their own minds, or with partners and friends: Is letting kids use screens all right, and if so for how long?"

As an anecdote, my mom would only allow me 15 minutes at a time of Tetris on the household GameBoy. My views on kids & screentime is pretty conservative, especially when they're younger, but my mom was down-right draconian!

And your GameBoy wasn’t designed with psychiatrists on the team to improve the addictiveness/retention/click-rate.

It’s important to remember that todays screens aren’t the screens of yore, but quite a lot more devious. It’s fairly obvious that any negative impact of that would be larger on impressionable young minds.

This is such a good point. Games are like this now too, especially on mobile. It's super sad.

It's funny that you bring this up. I think it is a very good point, and it's very accurate. Especially on mobile games and games like farmville, age of empires mobile, etc.... I say it's funny because it's specifically the reason that I can't stand them. I feel like it's always a carrot-and-stick, and the carrot is always moving, uncatchable - but you can get closer to the carrot briefly if you drop more coin in game. I get burned out. Give me SimCity 2000, Age of Empires II, or Quake Arena, and I'll play until I "get my fill", walk away happy, then come back for more later. I still play Sim City 2000 and AoE II semi regularly. It may be an age thing, having gotten into games so long ago.

Yeah kind of a similar story. We had our access to PC revoked when we were 10 because we did not switch off our Rollercoaster tycoon 2 session at 9PM.

Around that age i got my pc privileges revoked. "Grounded" was how it was referred. My parents both were tech savy. I managed to download a keylogger and swipe the login password before end of first week of punishment. I had access for HW, strictly hw. That's when i made a move. By 12 i had custom .exe made but god knows who with GUI capable of ddos among other nettools i shouldn't have had. Nobody taught those things to me. It just happened. Had the idea probably from a movie or tv..

I've found over and over again that prohibition and punishment tend to backfire. Children and adults need a reason so compelling that it will inspire them to not pursue cheap thrills at the expense of something better. Otherwise, they'll take up drinking, watching TV, eating way too much junk food and masturbating. Why shouldn't they? They feel really good!

Speculative, but I think that draconian measures only backfire when the parent-child relationship isn’t trusting and loving in the first place, i.e. if you’ve given your kids reasons to hate your parenting beyond your restrictions on their screen time. When I was a kid I had friends who were pretty strict about their internet access, but they did not mind because they have a good relationship with their parents anyway—they play sports together, share interests, work on the same hobbies or weekend projects, etcetera. Maybe this is what today’s millenial parents are lacking in, in the first place.

100% of strict parents would say they have a good relationship with their kids (or within a rounding error). If you asked adult children of strict parents if that was true, you would get fewer than 100% positive responses. People aren’t always reliable judges of their own behavior and relationships.

My comment was misleading—I didn’t ask the parents. I asked the then-kids, who are my peers. And looking back, there really were signs of healthy parenting, and my peers grew up to be happy, well-adjusted individuals who liked the idea of family, and they genuinely mourned when they lost a parent.

The way children scream for my tablet time worse than they would for a bottle is terrifying.

All those dopamine manipulation techniques made for adults are cleaning up with kids.

Frankly, kids want what you have. If it's bad, don't use it yourself!

Having kids was the final trigger to make me get rid of my smartphone, although I admit this is an extreme step.

I'm gonna make a meme about a modern Harlow maternal contact experiment.

It was about how monkeys prefer to hug cloth wrapped wire frames rather than food.

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/publications/observer/o...

One of the best things my wife and I did was have a "no phones at the table" rule for ourselves long before our kids were of an age to have a phone. It's made enforcing that rule on our teenagers a complete non-issue now.

We enforce that rule whenever we have guests (typically, family members). Obviously it doesn't need enforcing otherwise, as neither of us has a smart phone.

What's interesting is the defensiveness people express when they are are called up on a social behaviour which would be completely unacceptable and weird a few years ago.

The way these adults scream out long disproven neuroscience old wive's tales to justify their beliefs is terrifying.

All these passive stimuli coming through your normal senses are not in any way hijacking or directly manipulating incentive salience or motivation. They're not drugs. Screen displays do not have the properties of drugs no matter what is displayed on them. Arguing that they do is ignorant and dangerous.

Looks like at this time the screen has triggered quite an emotional (probably irrational) response.

Besides your point is nonsense.

Directly modifying incentive salience via drugs is different than normal environmental stimuli through normal sense perceptions. They require different responses from society and parroting falsehoods like you and others are doing is dangerous. You've already seen what the "drug war" has justified. Bringing that kind of response in to deal with normal aspects of living is wrong.

The youtube is dangerous crowd has about as much legitimacy as the 5G radio is dangerous crowd.

Blah blah blah.

This is all nonsense and has nothing to do with the original comment.

It has everything to do with the original comment. I'm trying to explain that "dopamine techniques" isn't a thing anymore than "chakra techniques" but it's obviously not getting through.

I was raised pretty much alone and spent far far too much time on the computer, always online and on the internet other than going to school and "surviving" - was exposed to 4chan at a young age, nobody monitoring what I was doing online, nobody caring for my struggles in school growing up other than "oh you've got great marks, you must be doing well in school!". My parents didn't really pay attention to me growing up other than to serve their own emotional interests which didn't help.

I'm 100% sure it's the primary reason that I'm so socially disadvantaged now in my late 20's - and honestly, probably why my late-diagnosis ADHD and its symptoms are as bad as they are now. The depression and anxieties are huge - and I still spend _far, far_ too much time online recreationally playing video games instead of doing actual work advancing my career.

Yes, the world is increasingly digital - yes, the world is going to be/already is "a computer in every pocket, a device in every room"... that doesn't mean we can't teach our children moderation. Make sure you know what your kids are watching online. Don't substitute parenting with a tablet because you're tired, you had a bad day at work, etc. etc. - I understand there's a lot of specific instances (single mothers/fathers, both parents working long hours, etc. etc.) that encourage this too and it's sad that society has encouraged these behaviors for so long.

A family member of mine allowed her 10 year old to make a TikTok account even though there's a strict age limit of 13 - I shudder to think about the content that the app is filling their easily impressionable mind with at such a young age...

YouTube is a video-sharing service designed to serve as many ads as possible into your eyeballs. It's obvious that if you leave a child to their own devices (hahaha) that they're going to get the full, "un-moderated" Youtube Kids experience. Toy ads disguised as videos, commercial lifestyles disguised as "influencers", etc. etc. I'm sure there's a lot of decent content there but it's up to the parent to teach kids moderation, teach kids to get off the screen and get outside, talk to friends in person, etc. etc.

There's only so much you can do though with the hours you have in a day. Hopefully society changes and begins to realize that these tools are harmful as much as they are helpful if not used properly.

I'm not American, so I don't know how much people can afford -- a nanny, or not working for one parent.

I can afford my wife not working, but we don't even try to hire a nanny, because we don't know if she won't give the child a gadget, and because the thing little children need the most are us, parents. So we're biting the bullet and doing home duties ourselves.

The gadget seems a solution to a lot of things. For example, cooking with my toddler, or dressing him for a walk is a pain in the neck, and the phone could ease the process. I see parents give gadgets to their 3-6y-olds on bus, just to avoid them asking stupid questions every 10 seconds and pointing finger at everything. The problem with this is that gadget use goes down a spiral: the child will beg for more in other moments, when the phone is not needed. (Someone writes they can't feed kids without gadgets -- I suspect bringing gadgets to the table was the reason for this in the first place.)

I know parents of 3yo kids who barely speak, because parents just gave them the gadget and to mind their own business. We tried an offline phone, and the addiction effect was the same.

I'd also love to read or do hobby code project at home in the evening instead of playing/watching my son. Or I'd do stuff about my career -- read vacancies, send resumes, tec. So untill the time the kid grows up to play by himself, a phone or staying out of home till late evening would have solved this.

The problem with this is that one day I'll come home, and see a 15-year-old guy ask who the hell this man is.

And when else am I supposed to build relations with the child?

These several years when phones can distract kids will be brief for us, adults. (I still remember jokes and funny vids from 2011, and perceive it as not long ago). But they'll be an infinity for the kids.

So, I'll do this without the gadget. If dressing up for a walk takes longer, we'll just stay outdoors a bit less. There's no deadline there. Hobby projects can wait -- I abandoned a lot of them. Board gaming parties, or bar with beer also can wait. All this can wait.

I'm minimizing gadget time with my son. Not because the eyesight or motility issues, but because it's a downward spiral that in the end destroys our relations too. I'm not having a phone "dry law" -- I videocall my parents with the son -- but otherwise I minimize screen time (I don't use phone on bus or subway myself). These precious years, when our kids are fully with us, won't happen again ever.

This strategy is hard to do if you add an another kid to the mix within the first 3 to 4 years. The baby will suck up so much resources that between baby, cleaning, cooking, working, and resting, being able to give that much attention to the older toddler may not be possible and so you decide to entertain them with a tv show or something while you do something else.

At this point, it seems common knowledge that overuse of YouTube and social media can have long-term effects on attention, etc. (I would appreciate references here, if anyone has it)

But do we know how we that relates with other stuff like TV or videogames? It would be interesting to see a study comparing how they affect children growing up, or even adults.

It makes me sick to see all the people who think the answer is to keep their kids away from computers or restrict screen time to a ridiculous degree. That's a real good way to leave your kid ignorant and defenseless when they inevitably escape your prison.

Not only that, you're making sure a kid who might have had an interest in programming or something never develops that interest, or if they do they'll resent you for holding them back.

I agree you shouldn't plop your kids down in front of YouTube and say "here you go". You need to teach your kids to be safe with computers. Failing to do that is neglect at this point in history. You'd be crazy if you never told your kid not to run out in the road or put their hand on a stove. And you'd be crazy if you didn't teach your kids to use computers the right way.

Stop letting your kids be ignorant.

This is where the BBC (CBeebies and CBBC in particular) is worth its weight in gold. I have trust in their programming.

If I have to sum up everything about kid related entertainment I have read on here, it would be:

- Games of the kind we have played or we like to play now are good.

- The new markets kind of games are totally worst thing ever and steal money.

- Arcades and collectible card games we used to spend all our money into were totally different thing.

- The kiddy shows we grew up with were best thing ever. Nothing beats them and they have no fault.

- New shows targeted at kids are all totally boring. All the kids being into them are wrong and don't have fun.

- If current world contains something inappropriate or dangerous that did not existed before, it is outrage and needs to be stopped.

- However, the loss old inappropriate or downright dangerous things we grew up with will harm humanity forever. It is outrage that kids today have everything sanitized. Except stuff from the previous point that should not exist.

Hypocrisy in itself doesn’t invalidate the point about the modern entertainment stuff being problematic. Even if what we grew up with had its own problems.

I was not pointing to hypocrisy. I was pointing to nostalgia and catastrophization being primary drivers of these discussions.

The most unbelievable thing about this site is to me the inability of users to recognize their language and aversion to, well, everything, is the same carbon copied rhetoric every generation has used to deride the technological Boogeyman of the day.

I take your point, but isn’t it possible that every generation was right because they feared that one day we’d go too far and weren’t sure if we were at that point yet?

And one day, we may go too far. We might have already.

I think that some complains about new generations are valid others are not. And as I had own kids I realized that when parents or teachers see an issue, they talk about, comment on it and then try to fix the issue. So sometimes, the observation is actually correct, but it makes adults to work on fixing it and sometimes they succeed. Some generations are more violent then others, some generations have more substance abuse issues. All generations are adjusting to the world they live in.

Moreover, in every single time and generation, you had mix of adults who had many different opinions on generations. One guy writing on the wall at the ancient Rome does not even implies all that much about general opinion of people in Rome.

But, "youtube bad" is not even complain about generation.

I’m sorry I don’t understand how your comment relates to the topic of different generations judging ‘newer’ technology to be somehow more dangerous.

There’s a distinct lack of Neil Postman in this HN comment section. given the arguments being made in favor of YouTube here, his most relevant retort would be “educational television doesn’t teach children to love learning, it teaches them to love television.”

It’s in some way the blind leading the blind; television and smartphone addicted parents rationalizing why it’s ok for their kids to be YouTube and IPad addicted.

Can't the other side of that coin be true?

Luddites ranting about the impending of society as a result of the latest tech?

The tech is a tool. Your example is key. I don't shove the educational tools at the kids and expect magic. I ask them what they're using it for.

The issue isn't the tech. It's the inherent generational superiority and absentee parenting.

You missed: Youtube is teaching your kids white nationalism.

It is so often I see kids sitting in buggy chairs wearing headphone with a phone.

It always makes me really really sad and I don't know why.

My colleague told me they started with zero screen time for their kids but eventually give up because sometimes it's the only way to have a quite dinner.

For people cooking alone with a kid. How do you entertain them while cooking without screentime? Kid is 16 months. Too old to lie still, and too young to help out in any capacity without getting injured.

Edit: Letting them play with utensils gives me about 2-3 minutes.

Is the kid not capable of quietly playing with their toys?

Not making any judgement but I truly think that parenting is a two-person job.

At that age, it is pretty much random. Some kids yes, some not and most of them are in the middle - sometimes yes and other times no. Their attention span is very small, so basically no child will play alone long enough for you to cook.

You cant really force it to happen in any case. Sometimes you cook while fighting the kid and that is that.

> Is the kid not capable of quietly playing with their toys?

You don't have kids right?

Parenting is a many person job but we've decided to incorrectly model our society around the idea that it's a <=2 person job.

Small kids get bored quickly. They play with any given toy the same way I listen to songs: without stopping, until saturation, and then infrequently or not at all. Whether this will last 20 minutes or 2 hours or 2 days - it's kinda random. Even if you give the kid a completely new toy, chances are, they won't get interested immediately. Or even the same day.

Parenting is definitely 2+ person job. At the very least, it's a full-time job for one person.

most of the time my wife is there to look after our 16 month old baby when I cook, but there are occasions when she's not. Usually in those cases I sit her in her high chair next to me in the kitchen, and entertain her by giving her kitchen ustensils to play with, like a whisk, a funnel, a wooden spoon, or sometimes I sacrifice food by giving her a raw carrot for instance.

As I cook I make her try the food as it goes, and I narrate what I do, try to make it interesting, sing etc.

And I make sure to, as much as possible, do everything that requires two hands as fast as possible (cutting vegetable and meats) so that if she ends up getting frustrated and wants to go in my arms, I can hold her with my left hand whilst I cook with my right hand.

We do that a couple time a week at least and 90% of the times it goes well. There has been the occasional time where she was in a bad mood and crying and I had to use both hands for cooking, with no other choice that to let her cry for a while, but mostly it's alright.

What did people do before youtube? Why is it impossible to leave the kid alone in a safe-ish environment? We had an "almost" strict no-screens policy (long car trips I think was excluded) when our kids were under 2 years of age. It was fine, don't even remember it as a problem, even when only one parent was home cooking.

TV/DVDs/VHS tapes? And, well, prior to that women were largely expected to dedicate most of their time to looking after kids. I was a single Dad of a 3yo (long before YouTube) and I can't imagine having done it without having some form of electronic entertainment to keep the kid distracted. I suppose I would've relied on other family or expensive childcare options.

SpongeBob... The classics! Anything on vhs or dvd disk... While you still can

Maybe a playpen? Or high chair.

Or avoid cooking in real time. Prepare food at other times. Have healthy snacks available.

Or use things like steamers and slow cookers or oven, all of which need less continuous attention than frying or boiling stuff.

Mine’s now a bit older (2.5), but will play with plastic cups and dishes and the dish brush in the sink with the tap on trickle until I turn it off and pull him off the chair. He occasionally demands a drop of dish soap.

I don't let my kids watch YouTube, but I sometimes watch with them. There is a whole world of incredibly wholesome farmer YouTubers, showing off their day-to-day life. I also use Invidious.

This is the key. There is excellent content on YouTube, but we don't let them watch by themselves and have explained the risks of algorithms to the older two children.

There's loads of stuff that is entertaining for children and parents watching together - Mark Rober, craft videos, draw-along channels, cabin building, hobby farming, streetfood, etc. Usually I will pre-vet a video myself or get a feel for the style of a channel to decide whether it's reliable or not.

As a parent of an almost 2 year old (tomorrow!), I feel a bit worried of what is yet to come. I notice kids around me (family, kids of friends) ranging 3 to 10+ mostly consume YouTube, TikTok, ... on a daily basis and when they do, they're totally isolated from what happens around them. They get feeded ad after ad, watching teenagers doing odd dances, minecraft video's, ... Rarely something of pedagogical value. Hope I can do better, time will tell. Tips are welcome though.

(US-centric take) Everyone’s parenting journey is different. YouTube can play a part, or not. Maybe a doctor’s appointment comes up and you have to watch the kids for a few hours. You can go through the toys and games you have and maybe all will go well for a few hours and things will be great.

Or maybe things are running longer than your stamina and you need to put on Ms. Rachel and leave the room for a half hour and regain your sanity.

Or you can pay a nanny to endlessly entertain your kids sans screens. Money isn’t an object for you and someone is willing to do the job for $20/hour and hopefully they never get sick or have care needs of their own.

You can also live in the woods and homeschool your kids and teach them long division with acorns and berries while your husband hunts game.

You, personally, yes you, unless you’ve actually studied this as your profession, have no relevant insight to the lives of parents writ large when the society we’ve built invests little in early childhood care needs. I literally know what’s best for my children based on the things I know about their lives.

We’ll deploy YouTube as needed. We’ll use iPad on the potty if it helps with that process. We’ll do our best.

Please, just, don’t make broad commentary on how to raise kids in 21st century America. It’s not helpful.

Happy to say that I am a father of four and have no clue what CoComelon is. Our solution to "screen time" has been an hour of Sonic or Kirby on the weekend and educational-only videos during the week which have something to do with whatever they are talking about or learning that day.

For example, our kitchen has a number of large windows and the birds love to eat in front of it. My five year old has become obsessed with birds and specifically sparrows. My wife found a Youtube video about sparrows, it was a powerpoint with voice-over, and the kids ate that up.

I think that tech and especially videos/games can be very dangerous. I wasted days of my life in grade school playing Halo 2 and later GTA and COD. I wish that my parents had attempted to restrict my time. I also think tech can be really useful for parents to help teach beyond their skillset. Just the line you walk between this too is very tricky.

Playing games at grade school age - is that a waste?

I reckon so. I got an Xbox in 7th grade. By the time I was in 9th I was devoting all my free time to Halo and such. Could have been working or playing or riding a bike or a myriad of better things that'd have bettered me somehow. Instead... I can double shot and no-scope well.

Yeah, it's even a waste later on. I could have been a middle manager, at least, if I'd used all those thousands of hours I spent managing teenagers in Dota 1/2 and WoW to work on my career or do sports or read or whatever...

It's a great nanny for adults too. I love getting lost in it whenenever I have time to burn. Audiobooks. Music albums. Weird science channels. Memes. Standup Comedy. Old foreign movies. Podcasts.

It's the eighth wonder of the world if you ask me. I'm a happy paying user and have been for years.

I wouldn't trust YouTube as your nanny: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1620505632649650177.html

what was surprising to me when I first accidentally stumbled into kids youtube a few years ago by accident was how, for a lack of a better term, fucking weird it is. For example this video from the mentioned channel in the article:

https://youtu.be/D1LDPmYoYm4

I don't know what makes this so uncanny, maybe it's the budget animation combined with the nursery rhyme but I can't imagine wanting to watch this as a kid. It's also incredibly bizarre what numbers these videos pull. Was one of the first moments where I felt completely out of touch.

Anecdotally, my kids liked music videos like these a lot. And lol, this one is practically prison break.

Part of what drives huge view numbers tho is that small kids like to watch the same thing again and again and again. Easily, one kid can account for 1000 of views over few months. That is why stuff like "10 hours same song" exists.

People not seeing anything sinister in these infinite loops of "content" are baffling me. These loops, the very loopy quality of those things get burned into infant subconscious, and that's no small deal.

I once watched my nephew, 3 yo, having what I can best describe as a psychotic breakdown, hysterically crying out the same word, 'cartoon', interleaved with convulsive grasping for air, every few seconds for an hour straight, like a machine, when he was deprived of 'cartoons' as a penalty for his 'bad behavior', and nobody, including his mom, my sister, who spinelessly managed to outsource his upbringing to YT, could pull him out of that loop. That was really scary to see.

Imagine YT going instantly offline worldwide, what would happen to all those poor little cartoon burnouts?

3 years old having temper tamptrumps were thing long before TV and youtube. I know, because books written long before that feature kids having hysterical temper tamptrums. And I assume so because I have seen kids aged 2-4 having issue like that and know for a fact that their parents did not run them loop videos (or any videos at all).

> Imagine YT going instantly offline worldwide, what would happen to all those poor little cartoon burnouts?

They will cry for a while and then they will adjust to the new world.

> and nobody, including his mom, my sister, who spinelessly managed to outsource his upbringing to YT, could pull him out of that loop

I dont know your sister. I dont know whether she always give in or whether she was not in mood for listening it or whether she specifically gave him video so that your visit can continue as normal.

I guess I'm getting old, when "budget animations" look better than Toy Story.

To be fair the original Toy Story animation does not hold up well at all.

I recall reading somewhere that the whole reason they went with toys as the main characters was because animation tech at the time made everything look like plastic anyways.

Is that weirder than teletubbies? I'm not sure.

There’s a deeper issue I personally find more interesting; there are an awful lot of parents who don’t really want children. Maybe they like the idea of being a parent. Maybe they just found themselves there. Maybe they think this is what they’re supposed to do. There’s no doubt a multitude of reasons.

The window for shaping what kind of people your children become is surprisingly short. It’s largely over by the time they start elementary school. It’s completely over by high school.

I wonder how many people are just using YouTube as a stopgap until they’re children are mini-adults, which is what many parents seem to want (IME).

Putting aside the morality of it, I wish we could study a case where twins are raised differently:

1. one where youtube (or any form of media under the sun) is part of daily life,

2. and another where youtube (and any alternative image/video/audio/social media) is completely removed.

Really what I'm asking for is the 21st century version of the identical twin study: https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/identical-twins-raised-in-di...

I wonder how different their dispositions would be.

Okay, but it shouldn't be N=1, otherwise it's just anecdotal.

Tv helps, but YouTube seems to kill kids'brain.

I usually provide them with long (long= 1 hour +) movies if they watch tv and usually the same one (that's the relationship we had with tv). This seems better than youtube, they seems to learn a lot about the movie which means they are engaged.

I wish I could tell we don't show them tv at all, but some days we are so tired that the whole family just hangs on the couch watching some good movies If they are not they get bored and change "toy"

Necessary plugin for YT: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/youtube-recom...

Or program: https://freetubeapp.io/

Both let you disable autoplay, suggestions, trendings, ads... I would never let kids watch YT with autoplay, suggestions on side and ads.

And, TV was the baby sitter of the last three generations. The technologies aren't 1:1, but letting your kids passively consume video seems is just as popular as ever.

And before that children were roaming around the streets for 12 hours because the apartments were too small for 7+ people.

I think there's one huge difference. TV gets boring, fast. The only time it would remain remotely entertaining was Saturday morning. And even that would get boring relatively quickly. And so you end up turning to other things to entertain yourself, or just be bored. Both of which are probably much better for one's development.

YouTube can probably provide entertainment to a child for an arbitrary length of time, on demand, anywhere. So I don't think it's especially comparable to TV. It also seems to trigger behavior that seems borderline addictive in many people - let alone children. Ultimately I expect online media of this sort will probably be treated in a way analogous to something like drugs or gambling, whereas right now we're just living through "Let's put cocaine in everything, because it feels goooooood!" phase.

What? Youtube is exactly like television. The only significant difference is that it includes a comment section where people can interact. I don't think that makes it worse.

And it is certainly not analogous to drugs. Trying to compare the stimuli of looking at a screen is entirely different from taking drugs that bypass your senses completely to hijack the neuronal populations which determine the salience and motivation of stimuli.

Stop comparing passive watching through normal senses to drugs. They are not the same. Saying they are the same invites the same kind of highly immoral "war" against "screens" which would necessarily involve violence of the state against people.

Youtube Kids disables all comments, and algorithmic recommendations. What they're recommended is 'kids' content maybe based on age. This is roughly the level of demographic targeting for broadcast television.

Just because an activity has a similar means of interacting doesn't mean it's the same, or even really comparable. Doomscrolling and reading a good book are both just "reading." But of course the consequences and benefits of each are quite different.

YouTube is millions of videos available on demand, instantly, across virtually any topic imaginable - with lots of high quality content available. And it's fueled by an algorithm designed to maximize "engagement", which is of course little more than a euphemism for addiction. That's quite different than TV which has a micro-sized selection of time-slotted, generally poor quality media, generally repeating on intermittent loops, that the user has to manually tune into to.

TV may seem boring compared for those of us who have grown accustomed to consuming video over the internet, but a lot of older people just leave their television on all day. Maybe they're not glued to it the whole time, but it it's a constant din. I guess they're hoping something worthwhile may come on and they'll get a squirt of dopamine.

> Maybe they're not glued to it the whole time, but it it's a constant din. I guess they're hoping something worthwhile may come on and they'll get a squirt of dopamine.

Some people just like background noise.

You have to teach your kids how to use YouTube and what they can learn from it.

How the YouTube front page works, how YouTube recommends videos, how YouTubers produce their videos. How these things are honed and perfected to attract their attention and never let go.

And you have to teach them how it influences them. You have to teach them about addiction and anxiety. You have to teach them about moderation and responsibility.

Its not YouTube’s fault if you don’t teach them yourself.

It really annoys me that there isn't an option to block certain youtube channels. There is loads of fantastic content on youtube, and the kids love it. But when you set them up with something and come back and crap like this with 278M views is playing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4xFWIKVT6s They turn into zombies watching that crap.

We've just had to stop our kids watching TV at all for a few weeks. They were getting addicted to YouTube. But their mood has been so much better without it. They've been playing more and talk to us more.

As a parent, regulating screen time is a battle of wits. The app is designed to you hooked. I would absolutely love them to have the option to "shutdown after the end of this video".

How are these channels monetized? I heard a while back that YouTube kids had no ads or heavily restricted them. Did something change there?

Everyone I have known who tried YouTube kids eventually ended up with normal YouTube. Maybe it is sort of acceptable for English speaking families, but outside of that, shows that parents wanted to show the kids or were ok with were not available. And shows that were available were meh anyway.

It came across to me as something that exists so that google can point out that it exists.

This thread is very popular, and some people are constantly looking for ideas for side projects. I think this is a good market demand, big enough and beneficial to society. People struggling with this problem indicate a need for a better solution or product.

I would never trust YouTube with children. It would probably get heavily moderated and I wouldn't second guess blocking it in an instant.

it's a source of extremely low quality content, powered by a mostly evil corporation

I was raised on tech. A third generation computer user, started writing software at seven under my father’s guidance. A Luddite I am not, but this doesn’t bode well for our future. YouTube is basically an indoctrination engine for white nationalism. It’s more or less what the right claims the American higher education system is for the left, only there’s no conspiracy fantasy to it.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/18/youtube_algorithm_con...

Wikipedia also documents it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt-right_pipeline

Or if someone rather likes the article format:

https://bpr.berkeley.edu/2022/10/31/addressing-the-alt-right...

The actual findings, as reported in the very link you post:

> "We found that YouTube's recommendation algorithm does not lead the vast majority of users down extremist rabbit holes, although it does push users into increasingly narrow ideological ranges of content in what we might call evidence of a (very) mild ideological echo chamber," the academics disclosed in a report for the Brookings Institution.

> "We also find that, on average, the YouTube recommendation algorithm pulls users slightly to the right of the political spectrum, which we believe is a novel finding."

So, about as close to being an "indoctrination engine for white nationalism" as a librarian that recommends books you like. And I am saying this as someone who reads Jacobin and watches any interview with Chomsky I can find.

“Pulls users slightly to the right”

So the indoctrination isn’t obvious? So it’s subtle? That makes it more pernicious, in my eyes.

I never said anything about a vast majority. To indoctrinate doesn’t mean convert an entire population, or even a percentage thereof. On the contrary, it refers to a process of teaching a person or group (of any size) to accept a set of beliefs uncritically. It doesn’t specify what degree of beliefs have to change, nor how rapidly, or severely.

YT recommends Fox, Shapiro, et al to kids watching anime, to adults whose sole interests are cat videos and programming tutorials. A bit different than a librarian suggesting books one might like.

And what happens if the librarian sees I’ve been checking out the likes of Mein Kampf, and makes recommendations based on that? Does indoctrination through multiple channels cancel itself out, or some? I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make there but it sounds a lot like “bad things can happen in other places so it’s acceptable if YouTube does bad things too.

One should consider the effect on those already radicalized in addition to the indoctrination of the non-radicalized when seeking to understand the political ramifications of such bias in algorithms. It’s not like they exist in a vacuum, after all.

edit: Add to that, on the topic of librarians, the decentralized nature of libraries and librarians ensures any effect of a single librarian will be limited to a local area. Don’t think we can say the same for YouTube algorithms.

My point is this: recommending related videos is not indoctrination, even if the content is political. If I'm watching Shapiro and YT recommends Fox, this is not indoctrination (same as, if I'm watching Young Turks and YT recommends Majority Report, it's not indoctrinating me).

Now, if I'm watching Anime and YT recommends Shapiro, I can agree that's closer to indoctrination. However, if it only happens like 2 times for every 10M watches of anime, and then 1 time for every 10M it's recommending Young Turks, then it's not really a significant force in this area; and it is only pushing slightly to the right - and I believe this is the sort of thing that the study found. So coming back to your first quote:

> So the indoctrination isn’t obvious? So it’s subtle? That makes it more pernicious, in my eyes.

No, that is not what the study found. It found that political recommendations for right-leaning content are slightly more common than those for left-leaning content.

I don’t need to reword the findings to make them support my assertion.

Again those findings: “We also find that, *on average*, the YouTube recommendation algorithm pulls users slightly to the right of the political spectrum”.

The whole “on average” nullifies the notion that occasionally recommending Young Turks to kids watching Anime once in a while somehow makes up for the fact that they push OANN or Newsmax even harder. That’s like saying I took one step forward so you should ignore the two steps I took backward.

Also you are ignoring the implications further down the line. If YouTube pulls neutral to the right, then it likely pushes those already right even further in that direction.

Are you familiar with the concept of network effect?

> So the indoctrination isn’t obvious? So it’s subtle? That makes it more pernicious, in my eyes.

>> No, that is not what the study found

“In my eyes” isn’t analogous to “that’s what the study found”, FYI.

> The whole “on average” nullifies your assertion that they recommend Young Turks to kids watching Anime as much as they do OANN or Newsmax.

I didn't say that they do it "as much", I specifically suggested they may do it half as often. But, per the study, they DO do it - otherwise, this would not have been a "slight" bias, it would have been a whopping huge bias.

That was a poor edit on my part. My apologies.

What I meant to say was the assertion that occasionally recommending YoungTurks somehow mitigates the right-leaning bias of the site, as suggested with the statement “then it's not really a significant force in this area” is false. The site has a demonstrable rightwing bias.

Elections can and are decided by a few thousand or few hundred votes in battlegrounds. As such, the argument that it’s of negligible effect rings false to me.

Even on a much smaller scale, the algorithm is incentivised to radicalise you. A few years ago I would watch videos of helicopters with my 4-5 year old son because he loved helicopters and enjoyed watching them lift things, cut trees, put our fires, etc, etc.

Then the suggested videos started including helicopter crash compilations and he was super keen to see those and lost interest in the more "vanilla" helicopter videos. That was the end of that avenue of entertainment and it's only now he's 11-12 that he's getting some limited access to youtube again.

>YouTube replaced the TV to be the world's nanny

Corrected the Title.

Dunno why but kids seem to like YouTube > Netflix, Disney, well produced kids shows. Tacky weird amateur YouTube appeals more.

I’m perplexed that there aren’t any tools to curate “kids” sections in streaming services. It’s seems like such a no-brainer.

Seems like something where one would want something like yt download. ie a local library of somewhat curated content

Having a separate app instead of a kids profile in Youtube was one of the poorest design choices ever.

Network television says, "They never write! They never call!"

A reason why the YouTube algorithm to idiocraty is a problem.

And the world will surely pay a price.

Why not just take ur kids on a hike on the weekend or read some books? Both are free (parks and libraries) and better than burning your kid’s eyeballs.

Update: nobody wants to put in effort. No surprise there, poor kids :(

Easy answer, it requires effort.

Because I can't fit a 3 hour hike in the car ride to school.

Literally said the weekend.

Perfect example of declining critical thinking and reading comprehension.

I can't fit a weekend in my car either.

You're talking to the wrong car salesman. Find one that will slap the roof of the car and tell you it can fit so many weekend hikes into it.

I don't think any of my local dealerships carry Ferd Fteens.

You can fit a book, though

Well first nobody with a sane mind would take a car for that. I am walking to school with my kids.

This is not mutually exclusive with youtube time. Even if you spend a lot of time outside and read for full hour every day, you wont do these things all the time. Partly because it would drive you crazy and you need to rest too and partly because you need to cook, clean, take shower etc.

Why take something and take the most extreme take on it?

Isn't that what you're doing?

Reading and going on a hike (on a weekend! Read damn it) once in a while is extreme?

YouTube is the best invention in modern history. While working I can passively listen to thousands of ideas in a year often curated by my interests automatically.

We don't teach people how to use these things well but we should.

Unless this is sarcasm, I completely disagree. Listening to thousands of ideas inevitably lowers the value you attach to each one, and lowers the barrier of entry for what ideas you hear.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."

This is how I exercise that skill. I listen to science, sociology, religion, conspiracy theories, relationship dynamics, etc.

Sometimes, I pick up something. Most of the time I'm allowing the ideas to float around in my head.

It helps a lot to practice this skill, because I trade for a living and I need to be able to convince myself that I am wrong about something all the time.

Yeah, but receiving ideas non-stop isn't really "listening" to them. A more accurate description of that passive activity would be "hearing". I get that surrounding yourself by interesting ideas and conversations is a nice passive way of entertaining potentially alternative views. But there are way better setups in which to do this. The YouTube algorithm is unlikely to challenge you to the same extent of, say, organising a family dinner where the racist uncle or communist cousin are in attendance.

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