I strongly recommend that you don't let your kids watch YouTube. There's some really low-quality garbage out there and there's just too much to properly curate. After some exploring on my own I absolutely do not trust YouTube at all to filter appropriately. This is just pure garbage streaming into your kids' faces.
Do anything else, Netflix at least has some barrier for kids content... but torrent a bunch kids shows if you have to.
Yeh we don't allow YouTube in our house, but instead use youtube-dl to scrape relevant educational/quality videos (Lah Lah, old Play School episodes, Peppa Pig, etc) to a local folder on the NAS. She gets to "watch youtube", but we get to control what's there.
YouTube is 100% not kid friendly in any way at all, not even with their parenting controls or their kids app. It should very much be seen as an adult platform with what gets pushed through there these days.
If kids are known for one thing, it's their ability to watch and re-watch the same piece of content over and over. We have decades of good, high quality, children's media. Why do they need the latest and untested greatest?
I credit some of my unpopularity in elementary school with growing up without cable television. All of the other children would watch Nickelodeon after school and the prizes on Legend Of The Hidden Temple would instruct them to ask their moms to buy them Jansport backpacks and AirWalk sneakers. I wasn't able to discuss yesterday's episode and didn't know how to dress to fit in.
As I discovered watching our kids go through school, if you had cable and the "in backpack", kids at school would almost certainly have found something else to dig at.
Those that react get picked on. If they can't single out lack of clothes, or knowing current music, they dig at too fat, too thin, wears glasses, wrong hair colour, wrong accent, you name it. In short if you react you lose.
I am much less open to the having all the same things to fit in argument than I was when I started on the parenting journey.
Parent wasn't concerned about being picked on but not being able to participate in the culture of the other children without cable TV.
There's a big personal preference there about whether or not you want your kids (or you yourself regret being or not being) involved heavily in the mainstream pop culture of your peers as children.
Experiencing more than just whatever is popular is important, but being very isolated can have effects as well. Whatever choices you make will have a strong impact, and there are very often not clear rights and wrongs.
Picked on or not able to participate is part of the same grouping that goes on in schools. For the most part is little to do with how much they are enabled or not to fit in.
Before being a parent I'd have inclined to agree with GP. The experience of seeing my kids progress, and their differing experience, through school leaves me believing it's nearly all down to personality. That of course is far harder for parents to influence. Course a kid with a sensitive disposition might well blame the lack of the right things as the reason to feel an outsider.
So true. I will do the same for my kid when time comes, he's only 0.7yo. How about screen time, do they watch them on tablets/devices or on a media player on a TV?
I do not restrict screen time in any way. If they want to watch videos (from our scraped collection on the NAS), they can. If they want to play with the carefully chosen educational apps/games on our phones, they can. We've never restricted them since they first became interested, and it has worked out fine for us.
They barely ever watch shows or play with the phones, and most the time just want to colour in, play with Lego, or play with toys. They use the phones maybe for an hour every 3 days or so (or if we're waiting at the Doctors office or on a road trip), and watch shows maybe half an hour to an hour each day (usually in evening when they're too tired to physically play and we're preparing dinner). YMMV of course.
We regularly make sure they get experience doing nothing too. My wife and I are big believers in the importance of doing nothing, for imagination/creativity and also just because it's an important skill to have in life, to be able to sit and wait.
They're very imaginative, and we regularly find the eldest just sitting in a sunny spot in the room and "dreaming in the warm" as she calls it.
The only problem we struggle with as far as technology is that a lot of her friends already have unlimited access to TV and talk about shows she's never heard of because we don't watch (or have) TV. We purely do Netflix/Stan and YouTube, so she gets a bit upset not knowing what they're going on about, but she's starting to understand that everyone has different things they do.
>How about screen time, do they watch them on tablets/devices or on a media player on a TV?
Sorry if my comment implied I had kids, I do not. But in terms of access I see a lot of other comments further below talking about downloading everything locally and serving it through plex, which seems like a solid idea.
We just stick to the classics. Play School, Peppa Pig, The Wiggles, Lah Lah, and movies like Frozen, Happy Feet, etc. Stuff you hear about from other parents, or come across in daily life as a parent.
As mentioned in another comment, kids don't need the latest/greatest, they're perfectly happy with what they know, and you just slowly introduce stuff you want them to watch over time by adding it yourself.
My nephew was at one stage really into "The minions" movie. To be honest, I can quite enjoy movies like that myself (same for the other disney / pixar bunch).
The only downside was that he for some reason really liked it if I sat next to him watching it, but I don't have the ability to rewatch them countless times :P
Still, kids definitely get hooked on stuff and stick with it through countless repititions.
> kids don't need the latest/greatest, they're perfectly happy with what they know
I remember reading that somewhere. Young children actually prefer watching the same episode over and over again, because it's rewarding when their expectations (of what happens next) get fulfilled.
I have a 4yo daughter. We don't use youtube's recomendations to get things for her to watch, instead:
* we watch what we liked to watch when we were young (we are from Czech Republic and there is a wealth of local animation series, usually ~7 minutes/episode. If you want a sample, "Pat & Mat" is silent-duo home-improvement slapstic comedy that we kinda like :)
* we talk to other parents (i.e. you can't really escape Pepa Pig or My Little Pony - Friendship is Magic)
* we like animation, and sometimes watch even more grown-up things togehter, i.e. we liked various series from the How To Train Your Dragon universe
Three more things that I think kinda help as well:
* if she watches alone, she know she has a limit (usually 3 stories in one sitting at most?) I am really proud when she manages to close the app on her own.
* I often sit her in front of my thinkpad instead of tablet. This limits her ability to binge-watch, somewhat :P
* She has an mp3-player of sorts and a cd-player with few radio-plays. She know how to operate both of these. We don't really limit her using of the audio-only entertainment :-)
> "Pat & Mat" is silent-duo home-improvement slapstic comedy that we kinda like :)
Did you know that Pat and Mat became a very popular export product of the Czech Republic? You might be surprised to learn that most Dutchmen know who Pat and Mat are (though not their names).
Something odd happened when it got imported into the Netherlands in the eighties: a soundtrack with spoken voices was added, and it gradually became a cult hit. Blasphemous as this may sound, the dialogue is as silly as the episodes themselves, and actually works.
The popularity of the show in the Netherlands actually helped create the demand for the new episodes made in this century.
Have a look at 'Buurman en Buurman' (neighbour and neighbour) on Youtube to see the Dutch rendition of Pat and Mat.
I mean, that is just a different way of watching YouTube. You can restrict what they can watch right inside of the app using the “approved content only” mode.
It's been good to teach him colours, but it's all very low quality videos with clearly chinese-english influence.
My biggest concern is not the content of those, it's the automatic skip after the episode is over, to "whatever" youtube feels right afterwards, and also the ads being played between episodes, some are about gaming, but violent, and a toddler takes everything he sees as "real".
That's my experience, and why I pulled the plug on it. Unless you're on top of your kid the entire time, it's incredibly difficult to keep an eye on that. YouTube is designed to just shove as much content in front of your face as possible, quality, content, age-appropriateness, be damned.
I've read this on hackernews a few times and have experienced some objectionable "kids" content on YouTube myself. Plus, there's a ton of mindless stuff like opening toys or kinder eggs.
I wonder if there's some kind of startup here. A service that whitelists YouTube content and curates the list. There could be an app you sign into before you hand it off to the child, it permits only whitelisted YouTube videos to be played. Possibly the videos are separated into tiers - educational, entertainment, prosocial. Then, you come up with a mix that you want to expose your child to for auto play - e.g. 40, 20, 40. Content could also be flagged for themes that are potentially undesirable - death, sex, religion, etc.
Pay 15-20 dollars an hour for people to watch and annotate videos. Get the same video to go through the process two or three times to catch potential errors. Your evaluators can easily watch content at 2x speed and not miss much. How much does processing an hour's worth of YouTube video cost? 60 dollars?
Invest a hundred grand, whitelist a thousand hours of YouTube content (assuming you reject half), build a simple mobile app to play your whitelisted YouTube videos, sign people up for 5 dollars a month and you can use the proceeds to keep growing your whitelist.
Why reinvent the wheel? There's lots of great, timeless kids content, like Sesame Street. There's tons of episodes spanning decades. The only problem to solve is getting it all in one conveniently accessed place.
A lot of the DVD collections of Sesame Street now has warnings that they're for adults due to content that they consider dated and not suitable for small children any more... I don't know how much I agree with that, but a lot of content that seems 'timeless' to people who grew up with it will seem wildly out of place to younger people.
That's interesting, I had no idea. Nor can I possibly think of anything that might serve as an example of "adult" on Sesame Street. Though I watched it mostly in the early 90s so maybe some of the older stuff is what's at "fault" here? Perhaps some of the themes might seem inappropriate for children if you're living in a homogeneous, middle-class suburb or town as many episodes did deal with things that kids growing up in city like New York might encounter.
The one I have here is from '69-'74, and note that it's still certified "U", it simply starts with a verbal notice that "these early Sesame Street episodes are intended for grownups and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child," so it's a pretty mild warning. Milder than I remembered actually.
I found an article talking about it. It's pretty mild stuff, but an interesting illustration of how what we consider appropriate changes in all kinds of small ways:
> What parent today would want their child to see kids running through a construction site or jumping on an old box spring? Scenes like the ones included on the new DVD would probably not make it into today's program now.
> "We wouldn't have children on the set riding without a bicycle helmet," Rollins Westin says.
> And what's that little girl doing with that man?
> "In the very first episode, Gordon takes a little girl's hand who he's just met on the street, befriends her and takes her into his home to give her ice cream," Rollins Westin said. "That's something we wouldn't do on the show today."
> "In the very first episode, Gordon takes a little girl's hand who he's just met on the street, befriends her and takes her into his home to give her ice cream"
With this kind of normalization of hanging out with strangers on TV, I am not really surprised that children were more likely to be abducted in the 70's and 80's.
Teach him colors with blocks the way every toddler before 2010 learned them. The most valuable skill of the future will be to not compulsively need screens.
You can turn off autoplay on the top right of any video page, but it's a local cookie and not stored in your account, so you have to do it separately on every device and, in my experience, does seem to have a habit of randomly turning itself back on again.
Also kids have tendency to just click randomly anywhere and figure out all the buttons in no time, so you can't really rely on GUI to stop them. Mine actually learned letters by searching the youtube for his favorite cartoon characters. At first he bugged me to do it for him, but very quickly he figured out what I'm doing and that he can look at the title of the current video and enter the same letters into the search to get more videos - but since he had no idea what those letters mean he'd often get some totally unrelated and non-kids results... toddlers are just unstoppable, resistance is futile :)
We discovered by accident how easy it is for kids to stumble into bad things.
We had a computer set up with Windows 98 for the kids to play games (this was a long time ago...). The computer was in the family room so we could always see what was going on, and the kids really did stick to playing games and other benign activities.
One day I watched my youngest to see what he was doing as he sat down to use the computer. He was about 5 or 6 at the time, and he would open up a web browser and type "sonic" to search for Sonic the Hedgehog pictures. At the time, at least, this was the kinds of things he would find, and I'm not aware of the kids stumbling into anything awful. But another term they used often was "chao" for the little creatures that you care for in the Sonic Adventure games, and since that can also be a name, other material would eventually come up as well.
We quickly realized that this had the potential to lead them into bad territory. It was an eye-opening experience. Seeing what's going on on YouTube these days is whole new level of scary.
I agree very strongly. My MIL was letting youtube auto-play and she didn't notice things were not quite "Moana" or "Elsa" before I turned it off abruptly, causing other family drama. This was in the middle of Elsa-Gate, of course.
Anyway I don't have time to teach caregivers how to use social media (YouTube) so I just teach my 5 y/o she's not allowed to watch youtube without me.
"Disturbing Peppa Pig videos, which tend towards extreme violence and fear, with Peppa eating her father or drinking bleach, are, it turns out very widespread. They make up an entire YouTube subculture. Many are obviously parodies, or even satires of themselves, in the pretty common style of the internet’s outrageous, deliberately offensive kind. All the 4chan tropes are there, the trolls are out, we know this."
When I paid any attention to 4chan, say 12 years or so ago, it always struck me as an odd place with some real creeps. But, I never imagined it'd become the hive of negativity and sadistic nihilism it seems to be today that's bleeding out all over the internet.
The internet feels a lot darker than it did when I was a kid.
Does it? I remember as a smart ass kid setting up fake meetings with people in various chat rooms on AOL. My friends and I were doing it thinking we were trolling other young kids who just wanted to meet up but, as an adult, I wonder how many of those other 'kids' so anxious to get into private chat and set up meetings were even kids at all. Also we were too dumb to think about things like indicators of what we'd be wearing/etc (to know how to identify us) were almost invariably unidirectional. Where did A/S/L? even come from?
4chan has turned more into a whipping boy for any sort of inconvenient issue, which is certainly not to say they aren't indeed heavy into trolling and other stuff - but they're also not this hive from which all issues originate from.
People seem to forget that things like worldwide organized pedophilia networks, and worse, exist. And the internet provides an excellent venue for these people to organize and try to further their ends. Many of the 'elsa style' videos extensively feature sexual and sadistic content alongside drugs and alcohol. And then you get into the bizarre messages in the comments for each video. Those videos have been watched for billions of hours by children, on loop.
Very conspiratorial but it's one of the more evidence-backed conspiracies out there (in that you can do a search on YouTube and see the actual videos). Basically, there is some really weird stuff on YouTube directed at children.
Download the videos and share with Plex. With the Apple TV app, it is as easy to use as Netflix. There is a lot of great content on YouTube. Honestly it is a shame that it’s not safe to leave it running unsupervised.
This also takes out all the ads. It’s insane that YouTube programming made for little kids can have 5++ ads within the video, all of which are wildly not appropriate for kids
If you can share the family plan and use Google Play Music, it's a pretty good deal. I couldn't care less for Youtube Red, however. Just the ad-free experience is good enough for me.
I've you've used that for a while, Youtube has recently gotten absolutely ridiculous with ads. I canceled my Premium/Red 6 months ago and I'm about ready to go back. I'll get ads every 2-3 minutes. I'd say it's been 3-4 months of this. I don't even want any of the other features, or Google (Play?) Music or anything. I just want fewer ads.
Google simply can't afford to be seen losing money on Youtube anymore - and the real economics of the situation are finally here. Easy money for producers is gone, and so is good ad-free content for viewers.
The impression I get from the article is that parents are helpless but to allow their children to watch TV and YouTube constantly, and thus be exposed to whatever happens to be popular. I guess that is how parenting and life in general works for a lot of people. Personally, I don’t watch any sort of video for entertainment, ever, and I wouldn’t assume that if I had children, they would be watching videos all the time.
One does have the option of finding higher quality video entertainment for children. Another option would be to find them something useful or interesting to do that doesn’t involve being a stationary recipient of an audio-video feed.
There's two disturbing aspects to this: one where parenting is replaced with TV, and one where it's impeded by TV — a woman was watching something on her phone, and didn't notice her toddler running onto the road.
Parent of a 7-year-old. It's definitely not perfect but I feel we've mitigated some of the worst of YouTube by placing our kid's computer in the living room where we all spend most of our time and not giving him headphones. He has a tablet but I used parental controls to block the browser on it.
This has forced us to be aware of and involved in his media choices. I've spent a lot of hours watching stuff with him and critiquing/unpacking it (he doesn't always like this of course) but also enjoying it. We've encountered lots of those unboxing videos and had lots of conversations about what's good to watch and what not, how to spot advertisements, etc. Knowing something about how YouTube channels work and get funded really helps lift the veil: A grown man playing with kids' toys??? Do those kids really own all those toys? Is that a story or an advertisement? How are PBS Kids shows different from Stampy, and how are both of these different from fidget spinner unboxing videos? What did you learn from that video?
After a lot of these conversations I see a real difference between the stuff he watches on his own and the kind of things his friends watch with him when they come over. I'm sure he watches all kinds of crap at his friends' places but at least I feel like I've given him some cognitive tools and defenses.
I've also set up his devices on their own separate wifi network that shuts off at 20:30 and doesn't come on again until he's at school. Between his afterschool programs and dinner and the bedtime routine, he can't watch much more than an hour a day. Weekends are still a problem though.
Based on what? My kids watch screens and they’re above grade level and do great in school. Just mindlessly banning screens is as bad as mindlessly allowing them. Parents were saying the same crap about radio in the 30s, TV in the 50s, video games in the 80s.
Surprising that most of my generation didn’t become devil worshipers since we listened to that dangerous rock and roll music. My great-grandparents were corrupted by that evil Jazz music.
A whole lot of get off my lawn but the real message should be: be a mindful and engaged parent. We could argue that kids should never eat ice cream either: but what kind of fun is that?
Not the OP, but FYI there's a body of research in the wild that suggests ties between the late 20th century fall in IQ with the rise of TV in households.
The gist of the explanation is a combination of decreased parental interaction, owing to kids learning less words when their parents aren't talking to them and hardly learning any words at all when watching TV, and the constant interruptions owing to the TV's sound and animations, which distracts toddlers as they're playing (including when they're not actively watching, like when the TV is on while a parent is ironing or cooking), leading to a decreased ability to concentrate that might ultimately be tied to an uptick in attention deficit disorder.
I'm admittedly no specialist in the matter so I can't speak for how accurate and reliable the research is, but I thought the explanation convincing enough to rule out any TV being turned on in the household while our toddler is around.
There is a difference between TV, Comics and Videogames that were all demonized in a similar way to this.
The difference is they all had a quality and decency barrier. YouTube videos are just made by random people with the absolute minimal of moderation. A kids TV show in the 90s wouldn't use an image of a woman dressed as Elsa cutting off her tongue with real scissors to try and clickbait children into watching it.
The actual video it's replaced with a gummy candy tongue, but the thumbnail it's her own tongue with real scissors and YouTube allowed this for months, it was an extremely popular video and channel.
and this is all before we get into the fact TV was consumed in the family room and tablets are solitary harder to control consumption.
There's a crisis of opinion like this in every generation. It happened with radio too.
I personally feel like the best approach is moderation for everything, but hey, people who don't watch media probably have more interesting hobbies than I do.
I've found YouTube to be a benefit. My daughter is four and we've been watching a few videos together on an almost daily basis since she's been about two. She never watches videos alone; we're always together. We end up watching educational videos, like how things are made and street science. It's been a great resource as she understands at a very basic level the little explosions inside of pistons that turn an engine because she's seen it on YouTube.
Most of the videos we watch are in German. I'm wanting to learn German and she is, too. So I'm getting educated along with her (and German children's videos talk more slowly and use simpler vocabulary so it's great for learning).
I concur. I tried a kids channel on Roku one day, and was immediately shown a very sexually suggestive ad. I contacted them with pictures from the ad and they initially agreed it was very wrong. But then they came back and said that they just serve the ads Roku gives them and there's no mechanism to make them age-appropriate.
Yep, the videos that autoplay on kids content can be super creepy, borderline fetish/brainwashing content. The channel H3H3 summarized a few of the videos (Spiderman and Elsa come to mind). YouTube didn’t take action against those videos until a year later.
Currently my son is too young to operate YouTube so his 15 mins of baby shark in a day is easy to curate safely.
But holy crap do they learn fast. He's 20 months old and he can navigate the iPad from off to unlocked to another tab to the baby shark shortcut.
At a certain point it's going to be such an uphill battle. Things like pihole gives me a fighting chance. I need a pihole like housebold-wide filter for YouTube.
youtube-dl is your friend. Build a local folder of shows you approve of and let them access that.
The Internet is an incredible tool for parents, with endless educational and legitimately beneficial videos, but there's so much noise (and malicious intent) to filter through that it's absolutely never worth trying to blacklist stuff, just block the Internet entirely and locally cache anything relevant until they're old enough to understand things better.
We have an RPi plugged into the TV with a folder on a USB stick, shared on our LAN, where I can use youtube-dl (command line or the GUI) from any computer to scrape videos we've found for the kids. They go straight to the shared folder, and she can access them on the TV or our phones via VLC. I then keep a couple dozen specific favourite videos on my phone's SD card for "emergencies" (road trips etc).
She gets to watch shows without us worrying, and doesn't feel like she's missing out when friends talk about YouTube, but we don't ever have to worry about what she's watching.
I hear that, my daughter can't even read but can play some really complex games with almost no direct intervention. Kids are incredible learning machines.
The restrictions on the iPad are rather mature at this point. I've blocked all unrestricted internet holes and just keep her within apps i've vetted.
Someone has to say it. If you’re letting your kid use YouTube or I’d even say the internet or smart phones unsupervised before their brain is well developed you are taking a tremendous risk on their mental development.
A few years back when my kids were toddlers I’d rather naively give them my phone with YouTube on it, and after ignoring them for just 15 mins they’d have switched from whatever edutainment programme I’d put on to a video of a burly pair of hands unwrapping toys - for 4 hours...there are no studies on the long term effects of YouTube on cognitive development in young brains but why wait? It’s not like it’s rocket science to infer that if you show growing minds poor quality content you’re going to get poor quality results.
I don’t feel comfortable leaving my kids to watch Netflix either. It’s too easy for them to binge watch a half season of Paw Patrol or Omizumi or other similarly lite content. As a kid I remember eagerly waiting for the next episode of He-Man or Ghostbusters but to have had several seasons of dozens of episodes on tap would have been too much to resist. With auto play on these services too it’s not like they have the interests of us or our kids at heart.
We need to be super careful here, this is new territory with early indicators showing declines in ability to concentrate in adults from these forms of distraction - god knows what it’s doing to our kids.
Maybe the problem isn't Netflix and Youtube, maybe the problem is letting them watch for 4 hours? And unsupervised, too. It sounds to me like it's a bit like letting your children run free in a candy store for hours and then wondering why they ate so much.
I try to teach my kids that these things are tools: we want to know how something works --> there's definitely a video on that --> we found out and turn it off again. And as with any tool, you can use them to become better or to hurt yourself.
With discipline, that is certainly doable, but YouTube is designed to tempt you down the rabbit hole. They want to maximize the amount of time you spend on their website.
You go to YouTube and order a salad. When you're done with the salad, they put a donut in front of you. When you finish that donut, they immediately put another donut in front of you.
Adults should be able to reject those temptations, but YouTube doesn't make it easy.
> They want to maximize the amount of time you spend on their website.
Is that true for YouTube kids app too? I thought you could put timers using parental settings. When the timer goes off, it will lock the device. And, some N minutes before, it would show a warning as well.
That seems way better than state of the art (dumping kids in front of TV or video game consoles etc.)
We tried the timer, but it wasn't so good for a program to suddenly cut off in the middle. I know I wouldn't be happy either if something I was into watching would just suddenly end. Now we let our kid watch about half an hour of YouTube a day, but try to let him stop at a natural place, such as the end of the video.
The only thing I really want is for foreign language videos not to appear in the list of suggested videos. Sometimes he gets trapped happily watching videos in Russian.
> Maybe the problem isn't Netflix and Youtube, maybe the problem is letting them watch for 4 hours?
I actually think the problem is specifically binge watching services like Netflix and services with very variable quality of content like YouTube.
Whilst it’s not ideal, as a kid I’d watch the BBC children’s afternoon segment from 3 till 6 after school and whilst 3 hours of TV is unlikely to have been great for me, I received a variety of programming, some ok and some great. My problem with Netflix and YouTube is a child can binge watch a whole season of average content without any variety whatsoever. It’s not just a question of quality which I’m raising but quantity of the same show episode after episode.
As far as teaching kids sure, by all means we should teach them to moderate themselves but as a 34 year old I find it takes discipline and will power to regulate myself, what hope does a toddler or infant have when faced with video services which are designed to encourage consumption?
Maybe the problem isn't Netflix and Youtube, maybe
the problem is letting them watch for 4 hours?
Isn't your assertion "Youtube isn't a problem so long as you don't watch for 4 hours" and leonroy's that "If you want something to watch for 4 hours, Youtube is a problem" just the same statement worded in different ways?
As others have said, watching 4 hours of anything might be problematic.
However, my point is this: different things require different amounts of moderation. Candy all day is probably worse than carrots all day. In moderation, candy is great. Same as YouTube.
Something like Sesame Street might be good. My problem with YouTube is it creates feedback loops where if you like something you seek out more of it, but with a near infinite range of topics. Throw an underdeveloped mind in there who is using basic stimulus to work out what is good and bad and who knows what will happen.
Wouldn't surprise me if that feedback loop was damaging even for many adults, but at least they are responsible and already have some grasp of how the world should work.
I don't see how "youtube neglect" parenting is qualitatively different from "regular neglect" parenting, honestly. We've always have people just "dump" their kids (of any age) into a room without supervision, predominantly people who just can't afford to be present all the time.
Might be more appropriate to demand universal child care or sth along those lines instead of bashing the parents.
We've always had that. But you're assuming that neglect is the major/only factor here. I disagree. I think the major factor is what the children are doing.
Spending time alone in a room with Lego is very different from spending time alone with some dark-pattern-studded UI, even if a parent is beyond viewing distance and within shouting distance in both cases. Do I need to argue that?
> Spending time alone in a room with Lego is very different from spending time alone with some dark-pattern-studded UI, even if a parent is beyond viewing distance and within shouting distance in both cases. Do I need to argue that?
Yes, you do need to argue that.
Humans are good at learning to interact with things; neither Lego nor YouTube were present in the ancestral environment but we manage just the same. If anything I'd say that people who grow up with "dark-pattern-studded UI" all around will probably learn to handle the tricks much better than people who only encounter it as adults (just as those who grew up with social media tend to have a much healthier relationship with it than the older generation).
You tell me to argue, but you yourself just assert.
I will, though.
I'll argue my point by RAA. You may recall my phrase, "spending time alone doing <x> is very different from <y>, ….". If spending time alone doing X is not very different from Y, then it follows that pairs of activities are roughly equally educational, roughly equally dangerous, roughly equally healthy, and so on, or at least roughly equal in sum of the qualities parents care about. Ie., if one activity is more educational than another, then the other must necessarily be less dangerous for the child, so as to conserve equilibrium. This is absurd. QED.
I interpret you as saying that people are better at learning to cope with dark patterns as young children than as adults. Right? Please argue.
> "spending time alone doing <x> is very different from <y>, ….". If spending time alone doing X is not very different from Y, then it follows that pairs of activities are roughly equally educational, roughly equally dangerous, roughly equally healthy, and so on, or at least roughly equal in sum of the qualities parents care about. Ie., if one activity is more educational than another, then the other must necessarily be less dangerous for the child, so as to conserve equilibrium. This is absurd.
"This is absurd" is pure assertion. The same argument would say that spending time alone playing with lego is very different from spending time alone playing with toy trains, or with dolls, or with crayons, or in a treehouse, or ... . If you're saying that all these things are "very different from" each other, then sure, youtube is different from lego in the same way that lego is different from crayons. But very few parents seem concerned that their child spends too long playing with crayons and not long enough with lego, or vice versa, or would want to ban one in favour of the other.
> I interpret you as saying that people are better at learning to cope with dark patterns as young children than as adults. Right? Please argue.
I gave an analogy to that effect already. More generally, people are better at learning anything (particularly things that are largely subconscious) as children than as adults - languages, riding a bike, performance arts...
> I’d say that leaving kids in a an environment of addictive substances (say, cigarettes?) is a great way to get them addicted.
Just as with social media, my general impression/experience is that people who were kept away from addictive substances (cigarettes/alcohol/coffee/...) growing up tend to be more likely to have problems with them in later life than people who had them around when they were growing up.
(There are specific health reasons to keep particular substances away from young children, but that's a distinct thing).
With smoking it actually helps prevent children from acquiring the addiction if they grow up in a society where people rarely smoke. Denormalization of smoking has been proven to work.
While I agree with your statements, isn't this the same warnings that people gave years ago with the rise of television? Cable TV? Video game consoles? The internet?
I mean it's the same as children's TV on cable, with the main difference that it's infinite instead of constrained to at most a couple of hours.
It is the same set of warnings. Those warnings are justified. This is anecdotal and I am well aware that all children are different. In my case, I have a 5 year old, there is a marked difference in their behavior based on the content they are is watching. As an example, we don't let the child watch "Paw Patrol" because it winds them up due to the constant high-intensity rush to solve a problem. Where as a show such as "Creative Galaxy" is paced to emphasize content instead of emotional waves. I would say that the beauty of the internet is now we can actually limit and screen content. No longer do children watch "whatever is on TV". They watch whatever on demand show that their parents allow them to watch. This is where pre-screening and understanding your child's developmental level are the most important. "Here's a phone watch YouTube." is the extreme and as stated in a prior post could be considered neglectful.
Oh come on. NEETs exist because the job market is ridiculous, and while I like to diss JavaScript like everyone else, JS developer is still an above average result in upbringing.
There's always been a lower class working terrible jobs. Driving for Uber or working fast food for $8/hour is a terrible job, but it's not as bad as working in a steel mill or coal mine.
The key issue is supervision. YouTube Kids also has very enriching content. My hyper intelligent kid was able to direct himself to all kinds of educational content — way better than being forced to watch whatever crap was on TV like when we were growing up watching He-Man and Skeletor and GI Joe which was some real f’d up shit if you think about it. Like, they had swords and guns and shot people and it was “harmless fun”.
Just fyi - Youtube Kids sells itself as "curated" content, but you can very quickly find Jake Paul videos which are absolutely 100% not kid-friendly on it.
Is this an anecdote? E.g. I assume you are calling this a tremendous risk because you have seen it first-hand negatively affect your own kids mental development?
Whilst I agree with the sentiment of less tech = probably better for young kids, your comment reads as FUD. 15 minutes a day watching youtube is probably fine and will likely have minimal effect on development compared to other factors.
The content being consumed plays a huge role in this. 15 minutes a day can range from enriching to neutral to harmful. As an example, a kid repeatedly watching YouTube videos of other kids kicking each other in the balls and laughing is likely to elicit unwanted social behavior.
My kids watch this stuff constantly and it's just too much and too random to vet it all. I'm putting a lot of trust in YouTube Kids to filter it to quality content.
That trust was shaken the other day when they said "daddy did you know you shouldn't sleep under trees because you can't breathe properly?" I'm like who told you that. "A video."[1]
Turns out it was a "learning" video produced by one of these outfits, not ChuChu but a competitor called AumSum. It's some weird urban myth that has traction in south asia.[2] It's a bastardization of tree respiration biology. They think it puts out enough CO2 at night to impact humans. So don't sleep near it because then you'll be oxygen deprived.
So yeah, apparently someone green-lit that stinker and turned into a cute animation. Which is funny until you realize AumSum as a whole has 139M views. Their singular mission is to make educational science videos.[2] And my kids are 100% addicted to YouTube Kids.
[3] "We try our level best to create highly creative and refreshing videos of Physics, Chemistry and Biology. This channel can prove to be useful for students studying in schools, colleges as well as for people of all ages who have a curious scientific mind." https://www.youtube.com/user/Smartlearningforall/about
I was not. I had early access to a real computer though, with those big trackball mice (my parents said it was easier for me to grasp) and a keyboard, and I had my own computer in my room by 7. I was addicted to that I guess.
And that would be the first thing I'd do if I had to parent actually. Why dumb things down with tablets ? A computer is affordable for most HNers. Give them computers. They can do the same tasks and learn so much more down the road ! Let them use complex contextual menus and find their own way, type on a real keyboard with keys you actually need to press, move a cursor ... I don't get why tech savvy people give touch screens to their children.
These mobile environments lead nowhere. Whereas when I started using the internet I too wanted my own website and already had the tools needed.
Also you said
>as well as have a large assortment of crafts and novel activities for them to engage in every morning while I do stuff like bathe and eat.
I don't remember my parents having stuff ready for every instant of my life. Sure I was bored from time to time (no siblings) and I probably bothered them (again, no siblings, I guess numerous bored kids is messier, but that should be thought upon beforehand), but I had to find my own occupations. What are you going to do later in life anyways ? Ask friends to keep you untertained ?
My dad gave me a laptop with games and basic tools on it when I was 2 years old, and i figured that out pretty quickly.
When I was 6, I was allowed to use the internet but there were limitations for time and keyloggers.
My parents gave up when they found out I was booting up with linux off a flash drive at 14.
I feel like I learned more about technology when there were obstacles to overcome, rather than instant gratification.
I would start my own kids off air-gapped and then gradually allow access, since for me it gave me a healthy respect for danger and taught me to find solutions.
But it's more nowadays. I notice it even on myself. On the internet I can watch whatever I like, and stick to that for hours. On the TV theres maybe only 2-3 interesting shows to watch, so I would eventually turn it off.
It’s strange that in 2018, superstitious beliefs without any evidence are widely believed. It makes me wonder what kind of bizarre superstitions will exist 100 years from now.
I lived in Incheon for 2 years and can confirm that belief in fan-death is definitely not uncommon. I even have a couple Korean friends who can rationally explain why fan-death makes no sense but still reflexively leave the window open when going to sleep with a fan on.
I know, I'm a shitty parent, and I'm solely responsible for my kids being exposed to shitty things in the world. I should throw out their iPads and read books to them constantly (more than the 20m/day I do every single day after 2h dinner & bedtime process) as well as have a large assortment of crafts and novel activities for them to engage in every morning while I do stuff like bathe and eat. Sorry for being shitty.
Don't mind him/her. Distracting a single-digit-aged human long enough to put dinner on the table or get some work done is hard on the best of days.
I don't have kids so I'm curious, why youtube? I assume most families don't have the time for a full time parental distraction but is there really no other alternative? I'd imagine Disney or some other media giant would have figured something out by now. Is youtube content just so practically endless and passive enough that no one can compete? Or is it just that they don't like gaming or TV shows that much (or you dont allow it)?
Kids will adjust to whatever their circumstances are though. If you just pull all media, kids will complain for a few days, but eventually just get used to it and play with their real toys. Hell, kids don’t even really need toys to have a good time, take those away and they’ll go dig in the dirt, jump off couches, and make pillow forts.
It’s not hard to “distract toddlers”, my daughter is three and LOVES to help cook. She fries eggs pretty well and I figure the worst that’ll happen is she’ll burn herself (which she hasn’t). Given the right opportunities and structure children can actually be much more helpful than we give them credit for, especially in the USA we’re just sort of taught that children are useless ingrates that are wholly incapable of the most rudimentary tasks (I mean I was certainly treated that way).
It’s a self fulfilling prophecy, the more constantly stimulated the kid is, the more difficult it is for them to pay attention when it’s important.
>It’s a self fulfilling prophecy, the more constantly stimulated the kid is, the more difficult it is for them to pay attention when it’s important.
I think this is true for all humans in general. I actually think it is worse for teenagers who have more unsupervised time and don't know any better.
--
FYI.. there was a program on about kids in Costa Rica or maybe Honduras where they all had chores. Even the 3 year olds. I thought it was interesting as the kids themselves were very well behaved.
> my daughter is three and LOVES to help cook. She fries eggs pretty well
Maybe I'm over protective, but hot oil around a 3 year old sounds like a bad idea. I get it that they can do it, but it only takes 1 accident to scar them for life and 3 year olds are super uncoordinated. I have been called a helicopter parent before though, so maybe it's me being a bit weird.
So you’re right, it is a bit scary. We cook on low, with just a little bit of butter. I certainly wouldn’t deep fry ANYTHING with her around, and when I have the kitchen is a no go zone. To me it’s about calculating risk, and a small amount of ~175° with a closely supervised child is not that risky.
I get some judgy looks on the playground for studiously ignoring my kid and letting her play for three hours and everyone else stays for maybe 15 minutes being super engaged with their kids before they get super bored and leave, so I guess I’m not really normal. I consider one of my goals to get my daughter to walk to the park alone at five, since that was the age I had agency to go wherever I wanted. I’m not super optimistic, I may end up moving to a small town to make that possible, if I can get a good remote position eventually.
"studiously ignoring my kid"... haha you sound exactly like me. I've got a two year old so a bit behind you guys, but same exact philosophy. The anti-helecopter -- give kids just a smidge more responsibility than they can handle (rather than hovering), make sure they don't get seriously injured, but let them learn from the scrapes and bumps. It's crazy how fast they learn and how capable they get at such young ages.
>I consider one of my goals to get my daughter to walk to the park alone at five, since that was the age I had agency to go wherever I wanted.
Are you maybe misremembering your age at the time? I have a 4.5 year old at home and there is no way that I think he will be ready to go the park a couple of streets away on his own. By not ready I mean, in no way capable of judging when to cross a street safely and may get lost on the way, especially if he gets distracted and absentmindedly wanders in an unfamiliar direction.
There was a recent study [1] that showed that kids have a highly elevated risk of accident when crossing the road right up to the age of 14 (!! was surprised to read this). Some points from the research:
- simulating traffic showed accident rates as high as eight per cent with six-year-olds
- Even those aged 12 were hit by vehicles two per cent of the time
- It was not until early adolescence that children crossed the road safely
Just thought I'd point this out in case you were not aware of the research.
Kudos for promoting self-reliance and independence though. I am a long way in the other direction where I do way too much to try and ensure my kid's safety. I know I need to ease up so that he can start to make his own mistakes.
In Japan they send their kids shopping at 5-6. It's Super safe in Japan, but the point is kids are very fast learners and learn to be independent fairly easily if pushed or directed in that direction..
I wonder if these kids need to cross any streets and what the accident rate there is. I'm assuming Japanese 6 year olds are developmentally very similar to western 6 year olds. So according to the research that I linked to above they have an 8% chance of getting hit by a car when crossing the road.
Would you cross the road if you were hit by a car for every 12 times you crossed?
> kids are very fast learners and learn to be independent fairly easily if pushed or directed in that direction..
An acceptable level of risk awareness can't be taught to kids under a certain age because their brain development is not yet at the level where they are capable of learning certain things. For example: do you think there is any level of training that you could give a 5 year old to safely handle a loaded gun? Do you think there is a level of training you could give a 5 year old to then leave them unsupervised with a gun? Crossing a street is no different. It's life and death.
If you've ever spent any time around kids 6 and younger you will know that they have very intense tunnel vision and very poor situation awareness. It's not their fault. They literally don't yet have the brain development necessary for accurately predicting future events and predicting the consequences of their actions.
I agree and wouldn't push my own kids for that type of activity, simply not safe here.. But as other people's comments, there are lots of ways to make kids responsible and independent even in the confines of your own home such as cooking, cleaning, other types of chores, etc
I suggest you read David F. Lancy’s Anthropology of Childhood. If children were as stupid as you suggest none of them would make it through childhood. No parent can watch even one child all the time and it’s possible to kill your self getting out of bed.
> “Perhaps the most persuasive evidence regarding the attitude of adults toward children acquiring culture through play – without the need for adult guidance – comes from widespread reports of parents’ indifference and even encouragement of toddlers playing with machetes and other sharp and dangerous tools (Howard 1970: 35). For example, from the Kwoma of Papua New Guinea: “I once saw Suw with the blade of a twelve-inch bush knife in his mouth and the adults present paid no attention to him” (Whiting 1941: 25). Aka mothers regret it when their infants cut themselves while playing with “knives but they don’t want to restrain their exploration and learning (Hewlett 2013: 65–66). The Aka provide scaled versions of items in their tool inventory to their very young children and enjoy observing (and, occasionally correcting) their practice strikes (Hewlett et al. 2011: 1175). Four-and-a-half-year-old Okinawan children readily peel the outer skin off a length of sugar cane with a sharp sickle. When a mother was asked how the child acquired this skill she was at a loss for a reply. “‘I don’t know! He must have watched us and learned himself by trying it out!’ she said” (Maretzki and Maretzki 1963: 511)”
>If children were as stupid as you suggest none of them would make it through childhood.
They're not stupid and I didn't say they are. They lack experience and do not have the skills (brain development) that are necessary to cross a road without significant risk.
> "The researchers found 6-year-olds were struck by vehicles 8 percent of the time; 8-year-olds were struck 6 percent; 10-year-olds were struck 5 percent; and 12-year-olds were struck 2 percent. Those age 14 and older had no accidents.
Children contend with two main variables when deciding whether it’s safe to cross a street, according to the research. The first involves their perceptual ability, or how they judge the gap between a passing car and an oncoming vehicle, taking into account the oncoming car’s speed and distance from the crossing. Younger children, the study found, had more difficulty making consistently accurate perceptual decisions.
The second variable was their motor skills: How quickly do children time their step from the curb into the street after a car just passed? Younger children were incapable of timing that first step as precisely as adults, which in effect gave them less time to cross the street before the next car arrived."
Your quote from David F. Lancy’s Anthropology of Childhood is an anecdote. Was there a study done to measure child mortality and injury in this community? Would it be acceptable by modern standards?
My dad was raised in an eastern European village in the 1950s. From his stories child supervision was non existent. He has many stories of children who died due to accidents, e.g. children who misjudged the thickness of a frozen lake, fell through and drowned. Of course most survived into adulthood, but by modern standards child mortality rates were completely unacceptable.
Your associations with the word stupid are your own. If children were as poor at dealing with the environment as you believe they are I would not be unable to name a classmate who died during primary or secondary school.
I haven’t read the article you quote and I won’t because the conclusions you’re drawing from it are insane. Maybe the internal validity is good and if the experiment was replicated the same results would be obtained. The external validity is obviously not there. They are attempting to measure how traffic mortality from independent road crossing and they get numbers so high that it’s obvious their experiment doesn’t generalise to the question they’re actually interested in.
If we pretend that children do not cross the road until age 12 and assume 0.99 chance of surviving one crossing a day, after 100 days 63% will be dead.
Or I could just examine my own experience. My father and I both grew up within 100m of a main road with heavy traffic and we survived unscathed. The paper does not support your conclusion.
There may be a sensible conversation to be had on child supervision but my father grew up in the 50s too and it was not the hellscape you depict. If you look at deaths per 100,000 young children 5-14 they’re at worst three times current levels. By the 80s they’ve dropped to less than double current levels and people weren’t going insane wrapping their children in cotton wool and depriving them of all contact with the real world then. Deaths in childhood are so low that accidents are a minority of childhood deaths.
You’re advocating depriving children of freedom under a model of the world where childhood is so dangerous no one would survive when the trends in death rates are pretty much the same across industrialised countries while the insane helicopter parenting isn’t.
It really depends where the kids grow up. Free range parenting is possible, but in metropolitan neighborhoods with lots of traffic and psychos the risks are quite high. Im a parent and would love for my kid to grow up the way I did, free range and all. But there are always risks. I remember being hit by cars twice. The first time just a bruise, the second time broken leg, double fracture, from which I developed a slight scoliosis. Some kids I grew up with died in stupid accidents so I keep the risks in balance. Are you a parent yourself? Would you let your kids free range in a city like NYC?? Yikes..
Barry has a point, one piece of research does /= the absolute truth. Research is the scientific process of moving closer to the actual truth through experimental investigation. While you may believe this study, do not be certain that it can't be falsified.
So you refuse to read the study because you don’t like the conclusion and instead rely on your own personal anecdote. Your reasoning has no place on HN.
One thing that's different is that in many places in Japan there's a 2- or 3-foot high metal barrier between the sidewalk and the road. It's impossible to just wander out into traffic except at crossings.
Those are the exception, not the norm. Just about all residential neighborhoods are filled with streets that have no sidewalks, much less barriers between car and pedestrian traffic.
> I get some judgy looks on the playground for studiously ignoring my kid and letting her play for three hours...
If you are watching your child for three hours on the playground then it is obvious you either do not have a regular job or only doing this on the weekends.
Check your privilege before you lecture others on how to parent. Also the hot cooking with 3 year olds is idiotic and dangerous even if it’s “just with butter” (??).
Problem being they lectured that it’s “not hard” to occupy kids everyday.. not just on the weekends. Parenting is hard and takes lots of resources and tons of time every day optimally.
risk vs reward. Have you spent any time around a 3 year old? They are super uncoordinated at this age and can't take off a sock without falling on their butt. GP clarified that it was supervised cooking with low heat and without oil, so that sounds safe to me, but certainly wouldn't have any other pots with for example, water boiling around since they don't have the experience to avoid it and the results can end up catastrophic.
Reportedly one of my first words was "hot!" after I stuck my hand on an electrical stove top burner that was on. I don't remember it. Scarred for life? What do you remember before age 4? Edit: ah, you meant physical scars.
>Scarred for life? What do you remember before age 4?
A 2 year old in my wife's mother's group got 3rd degree burns from tipping a hot cup of tea on himself. Luckily it missed his face, but his neck and chest are now permanently scarred (and disfigured). The child required 6 months of physical therapy because the burn was down the neck and under the arm so movement was affected due to scar tissue. Any liquid over about 60 degrees C is a very real hazard for small child.
It really depends on context. A closely supervised 3 year old "cooking" using very low heat without oil and without a boiling pot around? Yup that sounds ok.
To be fair, she's frying eggs, not deep-frying them. I'm sure the parent in question is taking appropriate steps to keep her safe. Kids are more capable and resilient than we give them credit for. Give them a chance to excel.
I think small accidents help kids learn. Splashing a bit of oil on yourself isn’t the end of the world for adults and I don’t think it is for my toddler either.
We don’t have a yard, my kids can’t cook eggs while I’m getting ready, and pillow forts get old. Maybe there is another solution to improving online educational content than shaming parents who find mornings “hard”.
Why is isn’t it shaming when we tell people to get vaccinations, then? The current medical research suggests that children 2-5 should have no more than one hour of screen time. The current medical research also suggests children should be vaccinated on schedule.
Your parent-shaming was not about exceeding one hour of screen time, it was about any screen time at all. Not all of us are able to spend our mornings frying eggs with our kids before taking them to the park for three hours (which means you probably have a working partner who is considerably less involved.. shall we judge their parenting?). My comment was about improving the quality of educational content on YouTube, not skipping vaccinations.
> Distracting a single-digit-aged human long enough to put dinner on the table or get some work done is hard on the best of days.
I don't doubt that it is, yet this is a problem that humans have been solving literally since the dawn of time. I doubt very much that YouTube is necessary.
Kids like to watch other kids. You can sometimes get them into a cartoon or an educational program... But they really like to watch other kids do things invent and play.. and they learn from them.
Nobody really has a right to tell parents how to parent. Parenting is hard.
Personally, I don’t let mine near YouTube unless we’re looking something up together. They’re allowed kids Netflix but even that has plenty of content I don’t let them watch. Annoyingly, there’s no way to remove a show from Netflix. I’ve been meaning to make a chrome extension so I can blast the likes of Horseland into another dimension.
Yeah except that in everything else people take advice but you say boo about someone’s parenting and you might as well have suggested they’re literally abusing their parents. There are plenty of things that are known to be suboptimal.
The American Association of Pediatrics recommends no screen time under 18 months except for video chatting, and only 1 hour a day for children 2-5 [0]
Most of us are engineers here, but as soon as parenting comes up people become so superstitious and irrational.
That could be for the simple fact that all it takes is a couple of concern people to make phone calls, and not only are you a bad parent, but you're in the system and have to do a bunch of remedial work. It's not hard, happens every day.
I have a fair amount of experience with this system. Not due to those phone calls but due to other things I did, foster care being one.
I cared for kids, who got placed with us. Some of those people earned that. Not good. Obvious.
On those, my wife and I did a good public service. It is hard.
But, I saw many cases where a disgruntled person ruined families too. Those kids should never have been with us at all. Yet they were, and worse, we had to hold a terrible line or it gets worse for the kids and potentially us!
A few samples:
Baby sitter feels she can do better, phones the father in. Boom. He spends 6 months being psych evaluated, his wife does not know what to think, and part of his struggle is having his johnson in a clamp while being shown suggestive kiddie pictures. That family got past it. We helped once we were free of the system. Labor of love and justice there.
They left the State the moment they could. Cannot blame them.
Ex wife hated step mom. Similar thing, both parents end up in some program. Never did get right. Just a mess, kids with relatives.
Dad loses his mind in the store. Brats got under his skin. Delivered a quick swat, lets go home. Ended up in all sorts of trouble for essentially getting a toddlers attention. Concerned people trump up abuse case. Never did see that one conclude.
People lose their kids these days. It does not take much. You should also know all public servants, teachers, many coaches are obligated to report or face charges in many places. The report bar is very, very low. An angry kid can get another kids family in the system. I saw that happen.
Having frank conversations about parenting carries grave implications these days. It was once not like this, but it is now. Among a trusted peer group it still happens as it always has.
Out in public? Internet? People are crazy to mention specifics. Just don't do it. Ever.
I do not have answers. I wish I did given what I saw.
I can help share hard won understanding. So I have.
Just know the touchy parent convo is systemic, not so much people being snowflakes or something.
Downvoted because this is your personal struggle and trauma, whereas the “bad parenting” discussion was really just about screen time. Just letting you know. But please talk to someone about it if you’re not already.
I have no struggle. Those events were hard. No doubt. Not the point.
It was an answer to the question of why bad parenting discussions often are met with angst.
People get questioned on parenting, and suddenly they are in the middle of a mess and they are there because other people said, "bad parent" essentially.
Understanding how that can happen is germane.
Here is all it would take in many States:
Those parents just leave their kids with an iPad, and do not watch their kids. Follow that with just about any scary scenario and it is likely to trigger people at your door asking questions.
What I did here was share a little from the other side of some of those events gone bad. None of those should have happened. They all were rooted in literally, "bad parent" allegations created out of thin air with basis as thin as "screen time."
Parents here should be aware of what can happen. Comments to the effect of, "WTF is it with parenting discussions?" These potential events are part of WTF.
Frankly, I only shared difficulty to underscore complete disapproval, and I should have shared we quit due to how out of control and abused it can be, and is regularly. Some if those families were of non trivial means too.
"It won't happen to me." Know I have seen otherwise, and that is all.
By the way, I really appreciate you giving the reason for the downvote. Kudos!
I rarely downvote myself, preferring to promote signal out of the noise instead. But that's just my preference. What I appreciate is knowing why, that's some understanding right there. I can use it, it's got value. I wish more of us would understand that.
My kid doesn't and will never have iPads until he is able to buy it for himself. Kids adjust and find ways to entertain themselves. It's an important skill they should be developing. You'd be doing them a service to just give them some inanimate toys to play with and leaving them to self-explore.
Don't worry. Everyone have this idealization of what type of parent they will be until they actually have kids. There are no rule book to say what good parent looks like.
Sounds to me like you're doing fine. Usually the people most critical of how others raise kids have no kids themselves (and/or are idiots), and therefore have no idea of the constant trade-offs you must make to keep them safe, fed, clothed, entertained, educated and also keep yourself sane.
In general no, but when it comes to plonking them down in front of a screen and turning on YouTube, that’s very much your choice. I don’t think that makes you a shitty parent either, but I think you’re misplacing your trust and it has a good chance of coming back to haunt you.
I dunno. My kids like to take YouTube things and bring them into the real world in imaginative play. You have to block peppa pig Spider-Man dentist but it’s not specifically bad. My kids are great at iPads fyi and there are a lot of educational apps. The only downside is my kids want to make YouTube videos now. Which when I was a kid my cousins put on plays and my friends and I made home made videos too.
Yeah, my oldest is actually brilliant and has learned many advanced things from YT educational videos way ahead of the curve. It's a powerful tool for self-directed education.. and also for junky toddler crack.
The problem is these content farms and ultimately the low payouts. Listen up YouTube: I would happily pay for better quality kids content. I'm about to trial Amazon FreeTime...
Why do they even have iPads? At least with a $100-200 laptop/chromebook they can learn things and build typing skills. Tablets are literally impossible (even for adults) to be productive on.
This is a very weird response. iPads are breakthrough child computers. They can use them prior to typing, reading or even fully speaking. And you said it is “literally” impossible for adults to be productive — like, not just slightly challenging. There are approx 80M iPad users. It is literally impossible to take you seriously.
This is even weirder and outright nonsensical. Observing the fact that a child can use an iPad at age 2-3 does not imply anything about expectations for their speech development.
He obviously likes the iPad more than the laptop. As a kid, I would tear the keys out of mechanical keyboards all the time out of curiosity and boredom, but that didn't break them.
Why isn’t there a Popcorn Time equivalent of children’s programming? Mr. Rogers, Sesame Street, Avatar:TLA and similar vetted content only. And strong parental controls if parents want to further limit the content.
Because their are massive anti-incentives to write that software as you won't make you any money and it puts yourself at legal risk for writing software which is designed to skirt copyright laws.
Yeah, and then "Following its creation, Popcorn Time quickly received positive media attention, with some comparing the app to Netflix for its ease of use. After this increase in popularity, the program was abruptly taken down by its original developers on March 14, 2014, due to pressure from the MPAA" [0].
Because I don’t have the physical, mental, or emotional capacity to take on something of that scope. A good day for me is one where I only have to shit 10 times instead of 20 - that sort of thing kills a lot of hopes and dreams.
There is, its called PBS Kids and all you need to do it note your local PBS station for it to work. My 4 year old loves all of the shows on there and it is amazing what she remembers after watching because it becomes a topic at the table several days after.
Yes I read daily. I also feed my kids pizza and ice cream from time to time and let them stay up past 8 last night. THERE IS A COST TO NEGLECTING MY PARENTAL RESPONSIBILITIES.
I'm not shaming him/her. They complained about something that is the easiest thing to fix. Take the damn iPad away. It's like complaining you're thirsty when you have a bottle of spring water in your hand. Not even Steve Jobs let his kid have an iPad.
> Parenting choices can be a way of harming people.
Sure, but the clarity of the information on which choices are likely harmful outside of fairly direct, physical harm is often far less than the shakers would like to pretend; it wasn't long ago (in fact it still happens even though the recommendation of the AAP has since caught up with the science) people were being shamed for providing early exposure to various nuts (the evidence note suggests the old advice that shaving was based on produced a huge surge in nut allergy prevalence, rather than mitigating risk.)
> People who harm people should be shamed.
And shaming, anyway, isn't all that effective (and certainly not a harm free) method of correction even when based on correct premises; when based on faulty premises it's an unmitigated harm.
So shamers generally deserve, by that standard, to be shamed; by a reasonable harm minimization standard they need to be corrected.
I think the best you can do is point at the scientific evidence that screen time is bad for kids, and if they won’t accept that there’s not much you can do outside of your own kids.
My sister has a 10 year old son and has absolutely no interest in even talking about parental controls. He spends all his time watching Logan Paul and who knows what else. I know how I was as a boy coming of age with unrestricted internet, and I worry about him.
> I know how I was as a boy coming of age with unrestricted internet, and I worry about him.
did you turn out ok?
when I was a kid in the early 80's kids would bring torn out pages from dad's dirty magazines, we'd sneak in to watch adult movies etc, and as far as I can tell we all turned out just fine.
On the other hand there is liveleak now and I'm not sure what effect that would have on a 10 year old's psyche. I guess we'll find out in the next decade or two.
I understand your argument. I had those experiences as well. Then I got high speed internet at 13 or so. Things changed very rapidly from there.
I really didn’t turn out ok. I don’t really want to go into details, but I turned out very far from ok. Maybe I wouldn’t have turned out different without internet, I can’t really know. I do know that I’m going to be really zealous in keeping the unrestricted internet away from my sons. And my girls, but for different reasons.
That's because people like you see 1 example and extrapolate that onto everyone's life circumstances.
For example: What about a single mom who puts on youtube for her child while she does the home chores and cooks because she does not have the money to pay for anything else (youtube is free)? Should she force her kid to sit there without any stimuli while she works? I'd argue that is far worse.
That's a false dichotomy - if you have money to buy a device to show YouTube on, you have money for books, toys whatever. And they needn't be expensive - at least in the UK, you can regularly buy 2nd hand books in mint condition for as little as £0.01 from Amazon, and we have lots of charity shops with great bargains on 2nd hand toys.
No, it doesn't. It recognises that shaming people does nothing to change behaviour or to prevent people taking up unhealthy behaviours. If anything shaming just entrenches those "bad choices".
I’m not a good person, or even close to it, and don’t mind being shamed for the harm I have caused people (some of it serious), but I wasn’t saying that. I was saying that Harvard should admit Beyoncé over me because she became more powerful than I did.
Why shouldn't parents trust a multibillion dollar company that employs literal geniuses when they say "hey, we have some videos that are suitablefor children"?
Until you've tried it you don't know how terrible it is. And by that time it's normally too late.
I'm not a parent, but I can totally see why as it is a free method for entertaining/potentially educating your child that requires extremely little involvement (time cost to the parent).
Chuchu tv is low effort content. I mean: it's really quite terrible and a waste of your kids time.
There's a lot of great content on youtube, but gets buried in this pile of garbage. Chuchu TV is part of the garbage. If you go to their channel and search for 'jonny jonny' (a popular nursery rhyme in india) you'll find a half dozen videos and enough garbage content to fill a whole days watching. This is a 3 minute rhyme.
The only reason chuchu has views is because they know how to game the system. Parents search for a popular nursery rhyme and leave kids with auto-play or suggestions... and guys like chuchu know how to game the recomendation algorithms to keep the kids within their content.
Western media has sort of an honor code not to engage in such actions. We traditionally prefer people to find our creative works because it's good and high quality, not because we gamed some algorithm.
That being said, it's entirely possible for someone outside of these organizations to start something like Chu Chu TV in the United States. However, it would probably face harsher criticism.
I find this comment and in fact the whole discussion here racist! It is just because that this is an Indian channel, people are bashing it!
It has songs like this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq3yfQnllfQ&t=140s) with a billion views! This means millions of kids are learning their first alphabets. My kid learnt her rhymes from this channel.
It is completely upto us parents as to how much screen time they get. My kid gets 40 mins everyday and no more. I decide what to watch and I watch with them.
I see what this channel is doing with the algorithm and I don't like it. In addition, I don't like the content and don't want my kids trapped by it. I'm sure that there's some educational content in there, but over all is of poor quality.
There are other channels in the toddler entertainment business, I assume from other countries, which do the same thing. I avoid them as well.
There are good Indian channels on youtube. Chuchu TV is not one of them.
Just wanted to add that this is a beautiful example of why, you shouldn't pretend to know the motivations, or what happens inside the heads, of other people. (as piyushpr134 did)
Our oldest recently started kindergarten and the teacher related that she’s seen a marked decrease in social skills the past few years. She blamed increased screen time which is generally videos on YouTube.
Our kids get about 20 min a day, 45 on weekends. I’d like to be rid of the devices entirely. Honestly withholding devices is the best discipline tool I have. What’s sad to me are the kids who are on them all day.
Maybe they've always been right. My wife is from a a developing country, and the incredible depth of the older generations who grew up without a drop of modern media is striking. Of course it is a complex situation since they had many other factors in their upbringing, but it is telling -- especially because their ability to patiently listen to and truly see the other person seems at least intuitively related to the lack of modern media consumption, which simply gave them so much more practice socializing, and placed so much more value on it. It was where life was at.
TV isn’t the rot of the western civilization/culture. It’s baked in much closer to the roots. We got two world wars well before any of this. And nukes.
War is the worst case scenario. It is not a good metric by which to measure a civilization or human growth, since we can be more refined, and virtually all wars are fought in self defense by one side - so say nothing at all about the quality of their way of life prior to the event.
I refuse to discard the death of millions as a statistical outlier. Particularly when the next example would likely result in the end of human life - possibly all life - as we know it.
Well then I expect you to note that the war was not "Western" only, and also take into account the extremely long and well documented history of war across this planet throughout human history. The danger of modern war is in technology, not culture.
Yep! Video games were ruining the youth when I was the youth being ruined. Meanwhile, I totally owe my career to the $300 my parents gave me for my birthday so that I could buy computer parts capable of running Age of Empires II.
But as a brand new parent, this YouTube stuff seems both tempting (as a distraction) and awful.
One issue is that an iPad is basically non-buildable or modd-able so you can't build your own PC to play a game... which one could argue is a more recent equivalent of buy a junky car and fix it up. Now maybe have the kid build a set top PC or something.. or a tivo.. That being said, video gamer kids tend to have super dexterity and they are better at taking in a lot of digital information quickly. So there is that.
They were right. Both video games and TV are pretty shit ways to spend time. I have never in my life thought “damn, I’m really glad I spent my Saturday playing halo instead of doing something else”. Video games and television are mental and emotional junk food.
And they've been correct for decades. Numerous studies have shown cognitive decline associated with television viewing, delays in language acquisition, deficits in attention and executive functioning.
As with everything there is nuance here, there is an equally valid argument in tandem to "Vidya bad" etc. which is the parents were watching a lot more TV (more channels arriving) and not interracting with their kids as much, hence less social skills for the kids to digest.
A child's cognitive recall abilities and associative thinking are super small when compared against an adult. Because of this, there typically isn't any room for additional information besides what's covered in the school day. The issue with video games is that some games take advantage of our attention span. In children, especially those without time management skills, the mind chooses between the instant gratification of the video game or the delayed gratification of studying for their school work.
Throughout every single year of my schooling, there was at least one teacher who would always tell us that we were without a doubt the worst class they'd ever seen in their life and they were quitting next year.
Are kids getting worse? Maybe. But teachers who think it's the end of the world and not just that they're getting old and grumpy have been around since teaching began.
Even Socrates was saying kids these days are hopeless. [1]
Kids today will be worse at some things previous generations were better at. They'll also do things that people today can't even imagine. Skills shift through the ages. I bet the average goober here on HN couldn't butcher a hog or build a barn like our great-grandparents could, but our great grandparents couldn't manage server farms either.
This is just terrifying: "As YouTube became the world’s babysitter — an electronic pacifier during trips, or when adults are having dinner"
Having kids is hard work. Do the work. Take some damn responsibility for your kids. Mine are limited to an average of 30 mins a day, including some days with 0. And never in the car, and we always eat dinner together.
I can't even understand how that sentence exists. It certainly does not in my world.
> when there are dedicated TV programs or even whole TV stations with quality content for children?
Name three.
All children-targeted TV I've seen these days are pure garbage. YouTube is full of garbage too, but at least you can find something of quality (even if it's some children cartoon from previous century) if you dig deep enough. But then there's issue with autoplay (discussed at length by other commenters), making YouTube dangerous to leave with kids unattended.
And that's why only let my kids watch my kid friendly curated collection:
Gummi Bears, DuckTales, Conan the Adventurer, Darkwing Duck, The Legend of Prince Valiant, Talespin, Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers, Defenders of the Earth, He-Man, Tintin, Dungeons and Dragons, Captain Planet, Batman The Animated Series, Avatar and Korra.
My kids are crazy about "Youtube Police" eg ChuChu Police. Last night my youngest complained that the cops where not wearing motorcycle helmets. =) The night before I cut out little stars on a thick paper, then put it ontop of a LED which filled the ceiling with stars, and put on a Youtube video about the universe with moody music. The next day one of them drew the solar-system with different colors. We also sing songs from Youtube videos even though I'm a terrible singer. And they refuse to go to sleep until I have read at least one book, where the Brothers Grimm's are far more scary then anything you can find on Youtube.
Because networks like Nick and Cartoon Network became absolutely stagnant for 6+ years. For example, It's only recently that Cartoon Network is beginning to invest in their shows again. Take their recent crossover.
Then compare it with what they had in 2013. Notice a difference?
And Nick is basically flatlining since they haven't ended Spongebob yet. Even the guy that made The Fairly Oddparents finally quit when he realized that Nick would just continue beating what they had into the ground. They're still having that DanWarp guy rehash the same sitcom formula he's used for the past 20+ years. It's all so stale now.
It's like every major network went into shock when Netflix started pushing their originals and are only now beginning to recover from it.
Two genres of youtube content that I was not aware of before I did some babysitting for a friend, and that I've come to appreciate now:
* compilations of ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks just driving along with their blue beacons rotating and sirens blaring. It's amazing how fascinating that is to kids.
* compilations of "good kids" happily eating their broccoli, spinach, etc.
That said, I've showed these to the kids for a few minutes on occasion; I don't think I'd leave them alone with a tablet to watch what they want (=what youtube recommends them for maximum "engagement"...) for extended times.
YouTube is trash for kids. PBS has tons of quality programming for kids and it’s all free with no ads! If you’re a parent get the PBS Kids video and games app for your device.
I have let my child watch some of the ChuChu TV videos, but I limit it to a fix time of 10 or 20 minutes tops.
I monitor which videos they are as the sidebar in youtube can suggest videos that are not appropriate for kids.
I think limiting screen time at a young at is what needs to be done. There are other activities the kids can do where they are engaging with their environment and using their senses.
What strikes me thought is the story about a dad who catches the son on eating sugar and lying to him and the outcome is happiness and whole family dancing. What is simply cheating others is promoted as wit and smartness.
I've mostly just manually white listed content that my kids get to watch, that is to say I make playlists for them (they can make requests) and their viewing is supervised.
There's a lot of "don't let your kids watch youtube" but you can... if you're present. It's not easy, but there is also stuff I like on there that I'm cool with the kids watching.
> I guess this includes watching TV while also doing other things
Exactly this. Some of my family members leave the TV on while doing other things "for the noise". Before the internet, you usually had what was either on TV or on the radio in terms of instantly finding background noise. TV was generally considered higher quality by most.
Yeah, chu-chu's success is evidence of the importance of being early and finding a good niche. I think all of my YouTube videos combined have like 100 views total.
That's a bit unfair, but you're right that "Raised by YouTube" is not a good title for this profile. We've changed the title to use more representative language from the article.
It's a 7k-word piece in the print edition of the Atlantic. You've made the case yourself that titles don't have to be trivially revealing - presumably because 'intellectual curiosity' necessarily involves some actual curiosity.
'Raised on Youtube' might be imperfect on some parameter or another but it's not 'misleading' any more than, I dunno, 'The Power Broker' is a misleading title of a biography. The title it's been replaced with is literalist butchery.
Do anything else, Netflix at least has some barrier for kids content... but torrent a bunch kids shows if you have to.