Whenever parents of young kids talk about how they handle the matter of screen time, it’s a really good opportunity to practice that whole Walt Whitman X Ted Lasso thing of being curious not judgemental.
I say this as I’m about to dive into something that’s one of the few regrets I have in my parenting journey a few years in.
Letting my guard down with YouTube.
I’m pretty thankful that as far as regrets go this is a minimal one, and it’s nothing extreme like having a five year old radicalized by some be-a-real-man weirdo with a vlog. It’s simply the fact that YouTube led to the introduction of my absolute least favorite programming my kids have seen.
Let me start by saying that YouTube became a tool not because of carelessness, but because we’re pretty intentional about what the kids get introduced to. At first, the opportunity to introduce *some culture* in the form of Tagalog nursery seemed like a good option over Cocomelon.
As the years went on, YouTube became the vehicle through which I introduced the kids to Moomin, and it’s hard to think of gentler, cuddlier content than that.
Pokémon is available on Netflix… until it isn’t. Right when the story hits the point where Pokemon: The First Movie was released, the episodes stop. The Official Pokemon Channel on YouTube can pick it up from there, and so if you want to keep up with Ash & Misty, that’s where you’ve got to go.
(Not Brock. The devout Pokémon fans will remember that during this story arc, Brock hangs back in Pallet Town with Ash’s mom for some reason.)
Anyways, so far so good. YouTube’s been a good tool to make deliberate introductions to some of the best things 90s animation had to offer.
Here’s where it starts to go sideways.
In preschool, we had a pretty big monster truck phase. The future ambition was to be a monster truck driver and all that. And so we loved Hot Wheels. And we got requests for Hot Wheels music videos and the animated series they made.
Not the highest value educational stuff, but also not terrible.
Until the algorithm starts to algorithm.
First you watch a few short episodes that the folks at Mattel actually produced out of one of their top franchises. They’re silly and fun enough. But the shows straddle the line between content and commercial. The thumbnails of the episodes don’t look terribly different from the thumbnails of video reviews. Unboxing. That sort of thing.
And that led to my least favorite bit of programming my kids have taken a liking to.
I don’t want to do an actual name drop, because I have no interest in either promoting the thing or making life worse for the kid behind it. I’m just gonna use the alias KidPlayz to refer to this channel.
KidPlayz is this child somewhere in the midwest. He’s apparently been online for some time because in some videos he appears about 5 or 6 and in others he may be 10 or 11. Anyways, this kid has an absurd amount of toys.
His channel is pretty much an unboxing channel. Most of his videos feature him testing out a new toy and assimilating it into his collection. His very massive collection. Of course, since his channel is a thinly veiled commercial for all these products, he and his family receive these shipments for free, creating this expectation from his young audience that it’s normal to have access to every toy in the world all at once.
A fairly large portion of his videos are product testing Hot Wheels cars and trucks by building racetracks for them. I didn’t mind this too much. Building racetracks has an element of creativity and science to it. I wish he was building them for a normal amount of vehicles and not the entire Marvel X Hot Wheels limited edition set, but hey.
I tried to be generous in finding the positives of this channel.
The kid does engage in some creative, imagined play… then again, if your kid ends up playing the exact same way he does rather than coming up with their own way, we might have to deduct some creativity points.
He does seem to have a present father who does this with him… but it’s also creepy that you mostly see the dad as an off-screen voice and never on camera. Is the guy unwilling to do what he’s making his kid do?
Ultimately, my issue was with the coached consumerism. The normalization of having a gluttony of playthings. And the constant hyping up of one product to then move on to the next one.
As much as I hated it… one of my kids loved it.
At first I thought his interest would die down and then move on to other things, as it goes with kids. And that happened. But then KidPlayz cycled back.
Still, I decided to take a cautious approach. We classified certain shows as “loud shows,” the things that I thought teetered on brainrot, and other shows as “calm shows,” things with an actual plot. That allowed us to whittle down time with KidPlayz. There were a couple more times I thought the interest was done, but then, it roared back up like a plumbing issue you were hoping would just “go away.”
As a parent, I’d rather not outright ban something my kid loves unless I clearly have to. A lot of times, you clearly have to. But the cost for using your parent power to strictly outlaw something is that it creates a mystique around that thing. I know. As a kid growing up in conservative church circles… I saw a lot of things with some pretty good mystique.
Maybe I could use tech against itself? Believe it or not, YouTube doesn’t let you block a single channel. Well… maybe that’s easy to believe. It allows that on YouTube Kids, but I’ll be honest, I don’t like YouTube kids. It quickly puts them on track to be served brainrot for kids, and I’d rather their recommendations be cut with all my workout vids and random travel vlogs.
I tried to retrain the algorithm. But unboxing channels and brainrot channels are like a hydra. You block one and another like it quickly takes its spot in the algorithm.
There are some absolutely terrible channels for kids that are mostly slapstick videos starring kids who seem forced into it by their parents. One of the downsides to technology enabling anyone to have a show is that… some people really shouldn’t have a show. And those people definitely shouldn’t be turning their children into entertainers for other children.
(As a side note, if you’re not already aware of all the drama that’s surrounded Ryan’s World- a popular kid unboxing toys channel from the mid 2010s… oh boy. The kid is now entering his teenage years and some of the late stage videos he seemed pretty painful.)
Anyways. Seasons changed. My kid went from one interest to another. Mario became the Ninja Turtles became Minecraft.
And then I was caught off guard when out of the blue I got another request to watch KidPlayz.
I was amazed. And not in a good way. KidPlayz had been a scourge of screentime to me for a couple years now… a kid being interested in a show for more than two years is like the Simpsons being on the air for nearly 40.
Anyways, when it became clear KidPlayz might be in our lives forever and ever if we didn’t allow it, I had to resort to some drastic measures: talking it out like a proper grown up.
It wasn’t exactly easy to package concepts like consumerism and materialism in a way that a five year old could grasp, but eventually we got to things like: things are good, but too many things can make it hard to enjoy or take care of our things the way they deserve. And they might make us so focused on things that we forget stuff that’s more important, like people.
Thankfully, I have a kid who has some pretty solid emotional intelligence. He said plainly, “yeah, I like watching KidPlayz cause I get so jealous.”
“Well then there’s that too!”
I explained how sometimes when kids make shows out of themselves playing, sometimes it becomes more like work than play. I noted that I was actually a bit worried about the Kid in KidPlayz.
I don’t know if I nailed this, to be honest. Screentime itself is a complicated topic. Sometimes I admire the parents who don’t let their kids watch anything not narrated by David Attenborough, then I remember, I watched Season One of The Pitt in less than a week. What kind of hypocrite would I be to be a purist against screen time?
I will say… I haven’t been asked to put on KidPlayz in a long, long time. Not since our conversation. Way better than a block button.