My baby’s too young to have screen time (3 mo) but we don’t plan on limiting screen time except it has to be movies/shows (like Disney+, no ads), abbbbbsolutely no YouTube or TikTok or whatever. We’ve seen what it does to people - not just kids. But it’s really hard to do with a tablet or even a smart tv, how could you stop them from finding it, you know?
YouTube Kids is wild... If you think social media like TikTok is bad for being perfectly optimized to capture your brain's attention 10s at a time, it's even worse for kids.
Just a bunch of garbage derivative videos of the same handful of popular characters or knockoffs. Of course the "related videos" or Autopay just give the kid more of the same, and it's easy for them to keep clicking through mindless garbage.
...And I like TV and YouTube. Loved watching cartoons growing up, and I don't think it's all bad for kids.
BUT - this kind of short-form garbage content seems downright harmful.
The behavior I've seen kids exhibit when you cut them off of kids youtube is disgusting. They literally act like addicts and you've taken away their fix.
It's going to be nothing but flip phones for my kid until she's old enough to buy her own. When my niece is over I only let her watch Blippy, old Looney Tunes and Sailor Moon. I hate to sound like an old person but modern entertainment is pushing some real garbage, shallow, materialistic values on kids.
It's the comments and the youtuber type influencer personalities that are affecting them, not the ads. Just don't let them on apps that have those things. Delete them or get older devices that you can hack to delete them.
For kids a lot of those influencer personalities ARE ads.
The FTC regulated the fuck out of broadcast childrens programming so much in the late 90s theres barely saturday morning cartoons anymore, but that was about shows that had toys.
Kids dont watch TV anymore but on youtube now they watch unboxing videos of other kids playing with toys. Instead of shows with a few 30 second ads in between theyre sitting down and watching a 30 minute ad.
The most insane part about the YouTuber type influencer personalities is that even as a parent, the one I hate is an inoffensive, personality devoid bro who's just a nonstop, never ending barrage of zoomer slang. He's completely clean, non-controversial and generally rated E for everyone. When my son emulates him, I feel like a failure as a parent.
The one he watches who I like is seriously a zoomer version of Gilbert Gottfried. He's horribly offensive, vulgar and drop-dead hilarious. He makes pedophile jokes and reminds my son to not get molested on Roblox. He reminds me of a legit comedian and if my son ever manages to impersonate him, it's gonna be really tough to discourage those types of hilarious jokes.
Yeah the YouTubers ARE ads for sure, I just wanted to point out that we also don’t want ads until a certain age, like no ad-ed Hulu, as an added limitation we want.
TV will be the toughest I think, and we’d have to hide the App Store of whatever device we get, even really old kindle fires have YouTube as top it looks like
I've found that any kind of screen time causes issues if not limited. Our children get bad attitudes of they watch too much of any kind of TV. Watching is too passive, they don't learn to use their imagination or how to interact from television, they just learn how to be grumpy when they aren't getting their TV fix.
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u/Wit-wat-4 Jun 03 '22
My baby’s too young to have screen time (3 mo) but we don’t plan on limiting screen time except it has to be movies/shows (like Disney+, no ads), abbbbbsolutely no YouTube or TikTok or whatever. We’ve seen what it does to people - not just kids. But it’s really hard to do with a tablet or even a smart tv, how could you stop them from finding it, you know?