[saudioger]

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.

[ObsoleteNerd]

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.

[lion0]

How do you find new content? Without the recommendations engine of YouTube that is?

[lamlam]

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?

[DanieI]

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.

[NeedMoreTea]

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.

[colechristensen]

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.

[tartoran]

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?

[ObsoleteNerd]

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.

[Double_a_92]

> or if we're waiting at the Doctors office or on a road trip

I wonder if that robs them from the experience of ever being bored. And if that might influence them.

[lamlam]

>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.

[ObsoleteNerd]

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.

[Insanity]

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.

[Double_a_92]

> 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.

[a-saleh]

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 :-)

[Freak_NL]

> "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.

[a-saleh]

We have watched a few episodes of 'Buurman en Buurman' :D I was quite shocked to see they have been dubbed, but it still seems to work :)

[abalone]

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.

[FabHK]

Much more selective, though, and you can choose a UI without the odious auto-play, "watch next" suggestions and (EDIT to add:) ads.

[keyle]

My toddler watches shows on there.

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".

[saudioger]

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.

[ALittleLight]

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.

[nkrisc]

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.

[vidarh]

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.

[nkrisc]

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.

[gambiting]

....like what for example?

[abootstrapper]

PBS Kids Video and Games apps.

[mromanuk]

I thought about that, there was an app doing that for iOS called Jellies

[sjg007]

There are apps for this. Most are parent curated.

[kyriakos]

Other than YouTube kids that is owned by Google itself what other apps are there? Can you recommend?

[sjg007]

There's Jellies and a bunch of apps that offer whitelists for Youtube.

[TallGuyShort]

^ This. View it as a teaching tool to make yourself a more effective parent. Don't view it as a babysitter.

[fipple]

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.

[keyle]

I do too of course. He learns colours with food, objects we play with AND TV.

[humanrebar]

I think avoiding bad romantic partners and substance abuse still rank above too much Instagram.

[sp332]

People learn by repetition. Youtube is great for that.

[LeoPanthera]

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.

[ivanhoe]

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 :)

[ConceptJunkie]

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.

[keyle]

Can you do that on a PS4 though?

[liveoneggs]

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.

[xvector]

What is Elsa-Gate?

[jazzyjackson]

See also, "Something is Wrong on the Internet"

"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."

https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-in...

[libraryatnight]

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.

[TangoTrotFox]

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.

[ConceptJunkie]

>> 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.

Yeah, I feel the same way about cable news.

[rococode]

https://www.reddit.com/r/ElsaGate/top/

Warning: Pretty creepy stuff and definitely NSFW.

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.

[booleandilemma]

What conspiracy?

[andrewem]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate has an explanation

[bitcraft]

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.

[r0fl]

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

[ianai]

As an adult, I rarely sit through a full YouTube video. The commercials wreck any informational value.

[imron]

Why do you put up with ads?

It's completely within your control to stop them.

[ianai]

My perceived costs/benefits for YouTube content don’t make sense.

[sushid]

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.

[imron]

There is zero cost associated with ad blockers, and they will significantly improve your entire web experience.

[TeMPOraL]

uBlock is free :).

[neom]

Youtube Premium is my fav thing I pay for because of this.

[swozey]

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.

[franciscrick1]

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.

[code_duck]

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.

[andai]

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.

[jefurii]

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.

[mycoborea]

I strongly recommend you don’t let your toddler watch at any type of media on a screen if possible.

[briandear]

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?

[ddebernardy]

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.

[whywhywhywhy]

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.

[saudioger]

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.

[techiferous]

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).

[r0fl]

YouTube has 1000s of the smartest minds working on increasing page view so and duration in app/on site

It’s like giving crack to a little kid. Impossible not to have them get sucked in

[kopo]

Also note, most adults are little kids.

[amrrs]

It's a coincidence that i just watched this talk on TEd https://www.ted.com/talks/james_bridle_the_nightmare_videos_... and this is on HN Front.

[TallGuyShort]

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.

[bennesvig]

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.

[Waterluvian]

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.

[ObsoleteNerd]

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.

[saudioger]

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.

[acd10j]

At least for fire tv stick chuchu tv has separate kid friendly app.

[arvindkumarc]

There is YouTube kids, even that didn't help?

[saudioger]

Check it out, it does an OK job at filtering out adult content... but it's 99% garbage.