[glaberficken]

Tech-parent here (if you can call me that!) I have a 9 and 4yo. My 9yo watches youtube since she was 2 (on normal restricted mode) I have been teaching my kids (especially the older one) to identify by herself what is quality content that you can learn from Vs what is just dopamine inducing click bait. I think it is delusional to think you are achieving anything by blocking youtube. The earlier you teach your kids to create their own filters the better. They will be exposed to it at some point anyway. My kid learned a lot of stuff by herself already on you-tube. How to draw, how to braid her hair, its really an empowering thing for kids. I wish i had youtube when I was a kid. It just enables them to learn by seeing and imitating, except they are not limited to what they see at school or at home. She already has a great sense of what is a shit video full of non-sense or what might be violent or inappropriate for her and polices herself to stop watching straight away. (obviously there is some supervision involved. She is not allowed to watch yt on the infrequent occasions she is home alone).

The other day we were researching something on wikipedia together for one of her homework assignments and i closed a browser tab by accident, she immediately turned and pressed Ctrl+Shift+T. I asked her how did she learn that. You guessed it, on youtube. One day she was drawing on a online drawing app and she closed the tab by accident and was really upset about loosing the drawing she had made, so she went on youtube and searched how to recover lost tabs.