| I have a 5 year old son. He has access to an iPad and all of my old game consoles (a Switch, my old PS4 Pro, and my Xbox One X), but he mostly prefers using the iPad. The iPad is locked down and has a ton of educational apps on it, but the main thing he does on there is watch Youtube Kids or play Minecraft (using an Xbox controller with a bluetooth connection to the iPad). His Youtube Kids account is locked down to mostly educational content only, with the content restrictions set to 2-4 years old. When I had it set to the 5-7 age range, Youtube kept showing him a lot of inappropriate videos. He knows how to use the search feature to find videos about just about any topic. I might have a conversation with him about quantum mechanics and then later in the day I will catch him watching a bunch of videos about the topic. He is obsessed with outer space and black holes. He will binge on low quality entertainment like my little pony for a while, and then he will watch some educational videos about math, and then he will switch over to some Kurzgesagt educational videos about outer space or something, and then he might switch to magic school bus. Any time I see something that I don't like on Youtube kids (like Ryan toys review), I will block the video (or the entire channel). I probably have 30 different channels blocked on Youtube Kids. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing by letting him watch so much content, but I can definitely say that he knows waaayyy more about the world than I ever did at his age, and he is also a voraciously curious self-educator. He loves math, mainly due to the Number Blocks TV show, for example. |