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by nsjames 811 days ago
As someone with small kids (5 and 8), can't say this is a bad thing.

A large majority of content creators that make content for children will do absolutely anything for fame with zero regard to how it affects the people who look up to them.

My kids will then come and regurgitate that stuff to me, and I've had to correct their thought process on things many times at this point.

I think the law should be more granular though. I allow my kids to watch a few types of content: - People playing with toys (as long as its not obviously promotional) - Educational videos (draw-with-me, learning videos, etc) - Play along (sometimes, it depends on the tuber)

I've banned them from watching anything else on youtube at this point. The primary problem here is that they don't come to me with everything so that I can fix the bad that they learn there.

Some examples: My 8 year old came to me one day and said "let it rain" with the hand motion. I asked her if she knew what it meant, and she said no. I explained it to her, and how it showed disrespect to money. She's been saving her allowance for a while so she understood the concept, luckily. But how many things like this has she learned that she didn't come to me with?

Another example is some song she heard a youtuber singing. It was about making fun of some little boy for having dirty pants or something stupid like that. We sat and had a chat about being kind to people, bullying, and other people's emotions.

Sure, these were good prompts for good parenting, something we might not otherwise have had, but overall I think the outcome of those videos is net negative. There are just too many subtle things that can't be easily corrected that have a large impact on the personalities of the little people we are attempting to raise to be good adults.

1 comments

On behalf of all parents everywhere... Thank you. :-)