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Comment by azangru | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reliable body of evidence about what happens to children if they watch content that their parents find unnerving? Do they become sociopaths? Drug addicts? Neurotics? Criminals? Is there any real need for controlling what a child can see and what he can not?

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I don't think you are familiar with the content. As a parent, I am. We've reported them to YT and they don't act. These are videos that pretend to be about spiderman or peppa pig but involve blood, violence, sexual themes, dismemberment, etc. I understand what you are asking but it's irrelevant here, this isn't an intellectual exercise where we decide "hey, this isn't so bad after all."

Sounds like Robot Chicken. Fortunately Cartoon Network firewalls off Adult Swim with an hour or so of King of the Hill or other bland, boring material.

I typically only watch Cartoon Network when I'm traveling for work and I only wish it was King of the Hill. They use Family Guy as a firewall and it's fucking interminable, I keep flipping back hoping it's come around to Robot Chicken or whatever but it's always more goddamn Family Guy.

No, Robot Chicken is a show that's intended for an adult audience and intended to amuse adults.

This garbage on YouTube Kids is aimed at getting children to watch it and intended to be disturbing to children. The titles say things like "educational, learn numbers" and the channels are called stuff like "Kids TV."

How old are your kids? My daughter is four and for the last two years has watched a few thousand hours of YT Kids while battling cancer. We've had nothing but good experiences. The toy uboxing videos have created friction in so far as she wants to buy a lot of the toys she sees demonstrated, but beyond that the worst thing we've seen are a few scatalogical references surrounding diaper changes and other fairly normal toddler fare.

I've been confused reading all these stories about YT Kids, how do the kids even get to this stuff? The obvious search terms are banned by the app, but how deep down the rabbit hole does one have to go?

> Is there any real need for controlling what a child can see and what he can not?

Yes, and any sane parent would agree. Physical safety is a prime consideration.

Here's a bunch of examples (query: fork in electrical outlet):

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=fork+in+electri...

Shouldn't you be covering up your electrical outlets if you have small children anyway, and not counting on security through obscurity? Small children have a knack for sticking forks or other hazardous objects in electrical outlets whether or not they've seen someone else do it.

(Come to think of it, college is when you really have to worry about your kids frying themselves because they saw something cool on the Internet. At that point, you've let your guard down and assume you don't need to babyproof. But I distinctly remember being sad that I'd missed the exploding wires demonstration in physics class and deciding to replicate it myself with a frayed Ethernet cable in my dorm room...that could've gone very badly. And my friend electrocuted himself trying to get pirated satellite with a board he'd bought off the Internet and a dish we self-installed on the dorm roof.)

That's a rather uncharitable read of my comment, obviously keeping kids away from awful Internet content isn't sufficient by itself.

That evidence would be nice. It would also be nice to know exactly how many kids have even been exposed to this stuff. The NYT story is one parent's anecdote. The Medium post linked to some videos that aren't actually in the YT kids app. Many of the questionable parts of the videos were 10+ minutes in, which doesn't excuse them, but knowing about the dropoff rate of online video, many hopefully dodged the worst content.

I have a lot of anecdotal evidence from personal experience. Two examples:

PTSD from seeing horror movies at the age of 2.

Sexually precocious behavior at 6 due to having seen hardcore pornography at the age of 3.

Seeing some guy get folded in half in Disney's movie The Rocketeer was traumatic enough for me, and I was ~13. Not to mention melting the shoe in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

It's hard to tell what will or won't deeply affect a child and even harder to gauge the specific ages where things might become appropriate. It's really per-child, and no matter how well a parent does gauging that, mistakes will be made.

There's no way this can be automated, as it's never going to be one-size-fits-all. The combination of generally sanitized media channel + parental supervision will (and should) endure, IMO.

Yeah, I was 8 when I saw Roger Rabbit, and it was the right level of scary for me, but a lot of my friends were really spooked by it.

Well on the one hand, I saw the South Park film in fourth grade and grew up fairly vanilla about sex and violence. On the other hand, if I'd been able to watch livestreams of ISIS burning people to death when I was a kid, that would probably have traumatized me with raw fear.

> Is there any reliable body of evidence about what happens to children if they watch content that their parents find unnerving?

Yes. See the number of perforated ear drums after the "You've been tango'd" adverts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Man_(advertisement)#Bro...

(the lead says the ad was banned; his section says it was voluntarily pulled. Either way it could have been banned: any system of media rating (eg advertising standards or BBFC) include imitatable violence.

"what is trauma" for 100, alex

I suppose that depends partially on how closely things that unnerve the parents are correlated with things that will traumatize the children, or influence them to emulate undesirable behaviors.

And I don't think a parent's discomfort is sufficient, either. There were things that I watched as a child, with my parents' knowledge, that I still consider to have caused me trauma.

Funny, you ask for a body of evidence and so far have only received emotional responses.

So, then, you'll be providing your children for testing, to be sorted into the <likely traumatizing content> group?

For some things, the potential hazards (in this case, lifelong desensitization to, or increased propensity to violence) so drastically exceed the potential benefits (in this case, a bit more profit and less work for Google), that we should proceed with the precautionary principle, rather than just saying "F-it, show em whatever, we don't yet have proof that it's bad".

Learn a bit of perspective.

Calm down, take a deep breath. There's no reason to get so bent out of shape over someone merely asking for a little evidence. The parent poster has already gotten plenty of replies like yours.

Sounds you're classifying every viewpoint that is disagreeing with you as "emotional".

Nope, just observing a bunch of people making claims about "what content kids should watch" unconnected with facts or evidence, and then getting VERY defensive when this is pointed out.

When you join a conversation and nobody takes you seriously, maybe it is because everyone else in the conversation has a common understanding. In this case, everyone else in the conversation understands child development and the potential of these videos to cause trauma. It's not on us to prove it to you. Go do some research.

Telling someone to calm down and take a deep breath is a quick way to make them do the opposite.

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