Raised by YouTube
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
... or maybe "popular for a set of small people" :)
Many folk trashed shows like Teletubbies or In The Night Garden for being banal, and thus 'damaging' young minds. But those shows were informed by child psychologists who, unlike the detractors, understand that child brains work differently to adult ones.
I suspect ChuChu hits the same buttons.
There are YouTubers whose whole bit is insulting people, having a short temper, inconviniencing people and playing it all off as jokes. However, I have seen my younger cousins directly adopt behaviors from these YouTubers and try to solve their problems by shouting, insulting and throwing a tantrum. Ofc, throwing tantrums is something all kids do, but the manner in which they do it closely resembles these channels.
Then there are straight up creepy and unnerving channels with millions of views and that show at the top of queries searched by children.
I feel YouTube should provide parents with a more granular control over the filtering process. Preteens can be very impressionable.
It's terrifyingly easy to permanently wreck someone's eyesight or hearing with a high power laser pointer or an airhorn.
"It's just a prank, bro!"
Back in the vacuum-tube days, I was watching a Three Stooges short. One hit another in the face with a pie. This inspired me to throw a pillow in my father's face. I don't think he'd have thought this good in any case, but he was smoking a cigarette. This led to an indefinite ban on The Three Stooges in our household.
Of course, in the days when the average household had at most one TV, and that TV had at most three channels, parents had very granular control over the filtering process.
ChuChu actually seems fine, for what it's worth. Even so, in the article the author describes how they couldn't get the phone out of a 2 year old's hands, which is 1) horrifying (regular screens that close to the face at that age may be problematic for depth perception development among numerous other issues) and 2) true of literally anything you put on the phone before giving it to a two year old.
I often find myself wishing for a browser plugin that hides clickbait. It seems like a fairly easy thing to do, maybe with some pretty basic machine learning - or even without it, just looking for too much capitalisation or phrases like "what happens next".
However there where also a 100 shows kind of like GI Joe and Transformers at same time that all died after a season or two and no one remembers. It would be interesting to see if anybody has done any analysis as to what made the successful bad show more successful than the unsuccessful bad show.
Compared to most of them, Pokemon was actually pretty decent. It had a (very basic, but still...) storyline about kids going off on kid adventures and meeting lots of weird cartoon animals. I mean, sure there was the whole "catch wild animals and train them to fight each other" thing but it wasn't really any more violent than the GI Joe or He-Man or Voltron shows I watched as a kid.
Going back to those, the only real common negative thread is how they were basically ads for toys and games. Taken outside of that, I saw Pokemon as a halfway decent "starter anime" that was loads better than some of the live-action cartoons of the time (Power Rangers and its knockoffs were just awful).
Oddly enough, they seem to be doing fine.
If your kids are not yet school age, and you plan to send them to school rather than home-school when the time comes: what's your plan for when your children and the other children realise this stark difference between their home environments? Your children will feel they're being denied wonderful entertainment that the other children are getting. Other children will mark out your children as outsiders. Based on my own childhood, I'm afraid I find it easy to imagine your children being ostracised and bullied over a thing like this. But even if they're not, won't they be screaming for TV every night?
(No children myself, I could easily be wrong about everything, honest question.)
When I truly wanted to watch a movie that was going to be on, I had to plan a sleep-over at my cousin's.
It honestly never bothered me, nor did I particularly feel ostracized in any way by my schoolmates.
Neither did I feel slighted by my parents: I grew in the kind of family where when you're a kid, things are what your parent tell you they are are and that's that. You get to argue the rules when you become financially independent.
On the flipside, for me, entertainment became synonymous with reading books and doing stuff outside, something I consider to have had a very positive impact on my life.
Specifically, IMO, reading for entertainment has a huge advantage over watching stuff: your brain has to work to build the picture from the text and connect the dots of the story. First, it is a very useful skill. Second, if the book isn't good, you walk away from it quick because it's not worth the effort.
With TV and YT ... it's much more about passively gobbling up whatever the thing feeds you.
That said, in 2018, with the importance social networks seem to have in teenager's lives, things might different.
We're not at that stage yet, my kids are toddlers. Once they get closer to pre-teen years, we might have to revisit.
I might have to cobble up a device that restricts internet browsing to hacker news :)
Have you completely removed all influence of screens?
Personally admist the uncertainty about what effects screens have on children I oscillate between a hard entrenched but probably superstitious belief they rot brains, and excitement about the educational opportunities they provide.
Some of the discussions I have had with my daughter about YouTube/kid shows have been absolutely delightful and have proved to me that there is a positive side to it.
I'm very wary about both quantity and quality of screen time though. It is just very difficult to know where or what those limits should be without being entitely arbitrary about it.
At this point yes (they can't read yet).
Once they do start to be able to read, we will likely allow some limited amount of screen time every day, albeit in a controlled fashion, and with an emphasis on non-video content for young kids (which is surprisingly scarce on the internet, as a matter of fact).
We (the parent) both have phones that we use regularly, as well as laptops, but we are quite strict about not using them during family time (outdoor, meals, week-ends, and family time before they go to bed).
The kids are obviously fascinated by the things, wondering what mummy and daddy do when they're using them, but so far they seem to have accepted that it's not for them yet.
Well, thanks! It's absolutely braindead stuff but braindead in a lovely way. Perfectly great for half an hour of powering down.
Perfect for you or your child? :)
> […] I sought out Colleen Russo Johnson, a co-director of UCLA’s Center for Scholars & Storytellers. Johnson did her doctoral work on kids’ media and serves as a consultant to studios that produce children’s programming. […] even in relatively limited doses, these videos can affect young toddlers’ development. If kids watch a lot of fast-paced videos, they come to expect that that is how videos should work, which could make other educational videos less compelling and effective. “If kids get used to all the crazy, distracting, superfluous visual movement, then they may start requiring that to hold their attention,” Johnson said.