YouTube

When YouTube took off in 2005 parenting changed forever. An easy thing to do with kids is to sit them in front of the TV so you can do stuff but YouTube and your phone takes that possibility anywhere. Last weekend my eldest son fell over and got coward punched by the concrete ground, splitting his the back of his head open, and subsequently, I needed to take him to hospital to get it fixed. As we sat waiting for a nurse to see us I whipped out the phone to distract him, he calmed down, and the nurse went to work stapling his head together. I honestly don’t know how any medico could distract kids prior to YouTube and smartphones; you don’t get the same reaction holding a colouring in book up to their face. My sister tells me they used to sing songs and blow bubbles. Bubbles are fun, but they lack the tractor beam qualities of YouTube. Blowing bubbles compared to YouTube is like Panadol to an epidural, but for the neck up. You would get more success distracting a child by just going up to a random thing and telling them not to touch it, kids would think of nothing else after that.

A part of being a parent is teaching your kid skills for life, and that’s all changed because of YouTube. You can learn everything there is to learn by watching a video on YouTube; want to know what the offside rule is just watch a video on YouTube; how to unblock a drain just watch YouTube; learn what this fascination with step sisters is? That’s RedTube. (If you don’t know what RedTube is… ask your kids or Google it at work)

Being a parent is about passing on knowledge. When I started driving, back in the pre-internet days, my dad taught me how to change a tyre. If cars are still a thing when my kids come of age I won’t need to teach them because there’s 100s of videos on YouTube on how to change a tyre, and they don’t giggle like I do when they say “tighten the nuts”. 

YouTube has not only changed learning, but also teaching. I first learnt to drive in a manual car and am quite proficient at it (humble brag). A few years ago I taught my wife how to drive a manual, but I looked up ‘how to teach someone how to drive manual’ on YouTube. And based on their advice I got someone else to teach her.

There is more content on YouTube than you could ever watch in your lifetime, which is great except for the fact that your kid will only ever watch three things on repeat. Seriously, YouTube Kids need only be three things; Baby Shark, The Wiggles, and Cocomelon. Everything else is just the bits between the ads. If I could get away with it, there would only be two things on YouTube Kids because Cocomelon is the methamphetamine of kids TV; you know it’s bad, it’s cheap, and kids will do anything to have it.

I do fear that the YouTube algorithm will know my kids better than me. YouTube collects so much data on what you watch and interact with, it probably knows your shoe size. There are videos I watch on YouTube that I would never tell my wife about, and I am sure (hope) she is the same. They have a deeper understanding of how I like to be entertained, and nothing exposes more than when someone else sees your suggested videos. “I don’t know what the suggested videos are weird”. I do: you’re weird. 

YouTube will raise your kids today like TV did you. Free to air TV can’t distract kids like it used to because the world has changed. Even watching TV feels like hanging out with your grandparents, reminding you of how problematic and slow the past was. No kid will wait in a hospital for stationary to be inserted into their back face with repeats of Antiques Roadshow, ads for life insurance, and the same commentators from when you moved out of home and into streaming. If TV is a grandparent, and YouTube is like a parent, that makes Netflix a stepdad trying to be cool; it’s purely entertainment and nothing practical. Netflix just wants to distract you long enough so it can chill with your mother.