You’re officially done with YouTube Kids

Details are sketchy, but I think my husband and I downloaded the YouTube Kids app to our TV sometime in 2022, when between one and three family members came down with the flu at the same time. Like countless parents of young children before us, we needed something, anything, that would give us a moment to vomit in peace. It worked, but it was the beginning of a fraught relationship — one that I finally put to rest years later by banishing YouTube Kids from every screen in our house that ever went dark.

At first, we let our son, Lennox, roam freely through the app, trusting the content filters and the broad “preschool-friendly” rating. He found some endearing and harmless things that way. Truck Tunes is charmingand so on Derby Zerbya live show starring some goofy RC cars that remind me in some way Mystery Science Theater. But we kept hitting weird algorithmic dead ends. There are countless computer-generated cartoons of trucks driving down ramps and landing in various vats of paint, ostensibly to help young children learn different colors. there Endless variations on this matter: Giant trucks, sharks, school buses, planes, you name it.

Then there’s a whole genre of videos where adults, mostly off-screen, unbox and play with a wide range of toys. There’s Blippi, of course, and Blippi imitators, all roaming indoor playgrounds under the guise of… teaching kids something? Somehow we came across recordings of farming simulation games, which I didn’t even know existed, let alone why they were on YouTube Kids. It was getting really weird, so I looked into the settings.

YouTube Kids offers a fair amount of parental controls. You can lock it to whitelisted channels only, set a time limit for each session, and block channels you don’t like. To the app’s credit, I never watched an inappropriate video. But the platform suffers from a slope problem; Even some of the things that earn a place under the “Educational” tab are questionable at best. Which principles of early childhood education are followed by a man named Cowboy Jack? Take a ride in the Cybertruck In a Tesla showroom, commitment? Not clear. I don’t want every children’s entertainer to be Mister Rogers, but I do question the value of a trip to the car dealership under the guise of “education.” Unless you’ve gone through the trouble of whitelisting only your favorite channels, these types of things appear as confusing thumbnails in the recommendations and next to the player when the current video ends.

Eventually, I whitelisted a few channels that I found acceptable, but even in this smaller pool of pre-approved content, the weirder, more unsavory stuff found its way to the surface. Lennox watched a few episodes of a program called… Supercar On repeat, which seemed harmless enough at first. After the tenth rewatch “The stinking car” I couldn’t take it anymore. The dialogue seemed like it was sloppily translated into English, the plots didn’t make sense, and most of all, it annoyed me immensely. We have created a long gap from the platform.

It eventually became permanent when I deleted the app completely.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why I hate YouTube Kids so much, and I suspect one reason is how hard it is to understand from He made these things. Supercar It’s copyrighted by a company called Lefun Entertainment, which calls itself “the world’s most beloved children’s content brand.” There is no reference to the parent company on Its bare sitebut a related channel on YouTube called Levon TV for children Lists an email address for Chinese brand called Beilehuowned by Leqing Network Technology, headquartered in Shanghai. So my kid watches Chinese cartoons about talking cars with more or less English subtitles – okay. I just want to learn it without doing 30 minutes of Googling!

What I find most uncomfortable is how clearly these videos are designed to grab kids’ attention and hold it for as long as possible – at the lowest possible cost to the creator. Simple computer-generated animation, the same recycled music, and a call to action at the end to watch more videos (I swear to God, if I hear “Just look up my name! BLI, PPI!” again). I don’t even find the ads themselves particularly problematic; We don’t pay for Premium, which might kill them, but one doll commercial at the beginning of a 30-minute video is pretty harmless. Rather, it’s the tactics that keep kids glued to the channel that rub me the wrong way. Paying for Premium won’t make the content any less obnoxious one way or another.

And look, I realize it’s capitalism all the way. It’s not as if The Walt Disney Company is a non-profit organization, but at least it doesn’t seem like the company is directly invested in my kids’ interest. The subscription model helps, but even in Disney clips on YouTube Kids, I’ve never heard Mickey Mouse end a video by telling kids how to type his name into the search engine.

After a long hiatus, we’ve reintroduced some screen time back at home, limiting it to whatever’s on Disney Plus and Prime Video for the kids. I’ve even started to push For show seasons such as Derby Zerby On Prime only to avoid YouTube Kids. In fact, the YouTube Kids app for smart TV doesn’t exist anymore; It was absorbed by the main YouTube app a couple of years ago. The experience is basically the same. You choose your kids’ profile when you open the app to get there, but what’s a little surprising to me is that the kids’ stuff is under the same roof as everything else on YouTube — even if the dedicated app is just a filter.

And look, if I could turn back the clock and tell my kid that the TV only has one channel and that’s PBS Kids, I would do it. He won’t be aware that the tablet can run anything other than him Great simple Sago games And a calculator, not to mention video streaming services. But the cat is out of the bag, Pandora’s iPad is on, and the truth is that our little family needs those moments spent watching cartoons to help us catch our breath. Lately, that means a lot Paw patrol Whatever Disney’s version of “building dogs” is. Is this better for my child than anything he’s been watching on YouTube? maybe. probably. At the very least, I no longer have to listen to “Stinky Car” – and that’s priceless.