Kids aged 2 and 3 should watch any content together with their parent. Or at the very least, the content that parent watched and approved before. No 2 or 3 year old should be mindlessly browsing Youtube
Yeah, but how many surprise egg videos does the average parent want to watch?
The videos that most children like are of a very poor quality at which most adults would cringe.
I've tried to redirect my children toward more high-quality children's programming. You know, stuff with scripts and budgets. Nonetheless, they want these toy porn videos produced by these toddler whisperers.
As the article begins, children crave autonomy. YouTube Kids gives it to them. It's an amazing application. I have a Google Music subscription, so my kids get to watch these videos ad-free. It's a pretty good experience for everyone.
Giving children autonomy is quite easy actually - parent just has to be a little inventive. For example, my 2 year old loves helping me by taking walking around with the mop, placing thing (not toys) from one box to another, etc.
I wonder how good/bad those "toy porn" videos are. I don't know, hence I prefer to play it safe and follow AAP recommendations regarding screen time.
My rule is simple. At the point where my mind snaps in half because I've been hearing those surprise egg videos for far too long as background noise, "toy video" time is over, and it's time to choose another genre. I assist by selecting a new vector (robots! rockets! ponies! kid cooking videos!) and give the iPad back.
As much as I agree, notice that it sort of defeats the point of it all if the they have to sit there with their child.
It ain't easy being a parent, a 9 to 5 worker and a household manager within a 24h schedule. If parents leave their children to do some mindless thing while unnatended, it's often because they don't have enough time to give attention to all the stuff which is immediatelly pressing them.
We just have a fire tv with a pin. Each show and between each episode, they bring the remote to us and we decide if they (we) need another PJMasks or not. We also have a kindle which has a very good kids mode. We can set the number of minutes allowed for certain tasks 30min/day video, 20 min/day games, unlimited books. We can also explicitly set the content that is available in that mode. Which means once that's done, I can hand it to them and have a full 50 minutes to cook or clean or what ever I need to do without worrying about access to apps or youtube.
One of my favorite parts about it all is that my kids have been taking selfies, pictures and videos of each other. They are up into the thousands. They put on hats and shoot little films of them jumping off the bed. They interview their uncles, and make cooking and painting shows.
There's a lot of really cool things they do if you limit the non interactive, blob mode of the devices.
Agreed My daughter started behaving very aggressively. It turned out she was watching these adult enact of cartoon where characters will fight with each others.
I immediately switched her to kindle fire for kids and she improved a lot. I don't like Amazon per say but there is no competition to choose from.
This is still full of "toy porn" -- unboxing toys, opening eggs to see what's inside, or just an adult(ish) person playing with toys acting out some scene. While it's not "disturbing" (so far as I've seen) it's mindless and still an utter waste of time to watch.
You can block channels, but there are so many of them that it's a losing battle. I would really rather just whitelist some specific channels, but I haven't yet found a way to do that.
I want to encourage my 2yo to be able to use technology like the tablet (and in fact, it's frightening how good she is at figuring it out) but I also don't want her watching this garbage. If she picks one of these and I turn it off, she gets annoyed at me and doesn't understand. I'd rather be able to let her pick her own show without worrying about exactly what it is, by having things like PBS, Sesame Street, TVO, etc pre-approved.
One of the channels I watch the most is Ashens. It's a British man playing with toys / retro goodies (and loosely reviewing them) on a brown couch and the videos last up to 30 minutes.
I've been using it since launch and think it works as advertised, not only in cutting out the weird stuff but in actively directing the child to educational content.
It also has a timer built in, and when the time runs out an animated face shows up and "goes to sleep" which is incredibly effective in avoiding a tantrum when screen time is up.
