{"id":392499,"date":"2025-11-20T15:36:20","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T15:36:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/392499\/"},"modified":"2025-11-20T15:36:20","modified_gmt":"2025-11-20T15:36:20","slug":"im-officially-done-with-youtube-kids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/392499\/","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m officially done with YouTube Kids"},"content":{"rendered":"

The details are fuzzy, but I think my husband and I downloaded the YouTube Kids app to our TV sometime in 2022, when between one and three members of the household came down with the flu at the same time. Like countless parents of toddlers before us, we needed something, anything, that would buy us a moment to vomit in peace. It worked, but it was the start of a fraught relationship \u2014 one that I have finally put to an end years later by banishing YouTube Kids from every screen in our house it has ever darkened.<\/p>\n

We initially let our son, Lennox, roam free through the app, trusting in the content filters and the broad categorization of \u201cappropriate for preschoolers.\u201d He found some endearing and harmless stuff that way. Truck Tunes is charming<\/a>, and so is Zerby Derby<\/a>, a live-action show starring some slightly goofy RC cars that reminds me in a way of Mystery Science Theater. But we kept ending up in weird algorithmic cul-de-sacs. There are countless computer-generated cartoons of trucks driving down ramps and landing in different vats of paint, ostensibly to help little kids learn different colors. There are endless variations on this<\/a>: monster trucks, sharks, school buses, planes, you name it.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s a whole genre of videos where grown-ups, mostly off-screen, unbox and play with a massive set of toys. There\u2019s Blippi, of course, and the Blippi imitators, all romping around indoor playgrounds under the guise of\u2026 teaching kids something? And somehow we got into recordings of farming simulator games, which I didn\u2019t even know were a thing, let alone why they\u2019re on YouTube Kids. It was all getting too weird, so I dug into the settings.<\/p>\n

After the 10th rewatch of \u201cThe Stinky Car,\u201d I couldn\u2019t take any more<\/p>\n

YouTube Kids provides a reasonable amount of parental controls. You can lock it down to just whitelisted channels, set a time limit for each session, and block channels you don\u2019t like. To the app\u2019s credit, I\u2019ve never come across an entirely inappropriate video. But the platform has a slop problem; even some of the stuff that earns a spot under the \u201ceducational\u201d tab is questionable at best. Which of the tenets of early childhood education does a guy called Cowboy Jack, taking a tour of a Cybertruck<\/a> at a Tesla showroom, adhere to? Unclear. I don\u2019t need every kids\u2019 entertainer to be Mister Rogers, but I question the value of a trip to a car dealership under a thin guise of \u201ceducation.\u201d Unless you\u2019ve gone to the trouble of whitelisting only your preferred channels, these kinds of things pop up as tantalizing thumbnails in recommendations and alongside the player when the current video ends.<\/p>\n

I eventually did whitelist a handful of channels I found tolerable, but even in this smaller pool of preapproved content, somehow the weirdest, most obnoxious stuff found its way to the surface. Lennox watched a few episodes of a show called SuperCar on repeat, which had seemed harmless enough at first. After the 10th re-watch of \u201cThe Stinky Car,\u201d<\/a> I couldn\u2019t take any more. The dialogue sounded like it had been sloppily translated into English, the plots were nonsensical, and most of all, it just annoyed the hell out of me. We instituted a long hiatus from the platform.<\/p>\n

That eventually became permanent when I deleted the app outright.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve had a lot of time to think about why I dislike YouTube Kids so much, and I suspect one reason is how difficult it is to understand who is making this stuff. SuperCar is copyrighted by a company called Lefun Entertainment, which dubs itself a \u201cglobally beloved children\u2019s content brand.\u201d There\u2019s no reference to its parent company on its bare-bones website<\/a>, but a related YouTube channel called Lefun Kids TV<\/a> lists an email address for a Chinese brand called Beilehu<\/a>, which is owned by Leqing Network Technology, based in Shanghai. So my kid is watching Chinese cartoons about talking cars with so-so English translations \u2014 fine. I just want to learn that without doing 30 minutes of googling!<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot<\/a><\/p>\n

What in the Peppa Pig is actually going on here? Image: YouTube<\/p>\n

What I find most uncomfortable is just how obviously these videos are designed to grab and hold onto kids\u2019 attention for as long as possible \u2014 at the lowest possible cost to the content creator. Simple computer-generated animations, the same recycled stock music, the call to action at the end to watch more videos (swear to god, if I hear \u201cJust search for my name! B-L-I, P-P-I!\u201d one more time). I don\u2019t even find the ads themselves particularly problematic; we don\u2019t pay for Premium, which would eliminate them, but one commercial for a doll at the start of a 30-minute video is pretty inoffensive. Rather, it\u2019s the tactics to keep kids glued to the channel that rub me the wrong way. Paying for Premium wouldn\u2019t somehow make the content less obnoxious.<\/p>\n

And look, I realize it\u2019s capitalism all the way down. It\u2019s not as if The Walt Disney Company is a nonprofit organization, but at least it doesn\u2019t feel like the company is directly monetizing my kids\u2019 attention. The subscription model helps, but even in the Disney clips on YouTube Kids, I\u2019ve never heard Mickey Mouse end a video by telling kids how to type his name into a search engine.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never heard Mickey Mouse end a video by telling kids how to type his name into a search engine<\/p>\n

After a long break, we\u2019ve reintroduced some screentime back into the house, limited to whatever is on Disney Plus and Prime Video for kids. I\u2019ve even started paying for seasons of shows like Zerby Derby on Prime just to avoid YouTube Kids. In fact, the YouTube Kids app for our smart TV doesn\u2019t even 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\u2019 profile when you open the app to get there, but it weirds me out just a little that the kids\u2019 stuff is under the same roof as everything else on YouTube \u2014 even if the dedicated app was just a filter.<\/p>\n

And look, if I could turn back the clock and tell my kid that TV only has one channel and it\u2019s PBS Kids, I would. He\u2019d be unaware that a tablet can run anything besides adorable Sago Mini games<\/a> and a calculator, let alone streaming video services. But the cat\u2019s out of the bag, Pandora\u2019s iPad is open, and truth be told, our little family needs those moments spent watching cartoons to help us catch a breath. Lately, that means a lot of Paw Patrol and whatever Disney\u2019s version of \u201cdogs doing construction\u201d is. Is that somehow better for my kid than whatever he was watching on YouTube? Maybe. Probably. At the very least, I don\u2019t have to listen to \u201cStinky Car\u201d anymore \u2014 and that\u2019s priceless.<\/p>\n

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