this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
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In the time I allowed my kids to have YT kids, I did not encounter the content you speak of. I know there's good content on YouTube, I watch it all the time. But I never saw anything good come up in the YouTube kids app. And we had it for a while.
i let my kids use YouTube kids right now, and what I've found is that the kids algo is way more targeted and sensitive to changes than the normal one. if you go find 2 educational videos via search and watch them all the way through it will serve you nothing but those for days, but if you watch 2 slop videos the same thing applies. so, as with most things, parental supervision is the only way it works, but with that oversight it works great.
Yeah, I mean we do sometimes watch YouTube videos together when they ask about a certain topic. I can see how if you only allowed them to use it supervised it could be a valuable thing. But it's tough to keep it only supervised. When my son had it, it ended up being just blippy and Minecraft videos. Not terrible stuff but not stuff I want him spending an hour a day on either.
I thought my youngest was all about watching hour long Minecraft playthroughs but really they are quite interested in game mechanics and speed running. They are just a lot more tolerant of watching hours of videos around a particular game.
I don't overly police their content consumption (although we do talk about limiting shorts). The main thing is at the weekend to kick them off the TV after the morning to go and do something more interactive.
The stuff he was watching was more "am I gonna catch Mikey? Mikey is a chicken" kind of stuff. If he was really learning about the mechanics and how to program stuff in Minecraft with redstone or something, I could get behind it. I know Minecraft well enough to know the junk from the good stuff. And he watched probably 10 videos like this every day for more than a year, so I think from those thousands of videos he's learned whatever he would have learned already.
Now instead he is mostly watching chess videos and playing on an app called ChessKid which I'm much more happy with.