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 — 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.
We initially let our son, Lennox, roam free through the app, trusting in the content filters and the broad categorization of “appropriate for preschoolers.” He found some endearing and harmless stuff that way. Truck Tunes is charming, and so is Zerby Derby, 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: monster trucks, sharks, school buses, planes, you name it.
Then there’s a whole genre of videos where grown-ups, mostly off-screen, unbox and play with a massive set of toys. There’s Blippi, of course, and the Blippi imitators, all romping around indoor playgrounds under the guise of… teaching kids something? And somehow we got into recordings of farming simulator games, which I didn’t even know were a thing, let alone why they’re on YouTube Kids. It was all getting too weird, so I dug into the settings.
After the 10th rewatch of “The Stinky Car,” I couldn’t take any more
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’t like. To the app’s credit, I’ve 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 “educational” 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 at a Tesla showroom, adhere to? Unclear. I don’t need every kids’ entertainer to be Mister Rogers, but I question the value of a trip to a car dealership under a thin guise of “education.” Unless you’ve 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.
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 “The Stinky Car,” I couldn’t 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.
That eventually became permanent when I deleted the app outright.
I’ve 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 “globally beloved children’s content brand.” There’s no reference to its parent company on its bare-bones website, but a related YouTube channel called Lefun Kids TV lists an email address for a Chinese brand called Beilehu, 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 — fine. I just want to learn that without doing 30 minutes of googling!
What in the Peppa Pig is actually going on here? Image: YouTube
What I find most uncomfortable is just how obviously these videos are designed to grab and hold onto kids’ attention for as long as possible — 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 “Just search for my name! B-L-I, P-P-I!” one more time). I don’t even find the ads themselves particularly problematic; we don’t 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’s the tactics to keep kids glued to the channel that rub me the wrong way. Paying for Premium wouldn’t somehow make the content less obnoxious.
And look, I realize it’s capitalism all the way down. It’s not as if The Walt Disney Company is a nonprofit organization, but at least it doesn’t feel like the company is directly monetizing my kids’ attention. The subscription model helps, but even in the Disney clips on YouTube Kids, I’ve never heard Mickey Mouse end a video by telling kids how to type his name into a search engine.
I’ve never heard Mickey Mouse end a video by telling kids how to type his name into a search engine
After a long break, we’ve reintroduced some screentime back into the house, limited to whatever is on Disney Plus and Prime Video for kids. I’ve 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’t 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’ profile when you open the app to get there, but it weirds me out just a little that the kids’ stuff is under the same roof as everything else on YouTube — even if the dedicated app was just a filter.
And look, if I could turn back the clock and tell my kid that TV only has one channel and it’s PBS Kids, I would. He’d be unaware that a tablet can run anything besides adorable Sago Mini games and a calculator, let alone streaming video services. But the cat’s out of the bag, Pandora’s 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’s version of “dogs doing construction” is. Is that somehow better for my kid than whatever he was watching on YouTube? Maybe. Probably. At the very least, I don’t have to listen to “Stinky Car” anymore — and that’s priceless.
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