My son likes YouTube. A lot. Most of the videos he watches are inoffensive, some are excellent. We’ve sat together riveted watching videos on everything from craft-making and sea-life to web-skills and basic coding.
His reading and maths comprehension have been demonstrably enhanced by ingeniously constructed tutorials on spelling and multiplication. I have a lot of time, too, for some of his favourite Minecraft and Lego tutorials, but for every lucid and witty piece of programming, there are several thousand which scream and blare hot nonsense directly into his brain.
I’m sceptical about screen-time panic, and the idea that all our children are addicted to digital heroin, but I must admit that it is the latter genre of videos he loves best. I’m forced to wonder about the narcotic effect all those screeched voices and seizure-inducing hyper-edits are having on his brain because it’s irrefutably true: he’s watching a type of programming that simply did not exist when I was a child.
Most of my aversion to judging his generation is grounded in my own clear memories of a childhood spent bored by the doom-laden drear of the telly we had on offer. The majority of kids’ viewing back then was made by well- meaning people in their |50s, referencing the distant cultural landmarks of Elvis, the Beatles or cowboys and Indians.
My son’s favourite YouTube videos, on the other hand, are made the day he watches them, often by literal children and never by anyone over the age of 25. The worst of them are loud and annoying because they’re made by content providers who owe their success to primping and preening their product until it is addictively compelling on an atomic level.
So, we limit him to 30 minutes of YouTube a day. I pay for Premium so there are no ads, and we only let him watch via the YT Kids app, which ferrets out any adult videos and reduces the chances of him becoming a 9/11 truther or Men’s Rights Activist. He is only allowed to watch YouTube on our TV, and anything else I don’t like – often for extremely petty reasons of personal distaste – I block manually.
The result has been a gradual regression to a softer, saner world, specifically curated to avoid the noisy horror of his former favourites – the removal of which has had the added benefit of lessening his aversion to switching off when the time comes.
I still don’t know what cursed, screaming magic YouTubers cast on their videos to make them so bafflingly addictive. If I did, I’d be doing it myself. I’m just happy I’ve been able to delete their screeching presence in my life with a walled garden of my own design. Until he finds a tutorial on how to get around it, anyway…
Did Ye Hear Mammy Died? by Séamas O’Reilly is out now (Little, Brown, £16.99). Buy a copy from guardianbookshop at £14.78
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