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There can absolutely be educational content for kids on YT, but compared to the egregious amount of mind-numbing/fetishy content, it’s totally not worth it. It’s a shame how there feels like a lack/decline of quality kids/tween TV shows being broadcasted, I was talking to my mom about how kids really don’t have a lot to watch once they hit age 9+.
Edit: Missed that you were talking about educational content, so this is more about entertainment, though quite a few of the shows in the linked post touch on social lessons that are, in my opinion at least, also important for kids to learn. Acceptance, open-mindedness, self-expression, that sort of thing.
There are a lot of good shows for kids that age (and the adults watching along with them), they just tend to not be all that well known. There are also a decent number of older cartoons not in that list that are kid-friendly while being just genuinely good art; off the top of my head:
Samurai Jack
Invader Zim (if you’re ok with its particular style of weirdness, parent discretion advised)
Courage The Cowardly Dog (also weird, but not as weird as Zim)
Because I’m slightly an animation dork, I’d also personally include Batman The Animated Series and Batman Beyond. Mostly just standard-but-high-quality action cartoons, but both occasionally did some really impressive artistic stuff, especially TAS.
I totally agree with the lists mentioned in that post, as my sister and I watched a good amount of them. But like my post said, there’s a decline in good TV shows for kids. All of those shows mentioned are finished, none of them are currently ongoing shows right? Do they still broadcast them? Now parents have to pay for Disney+ to have something that isn’t slop for their kids to watch.
Honestly, I haven’t followed the state of Western animation much the last few years, so I can believe that there are fewer good shows than there used to be.
That said, animation is extremely expensive to produce for the amount of media it creates. Combine that with creative writing (well, art in general) being very under-appreciated, and therefore poorly-paid-for, there are a lot of societal/business pressures working against shows like this being produced. I only bring that up because people being unwilling to pay for non-slop is a big contributor to the problem.
(Not to defend Disney or the other mega-corps nickel-and-diming us for shareholder profits, of course. If only these companies would use their billions to fund shows from enthusiastic new creators rather than dumping everything into forgettable live-action remakes and CEO bonuses >_>)
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.
Well I’m mostly thinking about how my teachers would make us watch a YT vid with a classwork/homework assignment. CrashCourse does like every subject, I watched several of their Civics & Government/History videos. Amoeba Sisters was a frequent channel in my Biology class.
But the whole point is you have to look for those, cause YT knows they can get way more kids to scroll and watch ads for 5 hrs+ if you show them “ElSa pOoPiNg oN SpIDeRmAn!1!1?!?1?” videos compared to “Learn about how carbon affects the pH of seawater!". The algorithm is designed to trap unfortunately, and YT kids is a fucking sham.
Yeah I mean if a parent was always curing the content, it could be useful. But to me that’s the same as not letting them have it, you just put on some YouTube videos every so often for them that you choose on your device (we do this now, I just don’t allow it on their devices).
How do I has a parent curate content? I have not found anything that lets me allows the good. Either I block youtube completely, or I get what google decides is good for my kids (which blocks things I find good while allowing the bad)
Exactly. The only way is to block it and then choose something on your device whenever you want to show them something, and never let them use it without you choosing the content. The algorithm will always lead them to the darkest bowels of garbage content in my experience.
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.
When we first let the kids watch YouTube it was on the main TV with it’s own account. We have consistently monitored it and actively prune recommendations while slowly introducing them to the concept of “the algorithm”. From secondary school they pretty much need YouTube on their own PC’s for homework reasons and it’s harder to totally lock down - we use the family link controls to limit it a little but if they tried to get around them they could. The hope is we’ve at least prepared them a little before they have totally unfettered access to the internet.
We did try YouTube kids a little but it was such a garbage experience we just blocked the app everywhere.
Sure if they needed to bypass ads I can introduce them to Free tube or whatever but for all it’s sins they need moderated exposure to the YouTube experience so they’re equipped enough not to go totally wild when they finally have unfettered access.
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.
That’s why I’ve blocked YouTube on all my kids devices. It’s just a pipeline of pure garbage content for kids.
There can absolutely be educational content for kids on YT, but compared to the egregious amount of mind-numbing/fetishy content, it’s totally not worth it. It’s a shame how there feels like a lack/decline of quality kids/tween TV shows being broadcasted, I was talking to my mom about how kids really don’t have a lot to watch once they hit age 9+.
Edit: Missed that you were talking about educational content, so this is more about entertainment, though quite a few of the shows in the linked post touch on social lessons that are, in my opinion at least, also important for kids to learn. Acceptance, open-mindedness, self-expression, that sort of thing.
There’s a post I ran across a while back that might be what you’re looking for: https://lemmy.world/post/30235633
There are a lot of good shows for kids that age (and the adults watching along with them), they just tend to not be all that well known. There are also a decent number of older cartoons not in that list that are kid-friendly while being just genuinely good art; off the top of my head:
Because I’m slightly an animation dork, I’d also personally include Batman The Animated Series and Batman Beyond. Mostly just standard-but-high-quality action cartoons, but both occasionally did some really impressive artistic stuff, especially TAS.
I totally agree with the lists mentioned in that post, as my sister and I watched a good amount of them. But like my post said, there’s a decline in good TV shows for kids. All of those shows mentioned are finished, none of them are currently ongoing shows right? Do they still broadcast them? Now parents have to pay for Disney+ to have something that isn’t slop for their kids to watch.
Honestly, I haven’t followed the state of Western animation much the last few years, so I can believe that there are fewer good shows than there used to be.
That said, animation is extremely expensive to produce for the amount of media it creates. Combine that with creative writing (well, art in general) being very under-appreciated, and therefore poorly-paid-for, there are a lot of societal/business pressures working against shows like this being produced. I only bring that up because people being unwilling to pay for non-slop is a big contributor to the problem.
(Not to defend Disney or the other mega-corps nickel-and-diming us for shareholder profits, of course. If only these companies would use their billions to fund shows from enthusiastic new creators rather than dumping everything into forgettable live-action remakes and CEO bonuses >_>)
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.
Well I’m mostly thinking about how my teachers would make us watch a YT vid with a classwork/homework assignment. CrashCourse does like every subject, I watched several of their Civics & Government/History videos. Amoeba Sisters was a frequent channel in my Biology class.
But the whole point is you have to look for those, cause YT knows they can get way more kids to scroll and watch ads for 5 hrs+ if you show them “ElSa pOoPiNg oN SpIDeRmAn!1!1?!?1?” videos compared to “Learn about how carbon affects the pH of seawater!". The algorithm is designed to trap unfortunately, and YT kids is a fucking sham.
Yeah I mean if a parent was always curing the content, it could be useful. But to me that’s the same as not letting them have it, you just put on some YouTube videos every so often for them that you choose on your device (we do this now, I just don’t allow it on their devices).
How do I has a parent curate content? I have not found anything that lets me allows the good. Either I block youtube completely, or I get what google decides is good for my kids (which blocks things I find good while allowing the bad)
Exactly. The only way is to block it and then choose something on your device whenever you want to show them something, and never let them use it without you choosing the content. The algorithm will always lead them to the darkest bowels of garbage content in my experience.
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.
When we first let the kids watch YouTube it was on the main TV with it’s own account. We have consistently monitored it and actively prune recommendations while slowly introducing them to the concept of “the algorithm”. From secondary school they pretty much need YouTube on their own PC’s for homework reasons and it’s harder to totally lock down - we use the family link controls to limit it a little but if they tried to get around them they could. The hope is we’ve at least prepared them a little before they have totally unfettered access to the internet.
We did try YouTube kids a little but it was such a garbage experience we just blocked the app everywhere.
Try using a free online YouTube ripper. You rip the video you need while still denying the kiddos junk tube.
Sure if they needed to bypass ads I can introduce them to Free tube or whatever but for all it’s sins they need moderated exposure to the YouTube experience so they’re equipped enough not to go totally wild when they finally have unfettered access.
You assume Google genuinely cares. They don’t.
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.
Make a new account and see what the suggestions turn into.