Our Complicated Relationship With Toddler YouTube

Yes, yes, yes, you like it too!

My parents were quite upset to discover I let my baby girl watch YouTube on her own. They do it with her too sometimes, but it’s always videos they’ve personally selected, watching them together on a big screen, while offering educational and engaged commentary. In my case, I usually just unlock the tablet and let her curiosity do the rest.

I totally understand my parents’ caution. I’m pretty much addicted to the internet myself. If I didn’t log off from Twitter for a few months every year, it would take a toll on our family life. And I’ve only had internet at home when I was 14 and unlimited access on my own computer only when I was in college. How much harder it will be for my baby girl who won’t know life before everyone was online all the time? Will she ever be able to focus on anything for more than 5 seconds? Will she ever be able to log off?

YouTube does indeed get her hooked. But on most days she can do perfectly find without it. If she spends too much time on her tablet, it either means she’s too sick and tired to do anything else, our space is too messy and overwhelming for her to play on her own, or she’d prefer us to pay more attention to her when we can’t. These are all the kinds of situations when I tend to spend too much time online myself.

If my daughter can choose between YouTube or going to the playground, she’ll choose the playground without hesitation, just like she will choose the swimming pool, reading books, or kicking a ball together. If she had more kids around I’m sure they’d happily kick that ball almost infinitely, but currently it’s just her and us, and sometimes we just need to do boring stuff like replying to important emails or cleaning up the kitchen. My parents can use YouTube as yet another form of bonding together, but to me it’s mostly a way to buy myself some time on more or less my own.

Our first encounter with toddler videos was in May last year, when we stayed for a few days at our friends’ place. Their 3 year old girl was a huge fan of Cocomelon at that time. I wasn’t too impressed with their songs, the lyrics sounded like a low-effort propaganda about how it’s good to eat vegetables and brush your teeth. The melodies weren’t that good compared with some of my favorite children’s songs. And I couldn’t quite explain it, but there was something creepy about their dad’s smile.

Since then I discovered there’s a vast world of toddler YouTube beyond Cocomelon, and almost all of it is much, much worse. Quality animation is very expensive to make, and it doesn’t make that much of a difference to a 2 year old kid, so why bother? I gained a lot of respect for the Cocomelon team, they clearly put in a lot of care and attention to the detail compared with everyone else.

Beyond thousand of covers, ripoffs and variations of the most popular toddler songs, there’s also some pretty weird and inexplicable stuff. I’ve seen my daughter watch walkthroughs of simple mobile games, adults unboxing toys or baking a pretend cake out of colorful glitter and slime, or crazy earworms by D Billions. My baby girl finds their songs absolutely hilarious for some reason, but to me they’re impossibly dumb and get stuck in my head forever. Whoever came up with this stuff must have been an evil genius of some sorts.

Should I let my baby girl watch stuff like this? There are so many beautiful songs online, perhaps I should be more careful with how I’m curating her online experience? I shared my concerns with one of my mom friends, who listened to them patiently and then asked “When you were a kid or a teenager, didn’t your parents say the same thing about your favorite music, videos, or computer games?” Yes they did, but can’t you see this is different? She’s only two years old now, definitely too young to know what’s good for her… I couldn’t help but notice that the more I tried to explain myself, the more I sounded like my parents again.

To be fair, my parents did have a point. I can totally see how Eminem’s songs about how he’s gonna murder his wife might have gotten them a little bit concerned. But when they criticized me for listening to such stuff it didn’t make me stop or even do it less. I just listened to it secretly when they couldn’t hear it. Knowing that my parents would strongly disapprove of my choices made me much less willing to share my world with them, to tell them about what was going on for me, or other stuff I cared about. Why bother? I already knew what they would say in response anyway.

If Eminem’s murderous lyrics didn’t turn me into a monster, perhaps my daughter’s silly earworms won’t do that much harm too? I used to scoff whenever I heard her listen to songs I didn’t like, now I’m trying to understand what she chooses to watch and why. These things are important to her for some reason, what is it exactly that makes them important to her?

My first surprise was discovering that when she jumps from one video to another it’s because she’s looking for something specific. Before she could talk, clicking on random videos was the only way for her to find what she was looking for. Now when I see her doing this I know to ask if I can help, and she’ll say something like “mama racoon and baby racoon”, or “rabbit on the bus”. Rabbit on the bus? “Rabbit sleeps, the bus goes away, rabbit runs behind the bus, turtle opens the door, rabbit gets on the bus”. She’s only just putting her first sentences together, but narrating the whole story of what happened in her favorite video comes easily to her. These stories matter to her a lot.

And so do her favorite songs. Most of them are either in English or Spanish, but this doesn’t stop her from singing them anyway. She’s beyond delighted when I recognize what she’s singing and join along. The only thing that delights her even more is when I improvise with the lyrics or try to translate them on the fly. Sometimes I would only remember the first verse or two, and she’ll gently remind me there were more. Music was always my gateway drug to learning new languages, and so far it seems it might work for her too.

The videos also help her make sense of what’s happening to her. The last time she was sick, she asked me for a “sick elephant” at least a hundred times. Watching all the other animals take care about the poor thing and give him some soup was reassuring to her. Every time she watched it, she became even more certain that it’s all going to end up well.

Letting my daughter watch whatever she wants to is quite an exercise in trust, but so far I’m seeing very positive results. She’s learning to articulate her needs, tell stories, sing songs in many languages, and speak more and more English words. But even if it didn’t have any educational value, figuring out what’s important to her and why is a very important skill on its own. I know some of her future choices will be much harder for me to accept than silly earworm videos, so maybe it’s good I get to practice this so early on.