The parents trying to keep their kids off YouTube

When Shawn Kallett’s kids watch too much YouTube, they get irritable. The meltdowns come faster. As the time ticks on, it gets harder to break them away from the endless churn of content. It can be addicting to continue searching through videos and clicking to watch just one more thing.

And that’s by design, says Kallett, a father of two who has worked in YouTube strategy for many years. The entire YouTube algorithm is meant to draw viewers in — including the youngest ones, like Kallett’s sons. “You’re getting sucked in more and more, just mindlessly surfing,” Kallett tells Yahoo Life. “My boys can only watch channels and videos that we select for them. They cannot watch it unsupervised, and they cannot watch it alone on their tablets. It has to be on the TV with a grown-up present. And when we say it’s time to turn it off, it’s time to turn it off. If they put up a fight, they could lose it for a day or longer.”

Twenty years after the platform’s inception, YouTube has become a staple in the media diet of many Americans. There’s something for everyone: kid content for young viewers, family vloggers for people wanting to watch the ins and outs of someone else’s home life, how-to videos that painstakingly detail everything from cleaning your dishwasher to achieving the perfect smoky eye. But some parents are reconsidering allowing their kids to surf YouTube in light of increasingly loud backlash against featuring young children on monetized channels, several high-profile scandals involving young YouTube creators like Piper Rockelle and the Franke family and an increasing understanding of the addictive nature of short-form videos.

In his work life, Kallett has worked with family vloggers, who are at the center of the conversation around the ethics of featuring children in online content. He wonders if subconsciously, that’s one of the reasons he wants his sons to watch less YouTube. Kallett’s 8-year-old son is drawn to the videos of family vloggers and even re-creates the videos, which often feature challenges and pranks, with his dad. But Kallett never posts the videos they create. “I’m not putting the kids’ faces on YouTube,” he says.

Rachel Nelson, a 33-year-old mother from North Dakota, says her 6-year-old son is also drawn to family vlogging channels despite her own misgivings about the content. “In the past couple of years, I’ve become more aware of family vlogging and people using their kids for money,” she says. “It’s just really icky to me.” Though Nelson tries to ask her son if he thinks it would be fun to be constantly recorded, he doesn’t seem to understand her hesitations, responding that he would love to play with all the toys the family vlogging kids seem to play with.

She’s also noticed that her son’s behavior changes when he watches YouTube. “He has a hard time sitting still and focusing after watching,” she tells Yahoo Life. “He gets more whiny and more easily frustrated.” Nelson has a few hard-and-fast rules for YouTube consumption now, though she says that before she instituted the rules, her son’s YouTube habits were a “free-for-all.” Now, he’s not allowed to watch YouTube unless an adult is supervising. That’s one way that Nelson handles the possibility of her son clicking through videos until he comes across content she finds inappropriate, like videos featuring guns or violence. Though many parents only allow their children to use YouTube Kids, a specific app that is meant to contain age-appropriate content, some kids figure out how to navigate to the regular YouTube app, leaving them open to all kinds of content.

The appropriateness of content on YouTube is something that Devika Bhushan, a mother and pediatrician, worries about too. And with good reason: One study found that there’s a 45% chance of kids coming across inappropriate content within 10 clicks, even when they start on a kid-centered video. “You don’t really know what you’re clicking into when you’re on YouTube,” Bhushan tells Yahoo Life. “It’s the Wild West.”

As a doctor, Bhushan also worries about how YouTube consumption is changing her 4-year-old’s brain development in the critical period of early childhood. The constant clicking of new content is just a flood of dopamine hits, she explains. Viewers may only watch a few seconds or minutes of a video before clicking to the next one. “And that quick cycle really trains the brain at a young age to start seeking thrills in the order of minutes and degrades the attention span over time,” she adds.

Bhushan has actually deleted the YouTube app from the devices in her home in order to steer her son away from that kind of short-form content. “We noticed that our son, at one point, was preferentially asking for YouTube because he loved being able to access that ‘next’ button,” she says. “And it was a slippery slope.”

If her son is going to watch something, Bhushan prefers that he watch a 20- or 30-minute television show “where he’s sustaining his attention across a long period of time on the same story arc or character development.” That, she adds, is “just much better for the way I want his attention and his brain to develop.”