> Ugh, I threw up a little in my mouth just from the headline.
I agree with your entire comment. And apart from the parents that feel they need to watch their kids every move, what always astounds me is how little consideration is given to exactly what tech they slap around their kids' wrist.
"Oh, look it is Google, our familiar cozy uncle, so all is hunky-dory".
No, it is not! Google is an advertisement company. The biggest on the planet. Ads are their raison d'etre, core business. And learning as much as possible from your kid at the youngest age is part of their business model. Not to protect them, but to turn them into mindless consumers that click the most ads. And to use all that juicy data about your kids life in any other shady way they can think of, where some cold hard cash may end up on their balance sheet. It is ridiculous.
> Fast forward to today. Ours came home with a google account in the 5th grade I think. Something I explicitly did not want. They didn't send a permission slip home like they do for everything else either.
Google Workspace accounts, especially those for education[0], have Web & App Activity, as well as Location History, automatically turned off. It's just a tool for schools to get free/cheap email, storage, and classroom tools. For your child under 13 to be able to use it compliant with COPPA[1], your school must have either used some level of blanket consent, or the school didn't bother to actually get the parental consent Google requires.
> youtube kids is keeping an entire generation of parents sane.
Can we hold off on considering this a positive until we see how exactly this generation of kids that think Google is a benevolent babysitter/genie grow up?
Parents have been parenting for millennia without handing off their kids's attention to a glorified advertising network.
> Having a 7 year old kid, I'm outraged at reading this. There is no single benefit to individuals or society from apps like these, they hijack our brain on the lowest level and makes us junk content feeding zombies.
Personally as a patent I think this is the same kind of refusal to accept responsibility that had my generations parents claim video games where all just horrible and brain melting, the generation before claiming that TV was rotting the minds of the youth and the generation before that yelling a young ones for listening to the devils rock music on the radio, then the generation before that proclaiming that books where destroying the mindset of the youth.
Yes, there is bad content everywhere, but your job as a parent is to help guide your kids to listening to the right radio channels, reading the right books, filtering good from bad tv, and helping them navigate social media as well as things like Tiktok.
My niece watches tiktok dances and likes videoing herself repeating them and sharing those videos with her friends. That seems no more brain hijacking than my brother who in his youth used to record himself playing cover songs of songs he’s hear on MTV and sharing that with his friends. For him that launched a life long passion for music and for her it might be the start of a passion for dance.
It’s understandable to want to protect children, but you also have to realize that you might end up being the parent who “protected” the next would-be Ed Sheeran from “the dangers of pop music” or the equivalent for the next generation all because you refused to see the world through their eyes.
Full disclosure, I’m quite fond of TikTok myself, following primarily Gardning TikTok’s these days. I don’t think it’s hijacked my mind, but my garden has had the benefit of others sharing their creativity and knowledge.
> Any big learnings you found during the process which you didn't anticipate starting out?
Always big learnings when it comes to rearing children.
Limiting in scope to my previous comment:
- I started with the "basics", which had nothing to do with browsing the internet (which came later.) Ease-of-use in services such as Google is a nightmare when it comes to providing a safe environment for your kids to explore. I think making the online world one of the latter components of exposure is best; otherwise, kids can get lost really fast in it's expanse. For anyone else following this approach, I'd say "keep it local".
- Kids are much more adept at technical adoption than adults. It speeds up conversations very quickly. For anyone else following this approach, I'd say be prepared to see what's coming. It will happen much faster than you might expect.
>Luckily I realized quickly that kids play on the devices of parents and so the ads they might see are at times super inappropriate!
That was exactly what happen to my kids yesterday. I don't mind ads, but when they are inappropriate for the 5 years old I get really pissed off. And I wish Apple Arcade could come sooner so they don't get distracted with Ads.
It is the same reason I don't really allow them to watch Youtube unattended anymore. I wish there is some curated Kid Channel I can safely let them browse. ( Kid these days are extremely good with technologies )
I’m sure this is probably a thing overall, but I also distinctly remember some extremely tech savvy friends, people making their livings in tech from the 90’s, using iPhone with games and YouTube as an opium stick whenever their 7-10 year olds wouldn’t sit still in public.
They fought about it, so maybe it was a cultural thing, but it definitely wasn’t because they didn’t understand the mechanics of adtech.
I also have super techno-illiterate friends whose teenage son spends maybe an hour a day online.
I don’t pretend to know the parenting solution but my anecdata suggests the tech-savvy parents are not automatically better at this than their less-teched counterparts.
> but if you are ever around kids you'll realize that every 7 year old knows about google.
This is one of the most absurd things I have ever read here. According to the CIA World Factbook, there are 1.8 billion children under 14 years of age. Divide such a number by 14, and we get what might be the number of 7-year-olds on the planet: 130 million.
I do not find it at all plausible that 130 million 7-year-olds on this planet know about Google. A large fraction of those children have never used a computer, why should they care?
If I knew you personally, I would worry about your children. Do you act like this around them?
>I was recently visiting some family, and saw the garbage my 7-year-old nephew sits through to get to the YouTube video he wants to see. I can only assume we're just training a new generation of kids to believe that ads are a normal, inevitable part of every kind of media consumption.
Just like parents have a responsibility to teach their kids about safe sex, I think parents have a responsibility to teach their kids about ad-blockers.
> Dare I ask why you put your guards up against YouTube instead of either deciding that your kids are too young to use a tablet/smartphone/PC in general, or that sometimes contents is scary but it's OK to talk about?
My kids are too young to have unrestricted access to the internet. That's why they are limited to specific kids apps.
But YTKids is different than all the other kids apps. All the other apps have a human check all the content before it goes live.
So I can be reasonably certain that the content will be ok without watching it all first.
With YT, I can't have that certainty. So they just don't get to use that platform anymore.
Yeah, bad things happen, and when they do I talk to my kids about it.
But I don't want to purposely subject them to such things if I don't have to.
> these people know exactly what this tech is designed to do.
I think that's a little stilted in this case. I read voraciously as a kid. My parents often took my book away and kicked me outside. By the same rule, they knew exactly what books are designed to do.
I don't think it's so nefarious as that when it comes to [this]technology. They weren't designed to rake in ad dollars from childrens' misinformed taps.
I think they thought kids just need moderation. And kids are horrific at moderation. So until they learn, they get told what to do, or no cookies at all.
Hell, before tablets and user-friendly computers, it was video games are the devil, before that TV was the devil, before that the radio and the talkies are the devil.
Social media is a different animal. It's making use of the technology to a certain end. Sort of like how some TV talk shows and old kids radio adventures were really just disguised advertising that profited the most from bringing you back every episode.
> I think the underlying problem is that parents want the entire internet to babysit their kids for them.
It's virtually impossible for parents to check on exactly what their kids are doing, all the privacy controls that the tech world is so proud of have made it almost impossible for parents to keep an eye on their kids.
So what do you expect from parents? What else are they supposed to do? It wasn't even 15 years ago that the whole world helped shield children, now suddenly, nothing.
Not just nothing, active work to prevent parents from watching their kids, coupled with sites also refusing to filter anything.
And then parents get criticized for not doing enough........
> Schoolkids will love these exciting tweaks, no doubt.
Plenty of money in that demographic; when Google can track schoolkids habits they can predict their future habits as adults and be the first to sell the best ads. Google (and Target) knows about the first pregnancy before the mother.
> Kids from low income families are screwed over - again.
No matter what, there will be disadvantages, but it's not the end of the world. At least they have less screentime at home right?
> Tech parents are always like "f yea, of course you block youtube"
"Always"? I highly doubt that. Actually, I bet most tech parents guide their kids on which youtube channels to watch because most tech parents watch youtube.
> I don't want to have to sit next to them all night making sure that they are only doing 'productive' work.
They are kids. Why are you concerned about 'productive' work. Sounds like you are dealing with a company and employees rather than a family and kids.
Calm down. Everything will be okay. People really do turn into their parents.
> You are purposefully bringing up an extremely rare use case to detract from the fact that 99% of users of this software are going to be abusive parents
What exactly is abusive about me wanting to know if my 6 year old is watching porn?
Are parents that signed up for Youtube Kids abusive, too? Is Google abusive for filtering the videos? And are all those who shared articles about how porn was showing up in YTKids abusive for letting parents know that their children might have been exposed to mature material?
> How do you control the content your children are exposed to once they go to school?
Not OP, but in my opinion it should be pretty easy to control undesirable content. Nobody likes ads; I see no reason for the kids to actively seek out ads once they know what ads really are.
As far as controlling "desirable" content like movies, games, etc, I'm not sure it should be, but that's a rant for another day!
> I can’t help but feel bad for the kids in this situation.
I feel worse for the kids whose parents don't care and have all their information collected before they're old enough to know better. They're handing children chromebooks and letting google collect their kid's test scores so they can sort children into 'smart' and 'dumb' buckets before they're out of primary school, letting youtube and tiktok babysit them the way previous generations did with television, making them carry cell phones at younger and younger ages etc.
I think there's some solid middle ground there, but those kids will be much better off having been made aware of the issues and having their information at least somewhat protected.
> Don't give your children unsupervised access to the internet.
What phenomenally useless advice, and an utterly uninformed perspective.
Who and how do you propose offer this "supervised access" in a meaningful fashion?
How do you adapt for the fact that children, when supervised, specifically avoid play that might subject them to additional scrutiny (for example, not using youtube, etc).
How do you address the lack of supervision in environments that aren't specifically at home, or when one parent finds different content problematic than another parent?
How do you ensure that two parents who are at odds (e.g. divorced couples, etc) coordinate what is permitted or not in an environment where the child has different rules in different environments?
Far from children not having internet access at school, the school my children attends recognizes the need to teach children how to think critically about online content, and both my 8 year old and 10 year old have had assignments to use youtube and other media sites to learn more about specific topics.
Far better advice would be to periodically review content your children view, and then have meaningful discussions about the content they are consuming, what makes it "good" or "bad", and encourage children to make better choices, and to discuss what they are seeing and learning.
As awful as Youtube is, it's not possible to block it out of kids lives, any more than porn magazines and other objectionable content could be kept out of the hands of children 30 years ago.
I agree with your entire comment. And apart from the parents that feel they need to watch their kids every move, what always astounds me is how little consideration is given to exactly what tech they slap around their kids' wrist.
"Oh, look it is Google, our familiar cozy uncle, so all is hunky-dory".
No, it is not! Google is an advertisement company. The biggest on the planet. Ads are their raison d'etre, core business. And learning as much as possible from your kid at the youngest age is part of their business model. Not to protect them, but to turn them into mindless consumers that click the most ads. And to use all that juicy data about your kids life in any other shady way they can think of, where some cold hard cash may end up on their balance sheet. It is ridiculous.
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