execrable children's programming pox

We just keep an ear out. You can’t leave that responsibility to anybody else, much less a robot programmed by somebody on a short term contract who, even if they have kids, probably doesn’t really care less about yours.

well yeah, it just starts immediately in a scary voice. we were thinking of telling him tv YouTube had gone away anyway, we've got loads of actual proper Thomas episodes for him to watch...
he got into actual videos of car factories from manufacturers for a few days, these were pretty cool though.

My kid is super into Dinosaur Train lately, which I don’t hate because he gathers all his rubber dinosaurs together when it comes on and tells me their names and sometimes he yells DINOSAUR TRAIN like the theme song. Also I always mentally replace the first line of the song with the opening line from Slick Rick’s “Children’s Story”.

I like it much more than Wild Kratts which he was way into for a while before that. Though that show did get him obsessed with walruses to the degree that he wants to be one for Halloween.

Other shows sort of come and go:

- Paw Patrol is fucking terrible but I’m kind jealous I didn’t come up with a show that kills a quarter of each episode with a stock montage of the team mustering for whatever. He loves his Paw Patrol shirts though. My wife bought a season on amazon when he was sick so we’re stuck with that around

- Daniel Tiger sometimes is really soothing and sometimes makes me want to claw my eyes out

- he had a Peg + Cat phase but that only lasted like a week or two, which is sad cause I liked that one

- sometimes he’s into Sesame Street but not that often which is again sad cause I like it

- Yo Gabba Gabba is awesome but it’s not on Netflix or PBS so no regular access

- sometimes he likes Cat in the Hat but fuck that show

Anything though is better than toy videos or whatever weird garbage he ends up with while using YouTube on the iPad

We’re PJ Masks all the time now.

We've seen all of those phases and weathered them all.

Possibly controversial opinion: On balance, children who can control their own entertainment input (whether by searching on their own, following chains of "if you like this..." suggestions, and/or abandoning things they're tired of) are happier children. And they're WAY easier to deal with than children who need frequent parent interventions to keep them satisfied with their entertainment streams.

In my childhood, our choices were to (A) watch what was on or (B) not watch what was on.

In the childhood of my nieces and nephews, there were more options. You could put in a video! And you could ask someone to change it to a different video if that one wasn't appealing!

Nowadays my children just flop down with their tablets on whatever surface is nearest, and they watch what they feel like watching (within a wide but constrained universe).

N.B.: I love them to pieces, and I assure you I interact with them plenty. But I'm glad of not having to deal with "Paw Patrol, but not THIS episode" every couple minutes when I'm trying to get some work done.

Yeah, my son is too young to bring up a program on his own so there’s usually this ten minute quest to figure out which Daniel Tiger episode someone talks about a pie in or something.

I know it's a cliche, but I have yet to se anything remotely as irritating as Barney.

pk ha yep same here figuring out which ep has diesel 10 and Henry and a ghost

I like it much more than Wild Kratts which he was way into for a while before that. Though that show did get him obsessed with walruses to the degree that he wants to be one for Halloween.

My daughter has been a Wild Kratts super fan for like 2 years and will drop words like 'subnivean zone' into casual conversation which leaves her mother and I scrambling to google up what the hell she is talking about. It's a good problem to have imo.

N.B.: I love them to pieces, and I assure you I interact with them plenty. But I'm glad of not having to deal with "Paw Patrol, but not THIS episode" every couple minutes when I'm trying to get some work done.

― looser than lucinda (Ye Mad Puffin), Sunday, October 15, 2017 4:25 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah, my son is too young to bring up a program on his own so there’s usually this ten minute quest to figure out which Daniel Tiger episode someone talks about a pie in or something.

― President Keyes, Sunday, October 15, 2017 9:42 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Also yeah, I'm glad we're past this phase and my daughter can for the MOST part figure out which episode she wants to watch. Because otherwise it's me diving into http://dtrain.wikia.com/wiki/Episode_List or whatever.

So much Dinosaur Train. But I realized that they seem to want to be scientifically accurate by having to travel through time in order to see all the different species some of which existed closer to us than to other dinosaurs.

I also realized that full size pteranodons, standing, would probably be about the size of human adults so the main characters are roughly the size of adults and children which is kind of awesome for scale purposes.

Dinosaur Train is mostly tolerable. I initially rolled my eyes about it because the premise seemed like focus-grouped boy catnip: hey, what do boys like? Trains! Great. What else? DinosaurS! Okay, awesome.

- There's also TWO shows featuring dinosaur/truck hybrids. All male, of course. Children's television is already gender-segregated enough, come the fuck on.

- The carnivores eat "meat," which is - literally - a pile of meat. The show does not address (nor should it) who the meat used to be, because they otherwise make a great show of learning about and befriending all manner of creatures.

- Why is the only technology steampunky-af trains? They can get it together to do trains and submarines, but then they stop there and everything else is done with sticks and rocks.

Of course, lots of suspension-of-disbelief required for a grownup to watch children's television. Bubble Guppies features mermaids who are underwater but who still have a fire department. And deserts.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51N9SD6MW8L.jpg

I had a long talk with my daughter yesterday about whether Moana is a princess.

Went to lots of interesting places; we discussed metafiction, cultural appropriation, and power imbalances. Kids these days are woke af.

She’s the daughter of the village chief.

We’ve also had productive conversations about Moana.

“What’s a demigod? Is that half god half human?”

“Yes and now we need to have a long conversation about theology.”

Right, the topic starts with "the daughter of a chief is not a necessarily a princess and different cultures treat these topics differently" etc.

(I have to physically stop myself from my normal Pocahontas digression here. Pocahontas is the daughter of a chief, not a princess ffs. And she did not get romantically busy with John Smith, ffs; she was like 12! They were friends, but she married a totally different dude. Disney is garbage, etc. But we don't need to do that one because I already flogged it to death years ago and anyway we did Virginia history in fourth grade.)

Anyway the movie has the line "you're wearing a dress and you have an animal sidekick, that makes you a princess," so we get to talk about fourth wall, "meta-" etc., and the degree to which contemporary children's movies sometimes subvert tropes while simultaneously reinforcing them.

Unfortunately my son found a series of weird-ass unlicensed fan videos that are premised on Maui/Moana marrying and having kids, which we agree is insane, so we get to address fair use and shipping and fanfiction while also addressing consent, power, age gaps, the obliteration of platonic friendship....

That all makes my brain hurt. Glad my kid just likes to sing the songs and doesn’t ask questions.

Ha, be glad we didn't feel the need to talk about whether Lin-Manuel Miranda counts as an appropriator of Polynesian culture. Or whether Puerto Rican ancestry gives him a "well, that's kind of an islander" get-out-of-jail-free card. Or whether (half-Maori New Zealander) Jemaine Clement is okay, but maybe should not have done a David Bowie impression because wypipo, etc.

All of which are real Internet takes of varying degrees of performative wokeness.

how old is your kid?

Ten.

ugh
https://medium.com/@jamesbridle/something-is-wrong-on-the-internet-c39c471271d2

I am 99.9% sure all the videos we watch are fine but from now on I'm gonna build up a playlist of things I have personally vetted and only watch those. I might have come across ones with hideous blasts of crying (and switched it off immediately).

Most of the crying videos we've seen are actually not that sinister, tbh. I'm surprised the author couldn't figure out what was happening in the video; the outsider figure cries when the heads/faces don't match up, giggles/cheers when they do. It's easily the least sinister form of the type of video he's describing (we've encountered some very unfortunate claymation-esque pooping Elsa/Spiderman videos as well as some super macabre Thomas the Tank Engine videos; there was also a homemade video with Peppa Pig toys that ended with Peppa accidentally hitting George in the head while playing where George ended up lying in a pool of blood and Peppa was yelling "GEORGE, WAKE UP" at him before we turned it off).

The crying videos ARE annoying as sin, though.

hah, I knew this bump would be about that

is that last video completely AI-generated or was that dreamed up by an actual person? feels like a James Ferraro art project but even then it's too weird and haphazardly random. I had no idea this world existed.

the ironic thing is that a bunch of parents afraid of their kids being exposed to this stuff are now gonna have their YouTube recs loaded with it, and I now do

for some reason this stuff really spooks me, I read that article this morning

yeah I think we'll stick with DVDs for the grandkids

ha i just read this today too. i think the writer is definitely overstating how many of those videos constitute "child abuse" but jeez there is much weird content out there. i spent a little time this afternoon clicking around some of the shit he links and ..... i just don't know any more man

i mean

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm4Algab_qk

what the

That is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying

It's also probably going to show up on my smart tv now because I'm logged into my Gmail account

:-/

yeah I wasn't really sure about the "child abuse" part either. like I get what might be terrifying about Spiderman riding around on a giant syringe or Elsa "giving birth" to eight different superheroes but none of that really seems explicit - it's just deeply, profoundly strange. I mean, lets not forget what sort of horrible things were always right around the corner 15 years ago

or to put it more succinctly

jealous that kids get procedurally generated videodrome and I just had goatse

— Kevin Snow (@bravemule) November 6, 2017

this one's pretty good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9QOGFX2gos&t=737s

Well let's be clear; dude explicitly said in his article that he wasn't going to link the really disturbing videos. The Peppa Pig one I described was definitely not anything I would want my toddlers to watch, even though thanks to being on YouTube it wasn't full-on goaste/Tubgirl.

MARCOS MY CHILDREN HAVE WATCHED THAT ONE

but from now on I'm gonna build up a playlist of things I have personally vetted and only watch those.

I do this, but it seems impossible to avoid YT just playing whatever the fuck it wants when a playlist is over, is my worry. At least on the AppleTV app

lol no way xp

That is def one of the videos where we went "okay we cannot just put Youtube on and let it cycle through random things" because we did not choose that for our kids to watch

my embed didn't work huh. LETS TRY AGAIN WHY NOT

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9QOGFX2gos&t=737s

Finger family videos are plenty dumb and often pretty weird, but they are recognizable kid culture, with a reasonable level of tie-in to developmentally appropriate things. It's no worse than the very similar and venerable "Where is Thumbkin."

The phenomenon I do NOT get is "Johnny Johnny Yes Papa" which is even more annoying and has no clear genesis, it just keeps happening.

YouTube Kids is, of course, cleaner than normal YouTube but is still plenty weird.

toy freaks was legit alarming imo

Finger family videos are plenty dumb and often pretty weird, but they are recognizable kid culture

yea a lot of this doesn't seem that far off from idk teletubbies

The first time I saw Johnny Johnny Yes Papa, I was certain someone had slipped me acid.

The boy has come home from nursery singing that more than once. Now I’m wondering just how much YT he is getting there

wow, that animals for kids stuff is wild

yeah it's amazing. the version of 'buried alive' Bridle links to had a low hit count but other Animals For Kids uploads of the same video total 20 million+ views

I remember Teletubbies being the moment when TV officially sanctioned going after the 6-24 month old demographic; everyone agreed the content was well-meaning, the issue was whether or not it was morally ok to target viewers that young, but babies were just magnetized by that stuff and so it became a moot point. this feels like a breakthrough moment where the people targeting that demographic are getting competitive and creating edgier and edgier content to attract audiences -- there's still an attempt at a moral center in some of these (the superheroes usually end up winning by the end) but the ride on the way there -- there isn't 10 seconds of this I think unsupervised children should be watching

the NYT's article about this yesterday was a little more button-pushing, but the stuff they linked to was even edgier

With my children the worst stuff is always a passing phase. My daughter went through a brief period of watching deliberately grating things (Annoying Orange, Battle for Dream Island). It was during a gap when she didn't particularly like kid's shows (Dora/My Little Pony) anymore, but she hadn't yet gotten interested in tweenier stuff. And now she mostly just reads books, so it's working out okay.

My son sometimes falls into a rut of something pretty stupid, but he tires of it and moves on to something else.

Sometimes he rediscovers something he used to like, and gets back into it. He recently rediscovered Signing Time, which were the first videos he watched (back when we thought he might be deaf). Indeed, for a while, he signed "Time!" to mean all videos for a while. And then it will be on to something else.

Given the transitory nature of all this, I don't have the energy or time to vet and control his video input. The cost/benefit ratio just isn't there for me. Some day he may see chance to see something inappropriate, but I assume we'll just process that as we would any other unpleasant thing that happens from time to time.

I thought this comment underneath the medium post was interesting:

I just remembered I was discussing this with someone once and we came to the conclusion that they should essentially be called “fetish videos aimed at children.” The slavish devotion to search terms and SEO’d nonsense video titles has given rise to a… well, fetishistic product. You can look at the thumbnails and see it. Superheroes, costumes, taped up/tied up women. Syringes, blood, inappropriate gore. Crying is popular on thumbnails. The videos showing people dressed up as Frozen characters and doing something against their will. The main fetishistic aspect of it is, of course, for each of these videos there are probably a hundred more like it. Add in that all of these channels are weirdly foreign and seem to be imitating more popular channels and I think the fact that the strange knockoffs are on theoretically the same footing as established and legitimate channels adds to the general disturbing atmosphere.

I had no idea wtf Johnny Johnny Yes Papa was when my kid was saying it for a while. It had just come up in auto play after a parade video or something. Theres so much insane garbage on YouTube that we basically disabled it on the iPad and if he watches stuff in it it’s videos we’ve downloaded and put there on purpose. Works out cause we mostly reserve it as the nuclear option on car or plane trips.

Say what you will about Dinosaur Train and Wild Kratts but when he watches those he gets all his dinosaurs and trains and plays with them while watching and tells us facts about dinosaurs or animals for days. With YouTube he basically just goes catatonic and stares.

procedurally generated fetish porn targeted at children. wonderful.

burn the internet to the ground.

Yabbut some of these oddities have a weirdly charming moral core.

There's a version of "Baa Baa Black Sheep" where new verses extol charity (giving clothes to homeless children) and prudent savings. There are also versions of "Johnny Johnny..." that regard naughtiness as played out and take a turn toward healthy habits ("eating broccoli?"). A version of "Humpty Dumpty," apparently subcontinental in origin, becomes a safety parable.

finger family is giving me a full on panny

Yabbut some of these oddities have a weirdly charming moral core.

― Careful with that Ax, Emanuel (Ye Mad Puffin)

my god, have things truly gotten so awful that edutainment is now considered "charming"?