It’s a conversation, not a dictatorship.

How Do You YouTube?

YouTube as entertainment entered my kids’ lives sometime in February of 2020 while we were distance learning (thanks, COVID). With two parents working at home and two kids doing school online, we all needed separate a workspace. We were in a decent financial place then and bought a Microsoft Surface Go for the kids.  

Around the same time, we introduced our 6-year-old to Minecraft. We’d played games on the Nintendo Switch before, but this would be the first game that was his own. I only knew the basic concept and nothing about the mechanics.

Where do you turn when you a need a tutorial? To the YouTubes!

The floodgates opened! I was no novice to YouTube, but the world of YouTube gamers? My only experience before this was StampyCat. For a while, at least one parent was in the same room while they watched tutorials, that couldn’t always be the case. And if we both had meetings at the same time, then the kids wanted to watch it with their headphones on. 

Very quickly, we established our family’s ground rules for watching YouTube. We constantly refer to these almost three years later and refine the guidelines based on their maturity and age.

“The code is more what you’d call guidelines, than actual rules.”

Ground Rules for YouTube

The foundation for most rules in our home is always based on respect and discussion. These tenets apply to YouTube tenfold. 

• We apply the “Let’s try it” concept to most channels, as we do for trying new food. We can respect that they want to watch something if they respect our opinions on the content. If they think that we will automatically shut down a channel they want to watch, then they won’t ask us about it. If we stay open to always talking about it, they’re more likely to accept our opinion and change the channel. 
• Talk to them and be specific about what you don’t like. This is where nurturing mutual respect comes into play as well, even if you dislike their choices. Just a sampling of ways we’ve described what we do and don’t like include:
  • Are you learning how to play from this gamer?
  • The video moves so fast. Can you explain to me what they’re saying or doing?
  • Is this something you can use when you play, or is it just entertaining?
  • Do you like how they talk to their friends? Would you like it if your friends talked to you that way?
• It is a conversation, not a dictatorship. Establish that they can talk to you if there’s anything they don’t understand or think you might not want them to see. This doesn’t mean you can’t give them a definitive “no” if you don’t want them to watch a certain channel. But the more you talk them through your reasoning, the better they’ll react when you say no. And it’s more likely they’ll have the tools to make better media choices without you, which is the whole point, really!
• Pranks are not fun in real life. We had to address this early with PrestonPlays. A large number of his videos involve pranking his friends inside and outside of Minecraft. When our children started emulating his prankster nature, we established the idea that pranks can be fun, but not if they’re mean. You also need to keep listening to your friends to see if they like the pranks or if they want you to stop.
• Sometimes certain channels are okay, but not for too long a time. Sometimes kids just want to be entertained. Sometimes I want to read or watch fluff, too. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. So often, we’ll be overly critical with what they’re watching when the kids just need to veg a little and chill with some mindless YouTube. That’s fine for a certain time; it’s up to you and your kids to determine the limits.
• Talk to kids about the science of how their brain works and how different stimuli affect them.  I don’t care how old they are, and you don’t have to understand the brain yourself completely. Just introducing the concept that there are bigger consequences can help when you need to say, “I don’t like how this affects your brain.” 

• Introduce the concept of YouTubers amplifying their personalities for views. It’s easy to see why kids don’t know that most YouTubers are acting, even if they’re acting “like themselves.” Kids start to emulate how their favorite gamers hold themselves and speak, so they must understand how each person is still performing. Again, we turn to questions:
  • Would you want to play with someone that acted like that?
  • Are you learning the game? 
• Editing means you don’t see hours and hours of other work they’re doing behind the scenes. It’s inevitable that after seeing kids their age on YouTube, they’ll want to make their own videos. We are all for that (and post it privately), but once I outline how much work it takes to create and edit a video, they usually lose interest. My youngest is starting to put in the work, though, so be ready to follow through some day.
• Most of the products they review or get for free. Sigh. Thanks, Ryan’s World. We tackled this early, as they watched him unboxing massive piles of toys. We told them how they get these toys for free so that the YouTuber will essentially advertise for the toy companies. This ties in well with our work to help them decipher advertisements and marketing.

There is a lot more to this topic, but most of even our advanced critical thinking for YouTube comes down to these ideas. Soon we will start using more parental controls, but even then, it’s up to the whole family to keep the lines of conversation open. They won’t have the same – or any – parental controls at their friends’ houses, so let’s face it, ultimately, the decisions of what to watch are in our children’s own hands. It’s better to give them the mental tools to make better choices than count on the fact that they’ll never figure out how to work around parental control.

Photo/Image Credit: Canva, GIPHY

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