When it comes to content to watch, kids have a lot of options these days. There are still the classics, like Sesame Street, but also a new kids media titan: YouTube.
So how can a parent make sense of all this different content? And what’s the best way for young kids to engage with it?
These are the questions we posed to Dr. Jenny Radesky in this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast.
Radesky is a developmental and behavioral pediatrician at University of Michigan Medical School. She’s also a media researcher and a director of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health.
She says children’s media is very different from how it used to be. “I grew up in the 1980s when we would go watch Saturday morning cartoons all huddled together while my parents slept,” she told Vox. “There was a time and a place when technology could be watched, and that’s what’s really different about today. Now we have endless content on-demand and we have marketplaces and platforms where these pieces of content are competing for kids’ attention.”
Radesky has tools for parents when it comes to best practices for kids and their media consumption. Below is an excerpt of our conversation with Radesky, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to [email protected] or call 1-800-618-8545.
Can you rank the best children’s media out there? What is good content and why is it good content?
Our research team at the University of Michigan and I collaborate with folks at Georgetown, University of Wisconsin, and Brigham Young University. We’ve gotten together to try to create a coding scheme for kids’ media quality.
[“Quality”] could be quality education. It could be quality for lovely storytelling that’s meaningful to a child. The really best stuff, the stuff that is clearly made with some care and some thoughtfulness is still [like] Sesame Street, the PBS kids stuff like Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, and then there’s some newcomers like Bluey and Ms. Rachel.
They might be slower-paced, they might have a good sense of humor. They tell stories that are meaningful to a child’s experience, and that is one way that we define good content: It is reflecting back the world that children are in to children and helping them make meaning of it.
We also code for things like designs that just try to capture attention. We call this “bedazzling,” just this extra stuff that’s on a YouTube video but often is kind of shallow and gimmicky attention-grabbing content. [For this reason] I’d say AI-generated slop is definitely at the bottom. If you ever see a video that just looks like a computer-generated bunch of cars being driven by Spider-Man and Elsa and the Hulk crashing into a whole bunch of soccer balls, that’s the worst and not worth your kids’ time and attention. It’s all the gimmicky things that kids want to click on so that’s why it trends in the algorithm and those videos have billions of views.
So we’ve mentioned some of the greatest hits, but I have to ask about Cocomelon. Where does Cocomelon fall in the spectrum of children’s entertainment?
To speak like my 16-year-old son: Cocomelon’s pretty mid. It gets middling scores from our team of coders because it is surface-level educational content. It has lots of extra giggles and pacing that really grabs and holds onto your attention. Everybody’s happy. There’s no friction, and life is full of friction for little kids.
Even kids need conflict in their media!
That’s both how kids grow skills, but it’s also how they grow their sense of self. Like, “Huh, I handled that. I figured out how to put a spoon into this slop of baby food and try to get it to my mouth.” We don’t need to spoon-feed kids.
We’ve talked about what kids watch, but what about how kids watch? We got a question from a listener who wants to know if the type of screen matters — say, TV versus a tablet.
That’s a great question. We’ve done a little bit of research comparing when kids read off a print book versus a tablet or when they play physical games versus digital games. Kids create much more of what we called “solitary space” around a tablet. “It’s just me and this tablet. It’s me and this little sensory cocoon hanging out playing this game.” They don’t see it as a shared object the same way that a TV or a deck of cards or a print book is seen as a shared object by young kids.
There’s so much informal learning that children do in early childhood, and we can really teach kids that media is for sharing. It’s not for when each of us is stressed out and doesn’t want to talk to each other. We can set those norms! Make it predictable, make it shared if you can, or at least in a shared space so you can monitor. Also, make it not just whenever your child is fussing. If your child is used to being calmed down or managed behaviorally by media, that could create a dependence. Early childhood is such a great opportunity for kids to learn other emotional awareness and coping skills.
The post Your kids are watching YouTube. Here’s the best way for them to navigate it. appeared first on Vox.
