I can't describe it, but I know it when I see it
My oldest zygote is 5 years old. Up until now, I've been able to keep a good lid on what he's allowed to watch. We have Roku with a handful of streaming services, and he's comfortable navigating it himself to watch shows. I'm big on teaching agency and responsibility, and he's responded well to that: he watches shows we've okayed, asks about other shows he's interested in, and respects us if we tell him no. He's a smart kid and I'd like to keep him that way.
It's starting to get harder. Originally I could say on on grounds of age appropriateness, or I could point to things about a show that I outright didn't approve of for him. This is important to me because I want to teach him to think about these things and make good choices for himself in the future. So instead of telling him "No, you can't watch that", I want to tell him "No, you can't watch this because _________."
Now that he's getting older, he's asking more and more to watch things. And in some cases, I find myself saying "No. It's hard to explain why, but this isn't good." I hate saying that because I know that's not satisfying at his age, and it doesn't teach him anything about how to make good choices about what to watch.
YouTube is rife with examples. If my son is watching a branded show about Spiderman, I know what to expect. There are brand standards that I don't always agree with, but I know what the damage is, and the problems I have with those shows are problems I can talk through with him.
But when YouTube recommends videos that are low production quality videos of people in their living rooms playing with Spiderman figures, I don't want him watching it. Some of it feels Elsagate-adjacent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate) in that it seems harmless but you are just waiting for it to veer into weird or inappropriate territory. There's no trust between me and the content creator. Sometimes they're just harmlessly dumb. But in any case it's hard to explain why I don't want him to watch something that appears harmless to him.
Does anyone have similar experiences? Advice? Commiseration? Perspectives?
We keep a fairly tight control of what our kids can watch (4 and 2), and we only recently got a TV whereas before they'd only get a limited amount of time watching on my wife's iPad. So far it's mainly educational content, with the occasional age appropriate show for fun throw in (Bob the Builder, PAW Patrol, Bluey, etc.) but we have seen them tap on other videos that are recommended occasionally.
We haven't had too many questions regarding why they can't watch something yet, but I'm sure that is coming, and we'll also be in the camp of explaining why we don't want them to watch something since I definitely agree it is better to give reasoning behind it.
We did have the question specifically up regarding videos of people playing with toys that my kids had opened up, and we framed it as "you don't need to watch videos of other people playing with toys, when you can go play with your own toys". If they probed a deeper why, I'd tell them that "playing with toys practices your imagination, and watching someone do that doesn't. It's import to have your own imagination and to think of ways to play on your own without someone on a screen saying this is how you play with toys." Granted that isn't my concrete final answer and I may think on a better way to phrase it down the road and parenting is a delicate balance, especially nowadays with how accessible tech is.
I think you're describing media literacy. PBS has a pretty good article on this, and I'm sure there's lots of books about it nowadays
My son is 7, now, and YouTube has been banned in our house from an early age.
He knows that there is good stuff on YouTube, but the way I've tried to explain it to him is that YouTube, the platform, only wants to keep him watching. It tries really hard to get him sucked in and it doesn't care how. It's like force-feeding candy but for your brain: at first, it tastes great! But if that's all you ever eat, you'll get REALLY sick. And YouTube only wants you to keep watching more YouTube.
A lot of content on YouTube is only stimulation at a base level. Shows should be entertaining, yes, but they should also teach us things about the world. That doesn't necessarily mean explicitly educational content, either, but there should be a deeper moral message.
One litmus test I use with my son is: are these characters good role models? Are they kind to other people? It's okay if the characters don't always make the best choices as long as they learn and grow from those mistakes. If you start framing these questions for your son early, it can build some really good media consumption habits for the future.
In my experience Youtube has done a pretty good job of removing most of the really weird stuff. Especially if you have the parental controls turned on.
My kid has a Youtube kids account which I control (not actually YouTube Kids the app, but a kid's account linked to my family group with content filters set to age 9 - although they are still only 7). I spent some time clicking "don't recommend channel" on the more brainrotty stuff and after a while it's become a pretty decent feed. We watch some most mornings while I chug tea and try to wake up before starting the day properly..
Occasionally Kid goes off on an explore and finds a bunch more low-effort content but to be honest, they're pretty good at filtering themselves now. They like a well structured story or an informative video with actual facts and tend to choose that stuff. Sure, they watch some junk too sometimes but so do I. Kid watching other kids playing with toys (or in my kid's case, they like to watch gaming videos) is not all that different to me watching adults playing with lathes or milling machines. It's a kind of trash but brains need zoneout stuff occasionally. I notice the more tired or worried about something Kid is, the trashier the stuff they choose is.
That said, "let's not watch this, it's brainrot" is an acceptable and understood reason for me to give to them to skip a video. Also "this is AI slop", along with some tips on how to spot AI slop.
Me and the kid have long since had the discussion about how some content is like chocolate - it's OK occasionally but if it's all you consume it's no good for you. They understood about how they need to put good food in their body long before they needed to understand the same about their brains, so it was an easy comparison to grasp.
It sounds like you don't trust homemade videos aimed at children, in general? Because they're made by strangers?
I mean, yes, it seems like a perfectly reasonable precaution.
I had a lot longer response, but I think the crux of it was: He's 5. He doesn't need unbounded access to an enormous library of content. If it were me (and i have a 4.5yo), I'd just say "nope, we pick what we watch before we bring out the phone" and skip the recommendations. In fact, I just confirmed you can use ublock origin to erase the recommendation list on the side of videos (or on your homescreen if you really want) to prevent going down rabbit holes.
But really, if possible and there is a good selection, the benefit of having a DVD player and getting your media from the library is that the choices are deliberated in advance, you know the media is going to fall into certain standards, and it has to be returned within a couple of weeks and they aren't just watching the same thing over and over. And just a note, that if like me you live near the border of multiple library systems, you can check if you can have accounts in each and have them linked together (in the Twin Cities there are I believe 7 library systems that do this).
I have just straight up banned YouTube in my house. It's far too addicting and just gets into weird stuff all the time; I banned it many years ago and then we steadily reintroduced it relatively recently, strictly under our supervision, but even then when stuff isn't necessarily outright objectionable, a lot of the stuff aimed at kids has this addictive property to it.
We were letting our oldest watch about 20-30 minutes or so each night before bed, but every time we turned it off and told them it was time for bed, they would exhibit what I would call withdrawal symptoms. Begging and pleading not to shut it off and then refusing to go to bed and generally just having a meltdown. This happened consistently for a week and then I remembered it was the exact same behavior they exhibited years ago before I initially banned YouTube. So I told my wife it's going back on the ban list, at least partially. No longer will they have control over it, but instead we, the parents, get to choose what is watched, so now we're able to watch a little bit, but we watch strictly Educational or Edutainment content.
It seems to be working better so far, but if that becomes a problem I will again ban it completely.
My kids are 5 1/2 and 8 for reference.