Dear Emily,
I have to admit that my husband and I haven’t tried very hard, but we’ve definitely failed to figure out a way to put any parental controls on my 9-year-old son’s YouTube consumption — he just figures out ways around them, like downloading and opening different browsers. So he has somewhat unregulated access to videos of all kinds, and the algorithm seems to mostly show him short explainer videos that are in most instances full of misinformation and sometimes outright lies. Then he’ll come to us saying something like “Did you know there’s evidence that dinosaurs and people existed at the same time?” and we’ll have to explain to him that he’s learned something totally made up. I guess my question is, How do we teach a kid his age basic media literacy? The idea of questioning his sources doesn’t seem to occur to him. But also, what should we even be telling him are good sources of sound, age-appropriate information? And how do we impress upon him that this is important, and a good lifelong habit to cultivate, without totally boring him and losing his fleeting interest?
— Help, Before It’s Too Late!
Dear Help, Before It’s Too Late,
There will definitely be people who read this letter and judge you for not policing your child’s YouTube consumption more closely, but I would be the world’s biggest hypocrite if I sat here and pretended to be one of them. The older kids get, the less control we have over the media they consume, especially when friends with phones — and later, their own phones — get involved.
That said, you should at least try to use YouTube’s own features. While imperfect, they allow you to control your kid’s experience on a pretty granular level beyond the YouTube Kids version of the app, which shuts down just about everything. Instead, you can do what they call the “preteen supervised experience” of YouTube, which curates content into three categories: Explore (9+), Explore More (13+), and Most of YouTube (pretty much everything except videos marked 18+). Depending on your 9-year-old’s maturity level, I might select an “older” setting than his actual age to ensure that he’s not bored — I know my son would get frustrated if some of the (violent) anime he likes were suddenly off-limits. But you know your own kid and your own standards best. And since these features have their flaws, you still have to get into the YouTube trenches yourself, look at your kid’s search history, and get some sense of what he’s watching. Even better, watch with him — defeating the point of screen time, of course, which is that he leaves you alone. But even if you do this for only a little while, you’ll get a better sense of what he’s interested in and which paths the app may be leading him down. As one therapist I spoke to pointed out, talking with your son about what he’s seeing online will also be good practice for when he’s older and encountering more toxic stuff that encourages resentment of girls and women. If you can go into these conversations without judgment, that will keep the door open for more discussion in years to come.
I also want to allay some of your worries by encouraging you to simply notice that your kid comes to you and announces at least some of his “discoveries.” This opens the opportunity for conversation and course correction. All you need are more tools to guide the conversation that’s already happening.
I asked Allison Singer, the executive editor at TIME for Kids magazine, to weigh in here. Her magazine has a segment on its podcast called “Fact or Fishy?” in which kids your son’s age play a game to determine whether a news headline may be fake. They look at things like whether it can be confirmed elsewhere, whether it sounds just plain wrong, or whether there’s a credible source. If your son seems amenable, you could throw this podcast on the next time you’re in the car, without making a direct link between that and his YouTube habit. He may beg you to turn it off and switch back to Grimm, Grimmer, Grimmest, or it may hold his interest. You never know what might pique a curious kid’s attention.
That’s the good news: Your kid is curious! He’s seeking out more information about the world around him, and it’s inevitable that he’ll end up seeking it in some not so great places. You’re far from alone in your struggles. “Media literacy is a skill, and like all other forms of literacy, it needs to be taught,” Singer says. “In an age when kids are consuming more media than ever, more easily than ever, media literacy is more crucial than ever.” See if you can get more books, if he’s a reader, on topics he brings up having watched videos on, then make comparing the books with the “information” he found on YouTube into a kind of gotcha game. You may have a budding fact-checker on your hands! Or that approach may totally flop. Regardless, keep trying and something will stick, even if it’s as simple as just continuing to talk about what he’s watching and making time to watch with him whenever you can.
He’s still young enough that he trusts you rather than an algorithm as the ultimate arbiter of truth. Make it clear to him that you do research too when you don’t know the answer to a question. In my house, we Google stuff on our phones around the kids plenty, but we also have a big IRL dictionary we defer to when we’re stumped (or fake stumped) about spelling, just because it’s fun to go through the process of looking something up together instead of clicking through for the top result. Maybe you can ritualize something similar with your kid as a way to make it clear that you’re all learning together, all the time — you from him about what sigma and rizz mean, and him from you about how the first humans didn’t join the party till 65 million years after the last dinosaurs went extinct. Good luck!
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