I thought my youngest was all about watching hour long Minecraft playthroughs but really they are quite interested in game mechanics and speed running. They are just a lot more tolerant of watching hours of videos around a particular game.

I don't overly police their content consumption (although we do talk about limiting shorts). The main thing is at the weekend to kick them off the TV after the morning to go and do something more interactive.

Sure if they needed to bypass ads I can introduce them to Free tube or whatever but for all it's sins they need moderated exposure to the YouTube experience so they're equipped enough not to go totally wild when they finally have unfettered access.

The stuff he was watching was more "am I gonna catch Mikey? Mikey is a chicken" kind of stuff. If he was really learning about the mechanics and how to program stuff in Minecraft with redstone or something, I could get behind it. I know Minecraft well enough to know the junk from the good stuff. And he watched probably 10 videos like this every day for more than a year, so I think from those thousands of videos he's learned whatever he would have learned already.

Now instead he is mostly watching chess videos and playing on an app called ChessKid which I'm much more happy with.

That's easy. What about when they get older?

Then you have to set up parenting filters. Firewalls, content filters, read logs, etc.

When they are older I guess you can beg big brother and nanny state to hold their hand.

I wish there was a way to filter youtube. I can block it completely on my firewall, but how do I let my kids watch their piano lesson without getting sucked into something they shouldn't see?

How do I has a parent curate content? I have not found anything that lets me allows the good. Either I block youtube completely, or I get what google decides is good for my kids (which blocks things I find good while allowing the bad)

You either watch it with them, download it for them to play offline (try ClipGrab, its free) or they don't watch it.

Stop begging for censorship. That never ends up good. Accurate tagging of media is what we need and a way to filter that ourselves.

Exactly. The only way is to block it and then choose something on your device whenever you want to show them something, and never let them use it without you choosing the content. The algorithm will always lead them to the darkest bowels of garbage content in my experience.

Seeing TADC in the thumbnail and the "stock footage with scaryvoice" shockumentary intro immediately put me off this video (plus a link to another video from the same person with the same thumbnail but with Minecraft characters; seems like a good racket). So, my two cents:

🪙: The Amazing Digital Circus is a pretty-brilliant psychological horror adult animation. It shouldn't be recommended to little kids, for sure, but it's not "disgusting content."

🪙🪙: There is definitely a problem with the stuff being recommended to kids on YouTube. Google has no real incentive to fix it, of course, but leaving a kid to watch YouTube at random long enough to wander into the really weird shit is kind of on the parents. It's a video service that cares only about serving ads, not a babysitter; either adjust your expectations or stop complaining.

There are plenty of services for only a few dollars a month that are actively safe for kids. Quick DDG found this (and I'm a little dubious about them including the big players like Netflix and Prime, but they also list stuff that looks better): https://thestreamable.com/video-streaming/best-streaming-service-for-kids

Anyway, here's a much better video courtesy of Dan Olson about the weird stuff on YouTube aimed at kids: https://youtu.be/LKp2gikIkD8 (and its only 15 minutes long)

Edit: Missed that you were talking about educational content, so this is more about entertainment, though quite a few of the shows in the linked post touch on social lessons that are, in my opinion at least, also important for kids to learn. Acceptance, open-mindedness, self-expression, that sort of thing.

There's a post I ran across a while back that might be what you're looking for: https://lemmy.world/post/30235633

There are a lot of good shows for kids that age (and the adults watching along with them), they just tend to not be all that well known. There are also a decent number of older cartoons not in that list that are kid-friendly while being just genuinely good art; off the top of my head:

• Samurai Jack
• Invader Zim (if you're ok with its particular style of weirdness, parent discretion advised)
• Courage The Cowardly Dog (also weird, but not as weird as Zim)

Because I'm slightly an animation dork, I'd also personally include Batman The Animated Series and Batman Beyond. Mostly just standard-but-high-quality action cartoons, but both occasionally did some really impressive artistic stuff, especially TAS.

I totally agree with the lists mentioned in that post, as my sister and I watched a good amount of them. But like my post said, there's a decline in good TV shows for kids. All of those shows mentioned are finished, none of them are currently ongoing shows right? Do they still broadcast them? Now parents have to pay for Disney+ to have something that isn't slop for their kids to watch.

You assume Google genuinely cares. They don’t.

Talk to them honestly without pandering about how to be discerning about what they watch?

Find things to watch with them that are genuinely enjoyable for you both?

Make sure you always interact with them in an open, accepting, genuinely-involved way so that they tell you what they've been watching and respect your opinions on those things?

Honestly, I haven't followed the state of Western animation much the last few years, so I can believe that there are fewer good shows than there used to be.

That said, animation is extremely expensive to produce for the amount of media it creates. Combine that with creative writing (well, art in general) being very under-appreciated, and therefore poorly-paid-for, there are a lot of societal/business pressures working against shows like this being produced. I only bring that up because people being unwilling to pay for non-slop is a big contributor to the problem.

(Not to defend Disney or the other mega-corps nickel-and-diming us for shareholder profits, of course. If only these companies would use their billions to fund shows from enthusiastic new creators rather than dumping everything into forgettable live-action remakes and CEO bonuses >_>)

YouTube "algorithms" are nonsense. I watch one deep dive into the fallout games and despite the fact that I have, and continue to watch British TV shows it's relentless in showing me deep dives into "fallout lore". What I've chosen is like 3% of what I usually watch. It's not a very popular genre in comparison to, oh, the fucking BBC. Still, it's all of the sudden its the only thing that gets suggested.

That is the easy part. my kids piano lessons track which is next and their practice, then the video is embedded. it also doesn't work on the roae unless I get a vpn.