Earlier today, a Hacker News poster asked the Hacker news community if there are any alternatives to PBS Kids. The poster appears to have been under the misapprehension that PBS Kids has been discontinued, so all was well that ended well with the query. While I have not watched children’s programming on PBS in a good long while, I decided to scroll through the responses to see if there may be any interesting New Leaf Journal prompts, noting that I have a large collection of articles about children’s poetry and children’s literature. Unfortunately, I did not find any sites or services to cover in these humble pages. However, I did find one quote in a response which troubled me on first glance:
I have a 6 year old, and her youtube history isn’t what I’d hope.
The context of the quote is not entirely clear. When I first read it I thought that the commenter was saying that he or she let the child use YouTube on her own. But the quote could also be understood as the poster was watching YouTube with his or her daughter and trying to convince the daughter to watch educational content on YouTube. However, I see issues either way. A parent should not leave a six-year old on YouTube without supervision, even the “children’s” flavor of the platform. Likewise, if the child is not interested in watching videos that the parent deems to be educational, one may wonder why the child needs to use YouTube at all? Are there not other things of value in the world?
One down-voted comment proposed the worst approach:
I just put on YouTube kids and let the algorithm take the wheel. What could go wrong?
(To be fair, this is not the worst approach. The worst approach is always TikTok, which should be banned.)
This is not good, not the best. What indeed could go wrong? The commenter is joking, right? …Right? I may need a pharaoh emoji here…