I watched YouTube for a week with my children. Here's what I learnt

Times

a day ago

At about 5pm every day, in the small window between after-school activities and dinner, my three and five-year-old daughters veg out in front of a screen. Sometimes they'll watch a cartoon on Netflix; occasionally they'll ask for CBeebies. The majority of the time, though, it's YouTube.
The show they chose — or rather, that was algorithmically suggested — to watch one recent afternoon follows the adventures of a real-life brother and sister. They'd watched it before, as have many other children, since it's one of the most popular kids' channels on YouTube. While my daughters love the slapstick humour, to me it's like white noise, the background soundtrack to my multitasking.
But the video they watched that day made me pay attention. In it the brother tricks his sister into thinking she has gained weight. Visibly upset, the little girl changes into a skimpy workout outfit to do star jumps, and later turns down a sandwich in favour of a plate of raw carrot sticks, before heading to her bedroom to weigh herself. I was horrified, both at what we were watching and at myself for letting my impressionable daughters access it. How was it, I wondered, that this type of content was being promoted on a platform marketed as family-friendly? And what else had they watched that had flown under my radar?
According to Michelle Neumann, a professor of childhood education at the University of Sheffield who has carried out research on children's YouTube content, this is precisely the problem with a lot of what our kids are watching. 'On the surface many of these channels seem OK, so if a parent glances over their shoulder, they might think, that looks fun,' she says. 'But when you dig deeper, you realise there's a lot of problematic content.'
So I set myself a challenge: for one week I would dig deeper, intently watching everything that my girls were looking at on YouTube to see what I would learn.
I should preface my little experiment with a disclosure: my husband and I used to work for Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006. I joined in 2017, the year it emerged that bad actors were circumnavigating the platform's filters to run creepy, violent and explicit videos on YouTube Kids, the version of the app for under-12s.
But the company's response to the scandal had been solid, I thought — introducing new guidelines for creators about what qualified as good children's content, beefing up its moderation and mass deleting inappropriate videos.
• YouTube and the rise and rise of trash TV for kids
In the years after the scandal, after we became parents, my husband and I found ourselves turning to the platform more and more for educational and entertainment purposes. The depth of content is simply unrivalled. For example, around the age of four, after reading a lift-the-flap history book in our local library, my eldest daughter developed a morbid fascination with the bubonic plague. Her endless curiosity quickly exhausted my limited grasp of 14th-century history, but I knew YouTube would have the answers. Sure enough, I found what seemed like an age-appropriate video that taught her everything she needed to know about the Black Death. She watched it repeatedly for months, until the next obsession took over (Egyptian mummies).
This way of using YouTube is what Michael Robb, the head of research at Common Sense Media, the age-rating forum for parents, calls intentional — knowing what you're looking for and being deliberate about identifying it. The problem is, he says, it's just not reflective of how people actually use the platform. 'You could stay within a playlist that perhaps a parent has curated and have really good, high-quality content,' he tells me. 'But it's not how kids use YouTube, and it's not how it was designed.' When a carefully chosen video finishes, algorithmically powered suggestions on what to watch next can take kids down a rabbit hole of low-quality — even harmful — content.
This became clear within about ten minutes of my week-long challenge. After watching a video where a monocle-wearing cartoon professor explained evolution (fuelled by another question that had left me stumped), what followed was a flurry of content that, had it appeared on terrestrial television, would have had the Ofcom complaints line ringing off the hook.
In one video, which had more than a billion views, two young brothers showed off a homemade vending machine that spat out boxes of sugary cereal, fizzy drinks and chocolate bars. In another, a child played with what the video title described as 'girl' toys: a pretend sewing machine, a nail salon and a pink play kitchen (all things my girls love, I should add — but so, too, do lots of boys).
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Apart from these (and other) examples of content that flouted UK broadcasting guidelines or featured dated stereotypes, most of what we watched might generously be called clickbait: content that promised to teach children to learn new words, say, but that ended up being a thinly disguised toy promotion. Many of the videos we watched had titles packed with educational-sounding buzzwords, but turned out to be garbage with no narrative arc, out-of-sync dubbing and, all too often, an undercurrent of consumerism.
A spokesperson for YouTube told The Sunday Times: 'On YouTube Kids we provide parents with robust controls to decide what content to make available, whether approving specific content, choosing from age-appropriate categories, or the ability to block specific videos or channels.' They added that, after reviewing the links we shared, it had found no violations of its community guidelines.
My experiment stacks up with what other (more rigorous) studies have found: the platform has a few gems, some quite shocking content and a hell of a lot of rubbish. 'We did some research a few years back and found that, while YouTube says it has a lot of educational, high-quality videos, really only a small percentage of the content could be classed that way,' Robb says. 'A lot of the videos that position themselves as being high quality or educational are very shallow.'
By the end of the week I realised it was these types of videos that bothered me the most — content that Neumann described as 'wolves in sheep's clothing'. I feel well equipped to have conversations with my children about media content that very obviously challenges our family values. After watching the video that first triggered this article, I spoke to both my daughters about what we had just seen — how no food is inherently good or bad, about how we exercise to feel, not look, good. But knowing how to deal with the other, more innocuous-seeming content has left me as confused as when one of my kids asks me how birds evolved from dinosaurs.
Colin Ward, a Bafta-winning former children's TV producer and member of the Children's Media Foundation, agrees that, like me, most parents are struggling to separate the wheat from the chaff. But he questions whether that type of pressure should be put on us in the first place. 'Parents can't be expected to police this — it's just not possible,' he says. Neither should we put our faith in the platforms to self-regulate, given their main concern is their bottom line. 'It's a very competitive market and they are focused on monetisation, so they're not going to change.' YouTube told The Sunday Times: 'We have strict advertising guidelines on YouTube Kids, and don't allow paid promotional content.'
If we can't leave it to individuals or the free market to tackle, that leaves just one actor that might make a difference: governments. Ward knows that might not be popular with some people, but makes a point I think most parents will agree with. 'We all accept that there are some things that are important as a public service, whether it's the armed forces or parks, and that those things need taxes to support them and sometimes regulations,' he says. 'When it comes to our children having access to high-quality content and not just utter drivel, that too is surely a social good?'
The present government has already indicated it will take action. Late last year the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, wrote to YouTube urging it to make high-quality programming more visible on its platform. She also suggested that, if this doesn't happen voluntarily, regulation might force its hand. YouTube told The Sunday Times that it 'continues to engage regularly with the culture secretary, as part of our ongoing efforts to support the UK's high quality children's content creators'.
But while she and others work on that, what are parents to do? Ban our kids from accessing YouTube? Co-watch at all times? Neither seems realistic, at least not in my household. I have promised we will continue to apply a little more of that all-important intentionality. In other words, relying on our gut when deciding what might be an appropriate video for our kids, rather than ceding control to an algorithm.