I have a pickpocket living in my house. The thief is small, agile and remarkably discriminating in her larceny. Not for this pocket dipper the usual array of purses or loose change (though I doubt she’d baulk at the latter). It is my phone, and solely my phone, she’s after. And, like every burglar caught halfway through an open window, this charming crook insists she’s only ‘borrowing’ it. Yes, my ten-year-old daughter is addicted to YouTube and will use whatever means possible to feed the habit.
This, despite my dutifully signing up to every newsletter warning of the great screen invasion of childhood. When Sophie Winkleman and Hugh Grant decry the perils these devices pose to our children, I nod with an enthusiasm bordering on the wild. I bore anyone who will listen that, when the time finally comes for my daughter to have her own phone, it will be a Balance or Pinwheel model – one of those once-standard, now radical devices that can make calls, send texts and little else. For the time being, I stash my phone in places she can’t reach (reader, she clambers); I change my password (through some sorcery, she cracks it); I remove the YouTube app and set stringent time limits (she reinstates it and overrides them).
But even when I do succeed in removing the accursed device from her sticky mitts, still we are not safe. Have you ever tried to remove YouTube from your TV? I have, many times. And many times, I have failed. That my husband – marginally less technophobic – has also repeatedly failed suggests that such disabling is designed to be difficult and perhaps, in fact, impossible.
These futile efforts have not been undertaken in the name of eccentric recreation. They do not stem from an irrational hatred of film trailers or DIY instructional videos – the sole two acceptable uses of YouTube. We have undertaken these desperate measures, cursing all the while, because our daughter, along with much of her generation, worships at the altar of the 90-second clip – also, of course, available via TikTok and Instagram, which, thank ye tech gods, do not come baked into one’s gogglebox.
Of course, there are worse compulsions in life than watching strangers perform aggressively mundane tasks in far-flung corners of the world. And yet it is death by a thousand gormless shorts. It rankles that just when you, in your infinite naivety, believe you’ve left your beloved child doing something wholesome as you step away to make supper, the tell-tale whine of American teens ‘unboxing’ a ‘haul’ starts up once more. I hear my own voice becoming ever shriller with what are now my most-used words: ‘Turn that brain rot off’ – the 21st-century riposte to my mother’s threats that television, that benevolently antiquated friend with its limited schedules, would turn eyes square.
It is entertainment as a conveyor belt for the eyeballs of children
Everything on these platforms is calibrated to bypass the adult brain entirely: voices pitched to a frequency known only to dogs and sped up to sanity-threatening levels; parents who appear only to be duped or otherwise humiliated like the morons they no doubt are; and every clip ending with a hook designed to propel the viewer onto the next. It is entertainment as a conveyor belt for the eyeballs of children, and parents are expected to believe that a few meagre screen-time settings can possibly compete with that.
Most worrying of all are the effects these short videos may be having on developing brains. A 2023 analysis found links between heavy short-form video use and reduced inhibitory control and attention spans, alongside its egregious effects on sleep, mood and memory. That is to say nothing of Dr Joseph Jebelli’s recent thesis, The Brain at Rest, which scientifically corroborates what many of us already suspect: that allowing the brain to wander, rather than filling every spare moment with algorithmic sludge, opens up new ways of thinking. The art of staring out of the window is one we are in danger of losing. Whether by car, train or plane, the view beyond the glass is now eclipsed by inane content creators, Pied Pipering a generation towards viral tat and a vocabulary increasingly peppered with Americanisms.
Which is why I greeted proposals for tougher restrictions on children’s social media use with a relief usually reserved for cancelled plans. Naysayers point out that such measures will be impossible to enforce, that children will simply find workarounds, that the digital genie cannot be stuffed back into its bottle. They are probably right. But at the very least, it offers parents a new and useful phrase: ‘Government says no.’ Whether the Government can actually stop my YouTube obsessive is another matter entirely, not least given her nascent career as a cat burglar.
I don’t ask for much. Just a child who moans as my brothers and I once did at being ferried off to inspect another Norman church, sighing theatrically at every blade of grass and declaring ourselves bored beyond endurance, only to spend the next three hours inventing an elaborate game involving imaginary kingdoms and arbitrary rules. But if I hear one more American teenager unboxing some new viral trinket destined for landfill, I may finally make good on my threat to buy us all Nokias, throw the television out of the window and raise my child as nature intended – as a bored-to-death Luddite.
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