Look. I’m well aware of Raffi’s admonitions about screentime. Sometimes you need to distract a kid long enough to get things done. We can’t all be perfect parents, okay?
The little guy’s relationship with YouTube has evolved quite a bit over his short existence to date. We started off in the YouTube Kids ghetto, with your Sesame Streets and your Teletubbies and your Cocomelons and your holy trinity of Ms Rachel, Blippi and Meekah. YouTube Kids, tho, is a terrible interface. And as he’s started to develop interests beyond nursery rhymes and alphabets that YouTube Kids was wholly uninterested in satisfying.
I’ve made a channel for him under my account, so he can have his own subscriptions and playlists and history. That is to say, so that I can have that for him. I’m calling the shots here, although his interests and preferences are asserting themselves more and more.
One of the earliest things that forced us out of the YouTube Kids ghetto was videos of fans. He loves fans. And pinwheels and wind turbines. But if I ask him what he wants to watch, he’ll invariably say “Watch fans?” And you can’t do that on YouTube Kids.
TheSuperFanMan
TheSuperFanMan is a Canadian fan obsessive who’s been posting yearly videos of his growing fan collection since 2017. He also posts repair videos and reviews, but the little guy isn’t as interested in those.
You can go pretty deep down the fan YouTube rabbit hole. And there are channels that definitely know they’re catering to toddlers who just want to see people turning fans on and off, but those aren’t really what I’m looking for.
Unboxing TV
I’m sure this guy started out thinking he was going to do an unboxing channel covering a whole bunch of things, but the viewers, they only want fans. He generally gets three-to-five cheap, generic, USB-powered fans, unboxes them and puts them through their paces. The little guy likes it best when he scatters bits of square confetti around and blows it with the fan. “It blow the paper!”
Note that the above video has 12 million views. So successful is the formula, it seems, that a copycat channel has popped up. Same name, different thumbnail. Mostly indistiguishable to the undiscerning eye, which includes my eye, because we’ve watched a bunch of these (on YouTube’s recommendation, of course) without realizing it’s a different channel. I only figured it out when I was putting together this list.
Animals Design
I think I’m more fascinated by this than he is. He’s started to take an interest in puppies and kitties and he gets excited when he sees the cars pop up in the thumbnail sitting in cars. But he’ll kind of lose interest as these videos go on. I, however, have to marvel at what’s going on here.
The videos on this channel each follow a similar narrative with some variation here and there. Some homeless guy is camping or fishing or something when he hears a stock kitten mewling sound effect. Thereupon he takes a montaged journey a distance across which it would be extremely improbable one would hear an actual kitten to increasingly dramatic music. He then stumbles upon a cat-sized car or house or camper trailer crafted out of cardboard containing a kitten.
The homeless guy then takes the kitten back to a nicely appointed apartment (leaving behind the cardboard car, which a certain toddler finds very upsetting). He then feeds and nurses the kitten back to health.
From there, the video makes another abrupt turn, becoming a cardboard DIY video, showing you how they make an entirely different cardboard house for the kitten. Or an entirely different kitten sometimes.
It’s a journey.
Diorama Restaurant
Diorama Restaurant is a Japanese cat cafe with a bunch of model trains running through it. I think you can see where this is going.
The little guy gets very excited every time a cat (“KITTY CAT!”) attacks trains trundling by. And there are plenty of shots where the train emerges from a tunnel to see a kitty staring at it, pulls back into the tunnel and emerges again to see two kitties staring at it. Delightful.
Tractors Chema
After fans (and pinwheels, windmills and wind turbines), his other great love is tractors (also cars, trucks, motorbikes and bicycles—he’s big into circular motion).
Tractors Chema is a channel featuring a bunch of Czech dudes driving their tractors through tractor obstacle courses. Drama ensues as they get stuck in the mud, or belch black smoke as their engines get flooded.
That’s about it, really.
Dima Kids TV
This is his most recent favourite channel, and I’ve got some reservations about it. Mostly because Youtube keeps recommending their live streams, which are just hour-long video compilations looping forever. That’s frustrating because there’s no elegant way to just queue up something else and also because you never quite know what you’re going to get.
Because while most of the videos are “Hey, fireman, my tractor’s on fire, can you help?”, some are pitched nerf battles with cartoon explosion effects. I’m not sure how concerned I should be about “overstimulation” or whatever, but that’s kinda not what I’m looking for for him right now.
YouTube is a modern marvel in a lot of ways, but has a lot to answer for in many more. I couldn’t watch hours of tractor parades when I was a kid. But I’m sure at some point I’ll have to contend with the Mr Beasts and all the other crap YouTube wants to push on kids.
