Do You Limit Social Media For Your Kids? What Techniques Are Your Favorite?

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This may be a slightly odd question: Do you differentiate types of screentime, even just in your head, into good, bad, VERY bad? For example, do you extremely limit social media for your kids? If you do limit social media, HOW do you do it (particularly once the genie is out of the bottle)?

I just saw The Social Dilemma, the documentary on Netflix that pretty much all of my mom friends are talking about on Facebook, and I’ve reassessed some of my thoughts on screentime and social media — so I thought it might be interesting to discuss here. 

{related: here’s our last discussion of screentime rules that work}

If you haven’t seen it, The Social Dilemma is a really watchable documentary that talks a lot about social media, and particularly the algorithms that select what content you see and what content is recommended to you, as told through interviews with people who used to work for Google, Facebook, YouTube, and other companies. 

As The New York Times noted:

[C]onscientious defectors from these companies explain that the perniciousness of social networking platforms is a feature, not a bug. They claim that the manipulation of human behavior for profit is coded into these companies with Machiavellian precision: Infinite scrolling and push notifications keep users constantly engaged; personalized recommendations use data not just to predict but also to influence our actions, turning users into easy prey for advertisers and propagandists.

You can watch the trailer on YouTube, view the documentary on Netflix, read a review with takeaways at Business Insider or The New York Times. (Rotten Tomatoes gives it an 87% fresh rating!)

As a mom to a 6-year-old and a 9-year-old, we haven’t yet hit the era where we have to worry too much about whom they’re chatting with — and I’ve always known to not let them play online games “with strangers,” if that makes sense. My 9-year-old does play Fortnite with a few of his friends, but it’s just them; there’s (as yet) no other social aspect to his gaming. 

The big exception for both of my kids is YouTube. My eldest loves to watch gamers like BaronVonGames, while my youngest loves more abstract things like dominoes.

I have a memory from when my eldest was about 2 years old and really into Thomas the Train; he somehow found his way to YouTube videos that were in POV-shots of adults playing with the toys, describing their actions in another language (Spanish? Russian? I honestly don’t remember). Thomas apparently got into a fight halfway through the video with another of the trains because there was a lot of angry-sounding screaming. CHILD, I asked, WHY ARE YOU WATCHING THIS? He honestly had no idea.

So I’ve always MEANT to limit YouTube. But… somehow, over the years, the YouTube consumption has crept up. (In fact, since the pandemic started, our screen time limits have in GENERAL been out the window.)

(TRIGGER WARNING: mentions of suicide and animal cruelty) Yes, I’ve heard about people sticking sex or suicide scenes in the middle of Minecraft mod videos (I have to find the link for this!), and just seeing the creepy doll from the Momo suicide game of a few years ago is enough to make me shudder. (Oh, and a friend just posted on Facebook about how her 8-year-old daughter was seeking a “crunchy slime ASMR” video to help her fall asleep and accidentally found videos of someone driving over a cat or something else depraved and criminal?!?)

Seeing The Social Dilemma made me think of all of those fun tidbits from the past; the documentary also educated me further about how the algorithm really is designed to take you down crazy rabbitholes.

After seeing The Social Dilemma, I put my “dictatorial mom hat” on and decided, THAT’S IT. We’re severely limiting unsupervised YouTube viewing. (Which, just to be totally clear, means we are severely limiting YouTube viewing.)

I broke the bad news to my kids, explaining they could still have a LOT of screentime — playing games (particularly with friends!), watching television, talking to Grandma on FaceTime, and more — but that YouTube would be super, super limited.

I think the hardest thing for my oldest one to understand is that I’m not worried about the content he INTENDS to consume (I mean, sometimes BaronVonGames can be a little shrill/excitable in that young-guy-playing-a-video-game kind of way, but hey), but rather the places the algorithm may take him through suggested content.

I’ve currently allowed each kiddo 30 minutes of browser time (total) on their personal computers that we monitor through Microsoft Family. It is a buggy program and not at all perfect, but we’ll try to write a post soon on how to set that up.

Their iPads make it much easier to monitor screentime — again, I’ve blocked the browser to 30 minutes a day since both were only using the browser to watch YouTube videos. (We haven’t allowed them to download the YouTube app.)

Unfortunately, as a lot of elementary-school parents have noted, a lot of teaching materials assigned by their teachers are on YouTube — so we can’t block YouTube entirely, even if we could access those controls on their school-provided Chromebooks.

A few notes, just since I suspect people might ask about them:

• Yes, we know, there’s YouTube Kids — neither of my kids has ever found content they’re actually searching for on there.
• Apparently, one way to try to confuse the search engine is to not sign in to YouTube so you can’t be tracked — but one of my “supervisory techniques” (lol) is to sign both kids into a burner account that I use so I can review their viewing history.
• We bought a Circle many years ago (three or four, honestly) and at the time I wasn’t thrilled with the extent it inhibited my own social media viewing (yes, yes, I know, but I’m a blogger!). I’ve been meaning to look into it more; I understand there are also ways to limit media consumption at the WiFi level through a router like Orbi or Google WiFi. (It’s on my list of things to investigate; if any readers have opinions on it I’d love to hear them!)
• If you’re not familiar with it, Common Sense Media is an amazing organization doing a lot more in-depth thinking on this stuff; here’s their parental guide to YouTube.

So, readers, over to you — do you limit social media for your kids, such as YouTube? What are your favorite ways to effectively stop them from going on YouTube or social media?