---

My 10-year-old sweet daughter innocently searched for “tap dance videos” and now is in this spiral of horrible extreme “dance” and contortionist videos that give her horrible unsafe body-harming and body-image-damaging advice. I’ve tried to go in and manually delete all recommended videos, put in parental controls, everything (including blocking the app) — but she’s finding ways to log on using browsers and school computers. These terrible videos just keep being recommended to her. She is now restricting her eating and drinking. I heard her downstairs saying “work to eat! work to drink!” I don’t know how I can undo the damage that’s been done to her impressionable mind.

Sounds like there is a selling opportunity there.

Today kids are raised by YouTube.

The crucial difference is that when I was a kid there was common consensus that hey maybe we shouldn't play the goriest and sexiest things on TV between 2pm and 7pm when kids are watching.

YouTube doesn't have that. Yet. I'm sure eventually it will have to.

[1] I learned more than I care to admit about human interaction, personal relationships, and how the world works from American TV shows. But I also learned so much English that people often confuse me for a native speaker.

For once kids I had been spoken with (~12y) where aware that there are thinks they don't want to see.

But then we have that problem that it's no longer obvious what is "bad" and what isn't. For once youtube removes/age locks videos which are obvious not teen safe (gore, porn). But this mainly gives a illusion of safety.

The problems are normally not the obvious "bad" videos but such which seem to be fine. Except that they aren't because they either change their stile/content midway or are bad in a more subtile way.

EDIT: Just to be clear old TV also had manipulative content, but this was normally only about advertisements and politics due to curation. YT has manipulative content of cults of all kind, often with noticeable risks to mental and/or physical health. And the politically motivated manipulative content seems to have become much more wild/dangerous as it's practically way less restricted.

Parents traditionally haven't though. They relied on rating systems for television content and movies to efficiently screen out content that might be unsuitable for children. These voluntary rating systems were formed in different countries, at different times, for different media (e.g. video games, movies, television, and comics each have their own). It's important to note that these generally accepted rating systems were created as a voluntary measure to avoid widespread regulation of content.

Parents for the last 30 years didn't hand select movies to watch, they read the synopsis, looked for the rating, or asked a friend or employee at the video store for the rating of the content. They used a recommendation system, but that system was a fair bit more interactive. It's anecdotal, but in my high school and university days I worked in video stores, over about an 8 year period - translates into literally hundreds of user education sessions talking about how rating systems work what they cover and don't cover, and regional differences since Canada uses different ratings than the US and often had both a Canadian rating and a US rating.

Your "healthy response" statement also clearly comes from a position of reasonable economic privilege - I can also indulge my childrens interests, and do regularly through sports and other activities, but for the majority of middle class families, that kind of indulgence is out of reach due to the cost.

It's just not economically viable for most families to enroll their kids in something to help them "learn about it safely", any more than most families have time to create curated lists of content (which requires a degree of technical proficiency that is also somewhat challenging for many people).