“Is It OK for Young Kids to Watch YouTube? - Tufts Now” plus 3 more |
- Is It OK for Young Kids to Watch YouTube? - Tufts Now
- Drs. Oz & Roizen: Are you dumbing down your kids with digital devices? - The Union Leader
- Which smart home product you should get your grandma, child, and everyone in between - Chicago Tribune
- News to Know for Dec. 13: Mother wanted for abducting 4 kids; Chesterfield family’s security camera hacked; Im - WWBT NBC12 News
| Is It OK for Young Kids to Watch YouTube? - Tufts Now Posted: 12 Dec 2019 01:46 PM PST Kids love YouTube. According to one study, more than half of American children between eight and twelve years old say they watch YouTube and other online videos every day, despite the fact that YouTube's terms of service say the online platform is designed for people ages thirteen and up. "There are few regulations and an infinite amount of content," said Julie Dobrow, senior lecturer at the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development in the School of Arts and Sciences. "Kids can use YouTube to watch what they want to watch when they want to watch it." Dobrow teaches the popular undergraduate course Children and Mass Media. The class explores how and why children consume media and entertainment, and how it shapes the way they view themselves and the world around them. Tufts Now recently spoke with Dobrow about the reasons behind kids' close relationship to YouTube, and what parents can do about it. Tufts Now: How popular is YouTube with kids? What kinds of videos are they watching? Julie Dobrow: YouTube is extremely popular with kids. In fact, according to recent research from Common Sense Media, the percent of young people who now say they watch YouTube and other online videos "every day" more than doubled since the last time this audit was done: up to 56 percent of kids between eight and twelve years old and up to 69 percent of thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds. This is despite the fact that YouTube says users must be at least thirteen.
It's hard to know for sure just what kind of videos many kids are watching on YouTube. We have to remember that, as the Pew Research Center has suggested, YouTube is an ecosystem that produces a vast amount of content. To put this in context, about 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and estimates are that almost five billion—yes, billion—videos are viewed on YouTube every day. Why does YouTube appeal so much to children? There's a ton of content and very little parental control. There are social measures of what's popular and what's not. There's the ability to share things with friends. Kids can think about defining their identities, at least in part, by what they watch on YouTube. And there's also the ability to be a content creator, to be a YouTuber, which can be enormously appealing. What's the difference between YouTube and traditional TV for kids, commercial and PBS? The big difference is that there's little if any regulation. There's also very little quality control, and what kids can see on YouTube varies widely in form and in content. Kids can also find all kinds of things on YouTube that they won't find on traditional TV — tips on how to play video games, how to fix things, and a whole lot of other content that perhaps isn't as productive or innocuous. Which is "better" for children: traditional TV or YouTube—and why? I don't like to be prescriptive in my advice. I think that content matters. There's good and bad content on both traditional TV and YouTube. What's really important is for parents of young children to be present in helping their children to make good choices—and sometimes this means viewing with them. There's a lot of research suggesting that "joint media engagement" or "the new co-viewing" is important for lots of reasons. The bottom line is that it's very important to start making children more media literate from a very early age, so that they can become more careful and critical consumers—and producers—of media. Google and YouTube were recently hit with a $170 million fine for marketing to children. What do advertisers gain by marketing specifically to kids? In your opinion, will this fine have an impact on how ads on these platforms advertise to kids? The reason this decision was so significant is that it marked a rare instance in which large companies were charged with violating COPPA—the Child Online Privacy and Protection Act. This was a rule that went into effect in 2000 and basically prevented websites from collecting information from children without permission from their parents. A broad coalition of organizations and individuals, including the Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, the Institute for Public Representation at Georgetown University Law Center, the Center for Digital Democracy, and many others, went to the Federal Trade Commission with information about the ways in which Google and YouTube were violating COPPA. The Federal Trade Commission's ruling meant that kids should no longer be targeted by data-driven marketing and advertising on YouTube programming for children. Google created a $100 million fund for "quality kids, family and educational content." There are still questions about how these mega-companies will actively prohibit data targeting of kids, especially since, as we know, children view a whole lot more on YouTube than just videos for children. But this ruling was an important step in the right direction. Robin Smyton can be reached at robin.smyton@tufts.edu. |
| Drs. Oz & Roizen: Are you dumbing down your kids with digital devices? - The Union Leader Posted: 11 Dec 2019 04:00 PM PST If you were glued to your screens for the 2018 baseball season, you saw MLB umpires prove they're: • only human • out of their league (or should be) • and what are they, blind!  Researchers from Boston University did a deep data dive and discovered that umps made 34,294 incorrect ball and strike calls, for an average of 14 per game or 1.6 per inning during those months. Dumb mistakes like that are upsetting, but dumbing down your kids, that's an even bigger game-changer. It turns out that's what a lot of parents are inadvertently doing by exposing their children to too much screen time too soon. A study published in JAMA Pediatrics looked at brain scans and cognitive tests of 47 kids ages 3 to 5. The researchers found that those who had the most screen time had lower structural integrity of white matter in brain areas that support expressive language and processing speed, imagery, and mental control and self-regulation. Yikes! The researchers conclude there should be no screen time for kids 18 months and younger (except for video chats). Kids 18-24 months shouldn't watch screens alone. No parking your kid with your smartphone while you do something else! From 2 to 5, go for one hour a day of quality screen time that you participate in. Designate some screen-free times (for you, too!): all mealtimes, an hour before bed when you read a printed book to your child, and while driving. Direct their attention to what's going on in the world around them. |
| Posted: 13 Dec 2019 05:28 AM PST  Google Assistant is the youngest digital assistant of the top three, launched in 2016. Because of this late start, Google Assistant had the advantage of learning a great deal from its predecessors. Like Alexa, Google Assistant is compatible with a wide range of products, yet, like Siri, it offers a more personal touch. For example, a product such as the Google Nest Hub can access the information you keep on your Google Calendar as well as other Google apps and services, so it has a better reference point for correctly interpreting context. Additionally, Google Assistant can recognize different voice profiles and you can choose to continue the conversation without saying "Hey, Google" before each question, making interaction a bit more natural. Because Google Assistant does "know" you and your schedule better than Siri or Alexa, it's usually the first choice for a senior who would benefit from a digital assistant that is better attuned to their individual needs and routines. |
| Posted: 13 Dec 2019 03:38 AM PST [unable to retrieve full-text content]News to Know for Dec. 13: Mother wanted for abducting 4 kids; Chesterfield family's security camera hacked; Im WWBT NBC12 News |
| You are subscribed to email updates from "childs digital watch" - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
0 Yorumlar