License to Drive The Interwebs

Since moving back to Australia after nine years of living in Laos and Vanuatu, we’ve entered into uncharted territory. My children (who had never before seen ads or had much access to the internet) have suddenly discovered YouTube and started watching some commercial television.

This has given us some good times and lovely moments (I’m looking at you, Lego Masters Australia, you fun-family-viewing smash-hit). It has also given us our fair share of family arguments, epic meltdowns, and nasty surprises.

One of those surprises has been just how well advertising actually works.

They boys love ads. For them, right now, the ads are integral to the whole viewing experience. Both kids perk up when the ads come on, and both howl if we try to mute them or dare turn off a show while they’re playing.

In recent days I’ve heard both kids randomly singing jingles or spouting KFC slogans. They shriek for me to come running every single time the Haagan-Dazs ad comes on, just so they can taunt me. And last week, after I took them to Subway so they could spend some of the “reward coins” they’ve been saving up on “fizzy drink from the machine,” they asked for my phone while we were driving home. Dominic wanted Alex to take a video of him. What resulted was basically a home-made ad for Coke.  

Another unwelcome surprise has been what’s actually going on out there in the wild wild west of YouTube.

During our last decade of out-of-the-way living, Mike and I completely missed the pivot to video content. As a result, we’ve come to YouTube during the last few months as innocent as the kids. And while they’ve been mostly amused by what they’ve found, I’ve been largely confused and concerned.   

Did you know that there are people out there who make a very good living filming themselves playing video games? Or that some digital influencers staging random “challenges” and doing other goofy things have almost 80 million subscribers?

The kids stumbled upon Carter Sharer several months ago, and while it mostly looks like silly and fairly innocent fun… I’m not convinced. One “last to leave wins $10,000” video about a group of friends sitting in a tree and trying to outlast each other can be sort of funny. Twenty such videos (last to leave the roof, last to leave the pool, etc) is mostly wasting time and sending the clear message that money can grow on trees if you sit in them long enough while you’re performing for the camera.

In the last Carter Sharer video I found the boys watching, the four 25+ year-old friends in “Team RAR” were doing a “last to leave a $500,000 Lamborghini” challenge. Whoever made it the longest, got to keep the car.  In the last couple of minutes of the video, the last two left in the competition were taunting each other like third graders. Carter won, and he did so by starting the car and driving it out onto the road until his friend slid off the roof, complaining vociferously, “that’s cheating! There’s literally no way this should count, right?”

That video has been viewed almost five million times.

As a parent, I have spent more time and energy in recent months navigating decisions and pitfalls related to screens than any other single issue. When can the kids can have TV or an iPad? For how long? What they can watch and do with those devices? How do we deal with constant requests for the iPad, or navigate the difficulty they often have disengaging from the screens and the challenging behavior that can follow?

These issues are big-ticket Parenting Policy matters in our household. Screens offer some of the most potent rewards and intense (sometimes explosive) pain points in our household, and Mike and I are working hard to figure out how to harness the good in them while managing the dangers. No single strategy even comes close to accomplishing that, so we’re coming at this from a number of different angles. 

We’ve created clear guidelines around screen time during the current school holidays, for example. These are printed out and stuck on the fridge. The kids aren’t allowed any screen time before lunch, and they don’t get any after lunch until they’ve made their bed, put away their clothes, and done a “helping task” assigned by Mum and Dad.

When we’re watching TV together and ads come on, we often discuss them.

“What is this add selling?” we’ll ask. “How is it trying to do that?” “What is it promising?” “How does it trying to make you feel?”

We talk about the shows they want to watch, and whether they’re low-quality, medium-quality, and high-quality entertainment. We talk about how YouTube knows what they like and feeds them more of the same, which is why they keep seeing new shows about dangerous snakes, what happens when you mix Coca Cola and baking soda, and two grown men sitting side by side on toilets because… “last to leave the toilet wins $1,00,000”.

We talk about how money most assuredly DOES NOT grow on trees, how long most people have to work to earn $10,000, and how no one, in real life, ever gets paid a million dollars to sit on the toilet for hours. 

The other night at dinner, Mike and I took it in turns to read sections out loud from an article titled Why Man Versus Wild Is Totally Fake. We talked about how some of what the boys have seen Bear Grylls do during their latest favorite-show was staged, misleading, and even dangerous. We talked about how “reality TV” needs things to be dramatic, fast paced, and intense. Then Mike told the boys about how he once project-managed a celebrity TV crew who came to Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami to “build three houses in three days.”

“The thing is,” Mike explained to the boys, “it’s impossible to build a house with a cement foundation in three days because cement needs longer than that to dry. So we did all this work on the foundation before the crew arrived, and then we covered it all up to make it look for the cameras like the famous people were starting from scratch.”

“Also,” Mike told them, “The TV people were all about doing things as fast as possible, and the Sri Lankan builders were master craftsman and actually CARED about whether these houses were good. So after working alongside the TV crew all day the Sri Lankan builders used to work through the night undoing most of what the celebrities had done and doing it all over again, properly.”

Underlying all these efforts, though, there’s an important message I’ve begun sending every chance I get, and that message is this: “You don’t get a license to drive the internet by yourself until you’re a grown up.”  

“There are things on the internet that are just as dangerous to your heart and mind as cars can be for your body,” I’ve told both boys more than once. (Yes, this is one of my favorite soapboxes to climb up on. It lives right alongside “you are responsible for the choices you make, even when you’re very angry.”)

“You don’t get a license to drive a car until you’re a grown up. And you don’t get a license to drive the internet by yourself until you’re a grown up, either. In the meantime, Mummy and Daddy will make the rules. You may not like them. They may seem a lot stricter than some of your friends, but that’s OK. We’re not doing it to be mean. We’re doing it because we care about you and about helping you make good choices to protect your heart and mind.”

“So how old do you think you’ll be before you can drive the internet by yourself?” I asked the kids, the last time I was hanging out on this particular soapbox.

The boys thought this over carefully.

“Probably  about thirty?” Dominic ventured, glancing at Alex.

Alex nodded.

“Well,” I said. “That sounds pretty good. Let’s run with that.”