My daughters are obsessed with making videos, which made me take a closer look at the weird things kids watch on YouTube.
Kids are weird. But lately, the things they watch on YouTube strike me as really weird. Is this just me reaching old lady “in my day…” territory? Or are the things kids are watching (and emulating) on YouTube really freaking strange?
The other morning I woke up, groggy and still tired. When I grabbed my phone and unlocked my screen, I saw that my six-year-old had recorded a nine-minute video while I was sleeping.
It started off with my daughter’s grainy face in my almost-pitch black bedroom. It was near impossible to figure out what she was saying, as her whispers were drowned out by the white noise machine (which, it’s worth noting, is on for this very reason). Soon she gets up and wanders around the upstairs of our house, continuing to whisper some kind of song while staring intently into the screen. She eventually goes into the bathroom and turns on the light so that she can see herself more clearly and I see that, even though the sun hasn’t completely risen, she’s fully dressed.
She continues her song, which I can now identify as the line “We’ll do this togeeeeether,” over and over and over again, making different dramatic faces as she sings. The rest of the nine minutes is filled with her sitting on the toilet (while continuing to sing), a view of the ceiling of my bathroom when she (thankfully) puts my phone down to take care of business and wash her hands (popping her face into view every so often so that she can get really dramatic), and flicking the lights on and off. It culminates with her sitting on the floor of her room, applying lip gloss as theatrically as one could ever dream of applying it.
Why does she feel the need to document the seemingly mundane? YouTube.