mrbeast-ispublicenemy1

[mrbeast-ispublicenemy1]

Mr. Beast is Public Enemy #1

What is up gamers?! Welcome back to my YouTube channel (“Vine Boom” sound effect - nauseating zoom in zoom out)! (Change camera and new angle) First, let’s get energized! (edit splice for no apparent reason) Got sent this new bev - stoked to test it. (Sparkling drink animation. Shameless product placement) AAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!! (Echoing, sonorous, belching sound effect - also nauseating). Ok gamers - let’s take a look back. (New camera angle, saturation turned up to 1 million percent - no one knows how this is possible) I was checking out my boy’s channel (shameless plug for fellow like-and-subscribe-grubbing youtuber - new camera view, jumpy editing) and my brother was sporting some old-timey Sesame Street content (graphic jump cut to different camera, graphic - poorly animated Kermit the Frog). And I thought (jump cut to new camera - AI generated image of the Thinker) that shows just aren’t as kid-friendly as they used to be (sad violin music plays. Jump cut to new camera AGAIN and every five seconds hereafter - serious look into closeup cam). Today, gamers, we will be discussing the shift in children’s entertainment since the late 90s and how it has negatively affected children’s mental and emotional health because it hinders brain development, promotes isolation, and reduces empathy.

Children’s entertainment is not just silly cartoons kids watch between preschool and nap time; the shows and games children consume greatly impact their lives and development. Children’s media - and media people consume in general - affects everything about us. Shows like Bill Nye the Science Guy or The Magic School Bus do not just affect children’s education and learning by teaching kids, these shows teach kids how to learn and irrevocably alter how these children will interact with every learning experience for the rest of their lives (Ngo). The length and type of media affect attention span (National Library of Medicine). It also alters executive function and all higher cognitive thinking (National Institute of Health). A study conducted by Mary Louise Hemmeter at Vanderbilt University found that Sesame Street - one of the longest running shows geared towards a young audience, featuring my favorite little guys - literally teaches children kindness. The issue, however, is that Sesame Street is no longer the standard for children’s entertainment. Shows like Bill Nye the Science Guy do not exist anymore, at least not on the same scale.

Many people, usually my older brother and other old men (millennials) like him, say that children’s media peaked in the late 90s to the very early 2000s. Upon hearing this, any intelligent 2000s kid will say that our media was just as good and chalk up this sentiment to nostalgia, but this millenial assertion actually carries quite a bit of merit. Shaded with the rose-tinted glasses of childhood, every kid thinks that their shows are the best, but the contrast between what children’s media the large portion of American millennials (born 1983 - 1998) grew up with and what the large portion of American generation Z (1999 - 2012) consumed, is striking. The notion that children’s media was better in the 90s holds water for a few reasons: firstly, the 90s was really the first time when production companies started to actually care about kids’ TV and began catering to them accordingly (Chhatwal). The attention to detail allowed 90s kid’s shows to become iconic; shows like Aurthur, Blues Clues, and The Powerpuff Girls are still having lasting effects on the cultural zeitgeist, despite the original shows no longer running. The care put into 90’s shows also extended to caring about all kids, allowing these shows to be incredibly diverse in a way that children’s media had never been before. Shows like The Proud Family (which aired in the year 2000) unabashedly had a primarily black cast, or the show Static Shock which featured the first black superhero as a lead character. But the main contributor to the love of 90s shows and the vitriolic hatred of kid’s media now should be obvious: the internet.

In the 90s, the internet was something almost intangible, barely developed, and only accessed on your parent’s stationary desktop. Now, the internet permeates every aspect of our world, and children’s media is one of the largest signifiers. A 2024 survey found that YouTube is by far the most popular content platform for kids, where over 83% of kids aged 2 - 12 had watched YouTube content in the last week (Faughnder). Simply put, this is bad! There are numerous reasons as to why the progression of YouTube and kids internet entertainment negatively affects kids, but the primary reasons are incredibly similar to why children’s media is important in the first place. Children’s media on the internet is not regulated the same way Nickelodeon is (HealthyChildren). YouTube Kids is not PBS Kids. Children’s content online does not need to meet any educational standards, and according to The National Institute of Health, it doesn’t. Just like how Bill Nye changed how kids interact with their education, the internet can and is actively harming how modern children interact with all learning. The explosive, algorithmic internet also pushes content that destroys kids’ attention spans (NIH). It also, of course, alters executive function and all higher cognitive thinking (NIH). Without the same exposure to empathetic kids’ content, children are literally becoming less kind (Sevier).

This is our entire future. Children, the future of our world, are watching overstimulating, mind-melting content on loop. They are not learning, they are not growing, and we will inevitably live in an unkind, uneducated world.

My nephew is an “iPad kid.” A difficult thing to admit, truely. An “iPad kid” is a not-so-affectionate term to colloquialize all children who spend an excess amount of time on the internet, usually spending lots of time on Roblox (an online gaming website primarily for kids) and YouTube. The statistic that over 83% of kids aged 2 - 12 watch YouTube content (Faughnder) becomes much more concerning when you factor in the notion that YouTube content is becoming more and more overstimulating. Being a content creator is a job, and a YouTuber’s greatest export is attention. To keep retention rates as high as possible, YouTubers - especially kids YouTubers - make their videos exceedingly attention-grabbing. Overstimulation is a consistent pitfall of current children’s media. Content creators like Mr. Beast are obsessed with retention rates. When making a “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” special to promote the movie “Wonka,” Mr. Beast allegedly asked the director of the film what his “retention rate” was. For a movie. The retention rate is, obviously, for a movie, 100%. YouTube is not like traditional television; kids can click away from a video at any time; therefore, YouTubers must find a way to counteract this. So, they make their content as attention-grabbing as possible. Current videos catered to kids are high volume and high saturation, featuring dizzying graphics and nauseating people. This causes a ripple effect to all other children’s media. Long gone are the days of the soft, soothing Little Bear - now children watch as a child and his 15 dogs with extremely bright costumes and loud gadgets defeat bad guys and serve as the only first responders and city infrastructure. And even in the PAW Patrol universe, 15 dogs is way too many! Overstimulation and short-term content is linked to a decrease in brain development and a shrinking of the frontal lobe. According to The National Library of Medicine, this content is harming children’s brain development and negatively impacting their executive function. Executive function is an all-encompassing term for vital skills needed for problem-solving, decision making, and planning. “The three main skills are working memory, cognitive flexibility and inhibition control,” (Cleveland Health Clinic). Executive function is literally how human beings, well, function! It is crucial to navigating your life and develops as we grow. It is essential that children live in an environment that fosters their brain development. Constant media consumption exists in opposition to that and has proven to hinder the brian development in children and adolescents. A study conducted to determine if fast-paced children’s shows resulted in the viewers performing worse on executive function exams found that children who watched overstimulating, fast-paced shows performed significantly worse than the children who didn’t (Lillard and Peterson). This consistent media consumption is primarily just about that: consumption. These kids can sit in front of a TV or iPad for hours and actually retain none of the information relayed to them. It is too much too often.

Some argue that digital media is not inherently harmful to children, that some digital media can actually improve executive function - which is true! Passive consumption is harmful, but active participation in digital media can be incredibly positive! A 2011 study found that when children were directly engaging with the media like video games, it actually improved their brain development (NLM). This same study also observed children with dyslexia who were tasked with playing more video games. After a week, their reading scores improved! It makes plenty of sense that video games improve brain function while watching YouTube, for example, does the opposite. In a video game, you are exercising your fine motor control and hand-eye coordination; you also must remember certain moves and skills, and, in some games, facts about the NPCs (non-player characters). Executive function is harmed by the passive consumption of fast-paced and overstimulating content. It is honestly frightening that children are constantly force-fed this content. Kids are always seeing bright colors and “Vine Boom” sound effects and it is literally melting their brains.

One center of the brain that is particularly adversely affected is the amygdala - the emotional processing center. Modern children’s media is severely damaging the emotional and mental health of children, especially through their parental relationships. One thing that set apart kids media in the 90s was family co-viewing (Chhatwal). According to Geetika Chhatwal, co-viewing is when “parents and children watched shows together, creating a communal activity that strengthened family bonds and provided a shared cultural experience.” Co-viewing is deeply important when it comes to children and their development. Research shows that children need consistent parent guidance and involvement - go figure. When a family is co-viewing a show like The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, both children and their parents can enjoy it; they can laugh together, like the same characters, discuss certain episodes, argue whether or not Carlton is cool (he is) - they can find common ground. Because of how much the media we consume and engage with shapes who we are, being shaped by the same media is a crucial part of child development and familial bonds. Parents can also help children process information this way . . .

This, like most other positive and wonderful aspects of 90s media, has been so thoroughly destroyed by current popular media. It is as though Mr. Beast himself has leapt through an eight-year-old’s ipad and 360 no-scoped, a la Fortnite (an incredibly popular, online third-person shooter game that my little sister had to inform me about so I could make this joke), every parent-child bond formed through shared media. When you have one TV in your house, it is easy. You have family movie nights, you follow certain shows together - bound by a predetermined air time schedule. This becomes far more difficult when everyone has access to entertainment all of the time. Now, you are not forced to watch Will and Grace with your mom, you can just watch something else on an endless streaming service or, in the case of a growing number of adolescents, watch online video content on a smaller screen in another room, far away from any pesky parents. This is isolating. People are not meant to be all alone like this, isolated from anyone with shared interests. We are social animals! Shared media is one of the best things about being alive! It is so wonderful when 133.5 million people tune into the Superbowl to watch Kendrik Lamar call Drake a pedophile in the most viewed half-time show in history (Afrotech), but it is just as important to share media with those closest to you. According to Dou et al. with the National Library of Medicine, “Empirical evidence has illuminated the significant impact of children’s electronic media use on the quality of this relationship. Studies such as those by Zhu et al., Horita et al., and Ahmadian et al. have consistently shown that higher levels of problematic internet use among children are linked to poorer parent–child relationships.” This clearly negatively affects children’s mental and emotional health. Isolation, in any form, is dangerous, but the severe reduction in co-viewing content is a signifier of something greater: parents are not present in their children’s lives.

A lack of co-viewing does not just harm parent-child relationships, it is a signifier that these relationships are not very strong in the first place. Where I had an overworked older sister, many children are handed an ipad as some kind of pseudo third parent. Or, in some cases, only parent. An uptick in social media usage and screen time is directly associated with parental neglect (Dou et al.) This isolation and neglect can lead to consistent and lasting emotional and mental damage, anxious and avoidant attachment disorders, complex post-traumatic stress disorders, personality disorders such as bipolar personality disorder and numerous other negative effects. It is not enough to have lasting emotional damage from parental neglect, however, because the content that adolescents are consuming is, in itself, greatly harming their emotional well-being!

In “Why YouTube Is Causing Young Kids to Go into Therapy and Why Parents Need to Find Alternatives to Even Youtube Kids - AT: Parenting Survival for All Ages,” Natasha Daniels explains that, as a child psychologist, she has seen plenty of parents bring in their children for insanely concerning behavior, the kind that she had only previously seen in cases of severe abuse. She prepares for the worst, only to find out that this behavior is learned online, usually on YouTube. Online platforms like YouTube are not moderated well enough for children to simply be let loose. Even platforms like YouTubeKids that claim to be kid-friendly are most definitely not. Too many harmful videos slip through the cracks! It is the equivalent of the old-fashioned leaving the television on a little too late after Cartoon Network and now it's three A.M. and your son is watching Robot Chicken. Parents are not paying attention to what their children are watching and it is hurting them both. Dou et al. with the National Library of Medicine states “A relation between electronic media use, increased aggressive behavior, and decreased prosocial behavior,” (prosocial behavior being any behavior intended to help others, including sharing, kindness, and empathy).

This links to the reduction of emotional intelligence and empathy seen in children in recent years. According to PBS, media can build empathy in young children. Watching a show with a kind character, learning about sharing, watching a beloved character cry on screen, are all things that can build empathy in a growing mind. A study done at Vanderbilt University found that Sesame Street can actually make kids kinder, promoting integral prosocial behaviors. When it comes down to teaching empathy, kindness, and general traits necessary to build community and a functioning society PBS Kids as YouTubeKids beaten. No contest. PBS is known for foundational children’s shows like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood - one of the most beautiful and heart-felt kids programs to ever exist, - Arthur, Reading Rainbow, and so many others. With contemporary content, this kindness, this wonder, is gone. Sucked dry by product placement and hyperactive obsession.

This essay should end with a final, definitive conclusion - a call to action, telling you to grab the remote and change the channel to PBS Kids’ Wild Kratts before grabbing a hammer and smashing the nearest ipad to a million pieces. But, of course, this essay will not end that way. Children’s content will continue to spiral further and further, melting more brains with every upload. And, soon enough, there will not be a PBS channel to change to. Under the Trump administration with specific orders from the president himself, PBS has lost $23 million dollars in funding, and will lose more (Mullin). This crucial service, one of the last defenses parents have against the wretched onslaught of jump-cuts, isolation, and several dogs with heavy machinery will, if president Trump succeeds, be lost. Smashing ipads is not the sort of activism needed to help this crisis - involvement in where and how we spend our tax dollars is. I cannot admonish you to turn on Wild Kratts for your neighborhood 7 year old, if the channel has been defunded. We, as citizens, must get involved and ensure quality, developmentally appropriate programming remains accessible to all children - and even for burned out ipad parents. We cannot all create content, but we can all become activists to ensure quality content creators have a stage and finding on which to create. Because, of course, our children will not be saved by Mr. Beast, they’ll be saved by viewers like you.

Thank you.

[mrbeast-ispublicenemy1]

Original: https://www.instagram.com/caryisediting?igsh=bzBybjNrbXZvYzlu