Our 7 year old got hooked on these YouTube gaming channels and it spiraled out of control. He was watching every free moment and sneaking the ipad at night. We had to go cold turkey and take it away for 2 weeks. Things are better now but he still asks about it constantly. How do you guys prevent this stuff from happening in the first place?
Yeah the algorithm on those gaming channels is insane. Our oldest got hooked on the same stuff and it was like nothing else existed. We had to completely shut it down for a week which was brutal but it actually reset him. Now we do strict limits and he's way better.
Those gaming channels are basically designed to be addictive so don't feel bad about not catching it sooner. The creators know exactly what they're doing. Best thing we did was switch to family YouTube time only so we could actually see what he was watching.
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How old is he? We've been trying different approaches with our kids at different ages. For our youngest we just removed YouTube completely and stuck to Netflix with timers. For our older ones we had to have real conversations about why the algorithm works.