8 ms·

> they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free I have children between

> they had a youth where they could spend their entire time learning literally everything there is to know about their passion for free I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc. I’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. They are passionate about cheap mindless entertainment. I see the same things in their friends and classmates. You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. I’m sure there are a few youths who are using their time productively and it will pay dividends for them. But, from what I’ve seen, the vast majority aren’t interested.

radicaldreamer 4y ago
A lot of that stuff is going to be AI generated in the future and it'll hit those dopamine circuits better than human generated content ever could
- api 4y ago
  Now we know what all the Borg were doing in their cube ships. Between occasional bouts of conquest and assimilation they were all frying in a sizzling bath of repetitive dopamine triggering meme soup created by AIs and other members of the hive mind. Maybe they lurched out and attacked or assimilated someone when a new trending channel appeared that urged such activities. I joke but it really is a bit spooky how plausible the Borg are today to the point that I can imagine what it would be like to be part of them. It’d be like scrolling TikTok but with Neuralink.
  - hydrok9 4y ago
    That explains the skin conditions and baldness (of the Borg, though I see a lot of hair loss among under-30s)
SnowHill9902 4y ago
It’s your responsibility to guide them.
- djaychela 4y ago
  If only it was that simple. In my experience (with four step kids aging from 23 down to 16, and I've been in that position for over 13 years), I'd say my input has had maybe 5-10% influence, if that. If they're not interested in that area (and mine aren't), then there's not much you can do, even if you spend a lot of time and effort trying.
- irrational 4y ago
  Like I said, you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Agency is a double edged sword.
  - zo1 4y ago
    The "agency" that is dominated by the influence of their peers, schooling, and media you allow them to consume as impressionable and innocent individuals. Normally I'd say let them grow, have their own agency and learn the world in their own eyes with parental supervision. But right now, the media and culture are so highly toxic and degenerate, that I say it's our duty as parents (and humans) to shield them from that, and instilling positive values.
brewtide 4y ago
I have a 9 and 7 year old and we are constantly enjoying such YouTube channels as "smarter every day", "veritasium" (spelling?), "Stuff made here", to some extent Colin furze, "technology connections", and other such edutainment. Not sure it speaks about differences in kids, in ages, in households, or likely a combination of sorts. Also, not a judgement on your kids, just a counterpoint about the resources available and how some people will tend to gravitate in different directions. 7 year old daughter is learning to knit and forgot how to "cast on" , so she jumped on YouTube to search a how-to and had one of the methods figured out in 20 minutes. So, perhaps it does have more to do with the availability of such edutainment since they were very young -- we've been on this path for 5 years or so and it has just become "the norm" if we are to use YouTube as a household. (I will admit that as Dad, my time on YouTube is split between learning about whatever new hobby has peaked my interest , currently SDR related stuff, and car related material for fun. I've also fallen into the LTT universe, but am aiming to back away because it, in my opinion , is just providing that mindless watching which I aimed to get rid of around 16 years old (ie, decades ago) to better use available free time. Seems everyone is just different, but the resources are for sure there!
- stormfather 4y ago
  Can you attribute your kids' behavior to any actions you took or policies you had? Please don't be shy about it, I would love to inculcate that into my kids as well.
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    Not OP, but no matter what they say take it with a grain of salt. Rising kids is like throwing dice. No matter what you do (or don’t) within normal ranges of behavior, it’s pretty much a crapshoot to predict what comes out of them. The only correlation I’ve seen is they tend to emulate the parents’ intelligence levels and if you’re passionate about what you do, they might be too.
    - zelphirkalt 4y ago
      I think you are probably right and that there are many things in the environment, that also have influence. However, I would say that there are some tricks one can try: Reading stories to children for example. If the story is interesting, the child will want to know how the story goes on. As soon as they can read, they will be tempted to grab that book and find out.
brightball 4y ago
This. It’s the entire reason that I’m the unpopular parent that doesn’t let my kids have unlimited YouTube.
evanchisholm 4y ago
I am currently in high school, you definitely are right that the majority of people my age do just waste their time on YouTube (I do too sometimes) but there are a few of us that really take advantage of it. I have personally spent a large amount of time on YouTube learning to program over the past few years, I have now become quite competent and built some pretty cool things on my own (search engines, chess bots, personal web apps, competitive programming, etc.) My brother older brother spent a lot of time watching videos about physics and math to the point where he is now doing a physics degree. A lot of my other friends have used it to cultivate other skills and knowledge for free too.
- hyperliner 4y ago
  Keep doing what you are doing!!! (Old person here)
- EGreg 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - 867-5309 4y ago
    disclaimer: this is yours
    - EGreg 4y ago
      Yes. That’s why I am asking
      - Kye 4y ago
        It's good form to say you're the person behind the thing you're recommending. Making stuff to solve problems is the point of most of the domain this little website is under, so self-promotion is fine, but not saying that's what it is looks bad.
        EGreg 4y ago
shriek 4y ago
Yep, same with my nephews and nieces too. It doesn't help that YT algo pushes these contents to the front and center as trending content. But, those who do put some effort on actually making good use of this platform definitely has huge advantage than our generation growing up though. So, in that regard I'm still optimistic that our future generation will be much smarter than us.
kubectl_h 4y ago
Watching kids watch youtube is like watching zombies. I know a kid who is a big fan of any kind of sports. He is constantly watching youtube videos that are basically stats and clips packaged up with some slight humor but very little analysis. This kid has basically an encyclopedic knowledge of sports... stats. All from youtube. I was also like this to a degree as a kid, but I got my info from stats books/magazines/newspaper sports sections. So in a way the outcomes are the similar -- young kids love looking at the numbers -- but I can't help but feel icky about the way youtube can just lock a kid in for hours and hours. * Example video about Tim Lincecum that basically enumerates the stats of his career but doesn't discuss anything else -- his personality, his pitches, his unconventional delivery, etc. Just clips (that repeat) and stats. It's bizarre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgaPKJIF_Zo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgaPKJIF_Zo
- meken 4y ago
  Not really sure what you’re talking about when you say that vid just enumerates stats. There’s a lot of narrative and comparison and context put into that video. Comparing it to how I grew up watching ESPN Sportscenter, I find that YT video much richer and varied
  - kubectl_h 4y ago
    > There’s a lot of narrative and comparison and context There's not though. Most of what is narrative is cutesy jokes. Comparisons are just... stats. If you re-watch with a critical eye you'll see it's basically a formula: in these X games he pitched this well, then he'll compare him to some historical figure on stats alone, over a clip or a screenshot of baseball reference. At some point he just reads passages off wikipedia. There really isn't any subjective thought being put into it, it's just a clever packaging of google searches in a lot of ways.
- expertentipp 4y ago
  > Watching kids watch youtube is like watching zombies. My heart breaks when I see nephews playing dumb mobile games and watch youtube videos of someone playing games, all these interrupted with multiple full screen ads which they also diligently watch. Fuck these platforms and all their creators.
somethoughts 4y ago
One trick I've used is to disable Youtube on all of the kids' devices [1] and only enable it on the family living room TV. Then rotate video selection powers to each family member so that there's an equal mix of Mr Beast and Practical Engineering/Vertasium/Tom Scott/City Beautiful/Sebastian Lague etc. [1] Chromebook with Family Link to only enable specific websites.
MonaroVXR 4y ago
> I’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. Anyone good suggestions?
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  Kurz ge sagt. Smarter every day Practical engineering For the competitive athletes, all attack. Maybe something with Scratch, but id argue they should be doing scratch, not watching someone else create content. Any peppa or similar extremely benign cartoon if you are reinforcing a foreign language (Spanish, French, Italian, etc)
  - IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
    I will add Mark Rober to that list
- rcarr 4y ago
  Math - 3blue1brown Programming - freecodecamp AI - Andrej karpathy Science - acapellascience
- indeedmug 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/@PBoyle https://www.youtube.com/@PBoyle For good deep dives into finance. A lot of information but it's a great professional look. https://www.youtube.com/@JamesKerLindsay https://www.youtube.com/@JamesKerLindsay For good deep dives into international politics. https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel For good videos on civil engineering. I would recommend these channel for older children who can digest the information. They are all understandable for to the layman.
momirlan 4y ago
totally in agreement, my kids are just the same. me and wife, we read a lot of literature, poetry, classics, they don't touch books.
AlbertCory 4y ago
The lesson I get from all these replies is (shock & horror!): Kids are different. I hear of kids who are intelligent, energetic, curious... all those good things. Probably NURTURE (i.e. the parents) has something to do with that. But then: also NATURE. Not having any kids myself, I'm not going to preach.
- durandal1 4y ago
  The variety in temperament, interests and ability between even siblings varies greatly. The people most eager to share parenting advice is usually parents only one child who is calm and attentive :) I've seen several parents in that category have a second child and come out shocked. I'm believe that beyond a base level of food, clean clothes and love, your influence as a parent is marginal. It's also a wildly unpopular but intelligence is highly genetic (at least 50% of outcome determined by genes).
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    I wouldn't argue against intelligence being highly genetic. But people usually aren't talking about intelligence. They're talking about success in life, be it career or school. Our oldest had a terrible time at math early in this year, and the teacher thought she was doing well in the start because she never asked questions. But the first practice test showed otherwise. After that we made a point to ensure she understands math. It was a rough couple of months at the start of the year, but that's paid dividends and the last 5 have been pretty smooth. She didn't get smarter. And if she didn't have parents with the time and ability to help her, she woulda flunked.
  - ramraj07 4y ago
    If it’s 50% genetic, you’d see lineages of scientists or brilliant in whatever but it doesn’t seem to happen often does it?
    - wrycoder 4y ago
      Check out the Dyson family.
ur-whale 4y ago
> They are passionate about cheap mindless entertainment. Everyone hopes that their kids will be exceptional. You just have normal kids, get over it.
- bundze 4y ago
  I recently watched Steven Spielberg's recent autobiographical movie "The Fablemans". He portrayed there his own childhood and teenage years. What I found most interesting is the fact that Spielberg's father was apparently a skilled computer engineer who worked for the IBM. There was a scene in the movie where Spielberg's father tries to show his kids the beauty of engineering while building some simple structure from wooden sticks but they all are disinterested and shortly run away. There is a scene where Spielberg's father tells teenage Spielberg that it would be better if he ditched this filmmaking hobby and started doing something more meaningful with his life. Steven Spielberg did turn out to be exceptional but in a completely different way from his father.
mchaynes 4y ago
Gen Z here. I grew up on YouTube. I’m 25 now, so technically a cusper but had an iPod touch and YouTube since third grade. Videos of travel have a lot of value. I was stuck behind a desk for 4 years at my programming job. The last 7 months of travel has done so much for the rest of my entire human experience that I could never get from a textbook. Plus it’s fun to see people explore the world. We’ve been fascinated by this stuff since the beginning of humanity. Reality videos and reality TV all show elements of how relationship dynamics work. They often are fraught with bad narratives, but they model conflict and resolution between people. This can be helpful as a guide to understanding human interaction. I’m not saying that it is all bringing value to their lives, but there is something inherently interesting about the content they’re consuming. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be. The challenge for you is to go into their world and understand what they value. You might even change your definition of the word “value”
- gsatic 4y ago
  Nice observation. Algos do unlock some of that value. But long way to go. Cuz they need much more info about ppl. For example, I know my younger cousins like certain topics that they cant get enough off, but if I see them busy with exams or homework I hold back on pointing it out.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  > Videos of travel have a lot of value. I was stuck behind a desk for 4 years at my programming job. The last 7 months of travel has done so much for the rest of my entire human experience that I could never get from a textbook. The last 7 months of real travel, or watching YouTube videos of travel? Feel like you’re making a big leap here.
  - mchaynes 4y ago
    Does watching people program help you become a better programmer? Same thing with travel
quags 4y ago
7 and 11. My kids also like the same things but enjoy the shorts about science, space , microbiology, one minute animals and the bees.
Gatsky 4y ago
My thoughts about this are that youtube is great if you have a specific learning task/interest, but if you don’t then it will lead you astray. There is no doubt however that it has pulled off the magic trick of incentivizing thoughtful and knowledgeable people to produce good videos. This seems as close as we’ll get to a mutually beneficial arrangement in the attention economy.
AnnaPali 4y ago
> ’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. How did you try to do this? This sounds like a horror story I'm scared of happening when I have kids.
inafewwords 4y ago
I'm on the socially insular side as well and find my time learning instead of shared viewerships like sports. I'm checked out on up to date sports even if I do participate in kick boxing. There's tons of technique breakdown videos that's more interesting than watching every fight. But for those training up, seeing full definition replays of fights from amateur to high paid professionals at your fingertips as well as full breakdowns and other professionals in the comments is just building up tons of people to finesse their skills deeply in their crafts. OTOH I have a family member who is into those "shallow" videos but she is tuning her social media posts to be more interactive and her posts are "very extra". Many of these vloggers do a lot of behind the scenes in depth trade secret videos once in awhile and she seems to find out video trends. Her hobby is content creation, selfies, and making homevideos that other people watch. Reminds me of my dads and uncles lugging around cameras at every social function and upgrading to digital but she's now at the level of compressing it to something quick and watchable and a slideshow of what happened rather than a full recording like it was a documentary. She's gotten the engagement factor dialed in. It's nice to have her taking and editing videos as that's something of worth. Taking boring events (get together) where a straight video or group photos is the usual and making them personalized and basically something people want to add and to share on their wall if they were at those locations. Otherwise she's been watching a ton of home-based businesses walkthroughs and interviews with small business entrepreneurs. Those are big in niche communities and these shows are in our mothertongue. She does bounce ideas off me a ton for business ideas. She's more interested in retail ideas and wanted to advertise using social media than is interested in selling her services as a social media person. She's in her 60s. I'm in my 30s. She's more tech literate than me in regards to social media use even if I work at one. She's also more in tune with what people my age range are interested in and willing to pay for. If she does go into business I don't mind funding her, lol. She has a way of breaking into trends before mainstream moves into those trends. Science and math and other cool stuff might help round out young people but I don't push that stuff to my older family members. I'm the "youth" and none of my generation as kids yet. I don't see a reason to push the older folks into those subjects on YouTube. I might send them gardening tips, ideas, and a boring lectures or someone building out some fancy yard feature but I doubt they sit through it. I did send some tree planting advice and they fell asleep to it. Very opposing to what people push to youth. But there's still value in "wasting time" I think
jeffrallen 4y ago
And YouTube shorts. It is shocking how addictive they are. I suffer it myself, and continually interrupt my son to ask him, "do you really want to run out your limited screen time on that garbage?" He agrees no, then is back on them 5 minutes later until his phone shuts him out. Thank god for parental controls.
- icoder 4y ago
  The shorts are terrible, whereas my 'normal' home page is a combination of informative/hobby/tech related content and background music, the shorts are a bunch of useless crap that eat my time like nothing else without giving anything in return (apart from triggering of my reward systems I guess). I just delete them from my homepage and they stay away for 30 days. If they return I only notice it because they sneakily start eating my attention again. Maybe there's a setting that doesn't make them return.
audunw 4y ago
> I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc. When I grew up, and computers and the internet was new, we were mostly using it for entertainment and fun as well. I learned programming early, but I was an exception at my school (now lots of kids learn programming at an even earlier age). And I still wasted a lot of high school playing Anarchy Online (MMORPG), to the point where it affected my grades. I'm not sure the value they'd get is the videos they watch regularly.. but just the knowledge/habit/skills around finding a video to help learn a new topic or solve a problem. I've heard that they're losing the skills around using a general purpose PC though, since they're so used to smart phones, iPad and simple ready-made web solutions for everything. Not sure that's a big problem though.
aspyct 4y ago
When I was a kid, my parents hated that I was passionate about "cheap mindless video games". Guess who's become a successful software engineer and happy human as a result? Don't dismiss what your kids are into because you don't understand it. Their peers will, and their peers will give them money for it.
dehrmann 3y ago
Now I know Mr Beast's target demo.

radicaldreamer 4y ago

A lot of that stuff is going to be AI generated in the future and it'll hit those dopamine circuits better than human generated content ever could

api 4y ago
Now we know what all the Borg were doing in their cube ships. Between occasional bouts of conquest and assimilation they were all frying in a sizzling bath of repetitive dopamine triggering meme soup created by AIs and other members of the hive mind. Maybe they lurched out and attacked or assimilated someone when a new trending channel appeared that urged such activities. I joke but it really is a bit spooky how plausible the Borg are today to the point that I can imagine what it would be like to be part of them. It’d be like scrolling TikTok but with Neuralink.
- hydrok9 4y ago
  That explains the skin conditions and baldness (of the Borg, though I see a lot of hair loss among under-30s)

SnowHill9902 4y ago

It’s your responsibility to guide them.

djaychela 4y ago
If only it was that simple. In my experience (with four step kids aging from 23 down to 16, and I've been in that position for over 13 years), I'd say my input has had maybe 5-10% influence, if that. If they're not interested in that area (and mine aren't), then there's not much you can do, even if you spend a lot of time and effort trying.
irrational 4y ago
Like I said, you can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make them drink. Agency is a double edged sword.
- zo1 4y ago
  The "agency" that is dominated by the influence of their peers, schooling, and media you allow them to consume as impressionable and innocent individuals. Normally I'd say let them grow, have their own agency and learn the world in their own eyes with parental supervision. But right now, the media and culture are so highly toxic and degenerate, that I say it's our duty as parents (and humans) to shield them from that, and instilling positive values.

brewtide 4y ago

I have a 9 and 7 year old and we are constantly enjoying such YouTube channels as "smarter every day", "veritasium" (spelling?), "Stuff made here", to some extent Colin furze, "technology connections", and other such edutainment. Not sure it speaks about differences in kids, in ages, in households, or likely a combination of sorts. Also, not a judgement on your kids, just a counterpoint about the resources available and how some people will tend to gravitate in different directions. 7 year old daughter is learning to knit and forgot how to "cast on" , so she jumped on YouTube to search a how-to and had one of the methods figured out in 20 minutes. So, perhaps it does have more to do with the availability of such edutainment since they were very young -- we've been on this path for 5 years or so and it has just become "the norm" if we are to use YouTube as a household. (I will admit that as Dad, my time on YouTube is split between learning about whatever new hobby has peaked my interest , currently SDR related stuff, and car related material for fun. I've also fallen into the LTT universe, but am aiming to back away because it, in my opinion , is just providing that mindless watching which I aimed to get rid of around 16 years old (ie, decades ago) to better use available free time. Seems everyone is just different, but the resources are for sure there!

stormfather 4y ago
Can you attribute your kids' behavior to any actions you took or policies you had? Please don't be shy about it, I would love to inculcate that into my kids as well.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  Not OP, but no matter what they say take it with a grain of salt. Rising kids is like throwing dice. No matter what you do (or don’t) within normal ranges of behavior, it’s pretty much a crapshoot to predict what comes out of them. The only correlation I’ve seen is they tend to emulate the parents’ intelligence levels and if you’re passionate about what you do, they might be too.
  - zelphirkalt 4y ago
    I think you are probably right and that there are many things in the environment, that also have influence. However, I would say that there are some tricks one can try: Reading stories to children for example. If the story is interesting, the child will want to know how the story goes on. As soon as they can read, they will be tempted to grab that book and find out.

brightball 4y ago

This. It’s the entire reason that I’m the unpopular parent that doesn’t let my kids have unlimited YouTube.

evanchisholm 4y ago

I am currently in high school, you definitely are right that the majority of people my age do just waste their time on YouTube (I do too sometimes) but there are a few of us that really take advantage of it. I have personally spent a large amount of time on YouTube learning to program over the past few years, I have now become quite competent and built some pretty cool things on my own (search engines, chess bots, personal web apps, competitive programming, etc.) My brother older brother spent a lot of time watching videos about physics and math to the point where he is now doing a physics degree. A lot of my other friends have used it to cultivate other skills and knowledge for free too.

hyperliner 4y ago
Keep doing what you are doing!!! (Old person here)
EGreg 4y ago
[flagged]
- 867-5309 4y ago
  disclaimer: this is yours
  - EGreg 4y ago
    Yes. That’s why I am asking
    - Kye 4y ago
      It's good form to say you're the person behind the thing you're recommending. Making stuff to solve problems is the point of most of the domain this little website is under, so self-promotion is fine, but not saying that's what it is looks bad.
      - EGreg 4y ago

shriek 4y ago

Yep, same with my nephews and nieces too. It doesn't help that YT algo pushes these contents to the front and center as trending content. But, those who do put some effort on actually making good use of this platform definitely has huge advantage than our generation growing up though. So, in that regard I'm still optimistic that our future generation will be much smarter than us.

kubectl_h 4y ago

Watching kids watch youtube is like watching zombies. I know a kid who is a big fan of any kind of sports. He is constantly watching youtube videos that are basically stats and clips packaged up with some slight humor but very little analysis. This kid has basically an encyclopedic knowledge of sports... stats. All from youtube. I was also like this to a degree as a kid, but I got my info from stats books/magazines/newspaper sports sections. So in a way the outcomes are the similar -- young kids love looking at the numbers -- but I can't help but feel icky about the way youtube can just lock a kid in for hours and hours. * Example video about Tim Lincecum that basically enumerates the stats of his career but doesn't discuss anything else -- his personality, his pitches, his unconventional delivery, etc. Just clips (that repeat) and stats. It's bizarre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgaPKJIF_Zo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgaPKJIF_Zo

meken 4y ago
Not really sure what you’re talking about when you say that vid just enumerates stats. There’s a lot of narrative and comparison and context put into that video. Comparing it to how I grew up watching ESPN Sportscenter, I find that YT video much richer and varied
- kubectl_h 4y ago
  > There’s a lot of narrative and comparison and context There's not though. Most of what is narrative is cutesy jokes. Comparisons are just... stats. If you re-watch with a critical eye you'll see it's basically a formula: in these X games he pitched this well, then he'll compare him to some historical figure on stats alone, over a clip or a screenshot of baseball reference. At some point he just reads passages off wikipedia. There really isn't any subjective thought being put into it, it's just a clever packaging of google searches in a lot of ways.
expertentipp 4y ago
> Watching kids watch youtube is like watching zombies. My heart breaks when I see nephews playing dumb mobile games and watch youtube videos of someone playing games, all these interrupted with multiple full screen ads which they also diligently watch. Fuck these platforms and all their creators.

somethoughts 4y ago

One trick I've used is to disable Youtube on all of the kids' devices [1] and only enable it on the family living room TV. Then rotate video selection powers to each family member so that there's an equal mix of Mr Beast and Practical Engineering/Vertasium/Tom Scott/City Beautiful/Sebastian Lague etc. [1] Chromebook with Family Link to only enable specific websites.

MonaroVXR 4y ago

> I’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. Anyone good suggestions?

IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
Kurz ge sagt. Smarter every day Practical engineering For the competitive athletes, all attack. Maybe something with Scratch, but id argue they should be doing scratch, not watching someone else create content. Any peppa or similar extremely benign cartoon if you are reinforcing a foreign language (Spanish, French, Italian, etc)
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  I will add Mark Rober to that list
rcarr 4y ago
Math - 3blue1brown Programming - freecodecamp AI - Andrej karpathy Science - acapellascience
indeedmug 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/@PBoyle https://www.youtube.com/@PBoyle For good deep dives into finance. A lot of information but it's a great professional look. https://www.youtube.com/@JamesKerLindsay https://www.youtube.com/@JamesKerLindsay For good deep dives into international politics. https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel https://www.youtube.com/@PracticalEngineeringChannel For good videos on civil engineering. I would recommend these channel for older children who can digest the information. They are all understandable for to the layman.

momirlan 4y ago

totally in agreement, my kids are just the same. me and wife, we read a lot of literature, poetry, classics, they don't touch books.

AlbertCory 4y ago

The lesson I get from all these replies is (shock & horror!): Kids are different. I hear of kids who are intelligent, energetic, curious... all those good things. Probably NURTURE (i.e. the parents) has something to do with that. But then: also NATURE. Not having any kids myself, I'm not going to preach.

durandal1 4y ago
The variety in temperament, interests and ability between even siblings varies greatly. The people most eager to share parenting advice is usually parents only one child who is calm and attentive :) I've seen several parents in that category have a second child and come out shocked. I'm believe that beyond a base level of food, clean clothes and love, your influence as a parent is marginal. It's also a wildly unpopular but intelligence is highly genetic (at least 50% of outcome determined by genes).
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  I wouldn't argue against intelligence being highly genetic. But people usually aren't talking about intelligence. They're talking about success in life, be it career or school. Our oldest had a terrible time at math early in this year, and the teacher thought she was doing well in the start because she never asked questions. But the first practice test showed otherwise. After that we made a point to ensure she understands math. It was a rough couple of months at the start of the year, but that's paid dividends and the last 5 have been pretty smooth. She didn't get smarter. And if she didn't have parents with the time and ability to help her, she woulda flunked.
- ramraj07 4y ago
  If it’s 50% genetic, you’d see lineages of scientists or brilliant in whatever but it doesn’t seem to happen often does it?
  - wrycoder 4y ago
    Check out the Dyson family.

ur-whale 4y ago

> They are passionate about cheap mindless entertainment. Everyone hopes that their kids will be exceptional. You just have normal kids, get over it.

bundze 4y ago
I recently watched Steven Spielberg's recent autobiographical movie "The Fablemans". He portrayed there his own childhood and teenage years. What I found most interesting is the fact that Spielberg's father was apparently a skilled computer engineer who worked for the IBM. There was a scene in the movie where Spielberg's father tries to show his kids the beauty of engineering while building some simple structure from wooden sticks but they all are disinterested and shortly run away. There is a scene where Spielberg's father tells teenage Spielberg that it would be better if he ditched this filmmaking hobby and started doing something more meaningful with his life. Steven Spielberg did turn out to be exceptional but in a completely different way from his father.

mchaynes 4y ago

Gen Z here. I grew up on YouTube. I’m 25 now, so technically a cusper but had an iPod touch and YouTube since third grade. Videos of travel have a lot of value. I was stuck behind a desk for 4 years at my programming job. The last 7 months of travel has done so much for the rest of my entire human experience that I could never get from a textbook. Plus it’s fun to see people explore the world. We’ve been fascinated by this stuff since the beginning of humanity. Reality videos and reality TV all show elements of how relationship dynamics work. They often are fraught with bad narratives, but they model conflict and resolution between people. This can be helpful as a guide to understanding human interaction. I’m not saying that it is all bringing value to their lives, but there is something inherently interesting about the content they’re consuming. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be. The challenge for you is to go into their world and understand what they value. You might even change your definition of the word “value”

gsatic 4y ago
Nice observation. Algos do unlock some of that value. But long way to go. Cuz they need much more info about ppl. For example, I know my younger cousins like certain topics that they cant get enough off, but if I see them busy with exams or homework I hold back on pointing it out.
nonethewiser 4y ago
> Videos of travel have a lot of value. I was stuck behind a desk for 4 years at my programming job. The last 7 months of travel has done so much for the rest of my entire human experience that I could never get from a textbook. The last 7 months of real travel, or watching YouTube videos of travel? Feel like you’re making a big leap here.
- mchaynes 4y ago
  Does watching people program help you become a better programmer? Same thing with travel

quags 4y ago

7 and 11. My kids also like the same things but enjoy the shorts about science, space , microbiology, one minute animals and the bees.

Gatsky 4y ago

My thoughts about this are that youtube is great if you have a specific learning task/interest, but if you don’t then it will lead you astray. There is no doubt however that it has pulled off the magic trick of incentivizing thoughtful and knowledgeable people to produce good videos. This seems as close as we’ll get to a mutually beneficial arrangement in the attention economy.

AnnaPali 4y ago

> ’ve tried to introduce them to science, space, programming, history, math, finance, nature, etc. content and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. How did you try to do this? This sounds like a horror story I'm scared of happening when I have kids.

inafewwords 4y ago

I'm on the socially insular side as well and find my time learning instead of shared viewerships like sports. I'm checked out on up to date sports even if I do participate in kick boxing. There's tons of technique breakdown videos that's more interesting than watching every fight. But for those training up, seeing full definition replays of fights from amateur to high paid professionals at your fingertips as well as full breakdowns and other professionals in the comments is just building up tons of people to finesse their skills deeply in their crafts. OTOH I have a family member who is into those "shallow" videos but she is tuning her social media posts to be more interactive and her posts are "very extra". Many of these vloggers do a lot of behind the scenes in depth trade secret videos once in awhile and she seems to find out video trends. Her hobby is content creation, selfies, and making homevideos that other people watch. Reminds me of my dads and uncles lugging around cameras at every social function and upgrading to digital but she's now at the level of compressing it to something quick and watchable and a slideshow of what happened rather than a full recording like it was a documentary. She's gotten the engagement factor dialed in. It's nice to have her taking and editing videos as that's something of worth. Taking boring events (get together) where a straight video or group photos is the usual and making them personalized and basically something people want to add and to share on their wall if they were at those locations. Otherwise she's been watching a ton of home-based businesses walkthroughs and interviews with small business entrepreneurs. Those are big in niche communities and these shows are in our mothertongue. She does bounce ideas off me a ton for business ideas. She's more interested in retail ideas and wanted to advertise using social media than is interested in selling her services as a social media person. She's in her 60s. I'm in my 30s. She's more tech literate than me in regards to social media use even if I work at one. She's also more in tune with what people my age range are interested in and willing to pay for. If she does go into business I don't mind funding her, lol. She has a way of breaking into trends before mainstream moves into those trends. Science and math and other cool stuff might help round out young people but I don't push that stuff to my older family members. I'm the "youth" and none of my generation as kids yet. I don't see a reason to push the older folks into those subjects on YouTube. I might send them gardening tips, ideas, and a boring lectures or someone building out some fancy yard feature but I doubt they sit through it. I did send some tree planting advice and they fell asleep to it. Very opposing to what people push to youth. But there's still value in "wasting time" I think

jeffrallen 4y ago

And YouTube shorts. It is shocking how addictive they are. I suffer it myself, and continually interrupt my son to ask him, "do you really want to run out your limited screen time on that garbage?" He agrees no, then is back on them 5 minutes later until his phone shuts him out. Thank god for parental controls.

icoder 4y ago
The shorts are terrible, whereas my 'normal' home page is a combination of informative/hobby/tech related content and background music, the shorts are a bunch of useless crap that eat my time like nothing else without giving anything in return (apart from triggering of my reward systems I guess). I just delete them from my homepage and they stay away for 30 days. If they return I only notice it because they sneakily start eating my attention again. Maybe there's a setting that doesn't make them return.

audunw 4y ago

> I have children between the ages of 9 and 26. You know what they are passionate about? Minecraft, Mr Beast, Travel vlogs, mommy vlogs, “reality” videos, etc. When I grew up, and computers and the internet was new, we were mostly using it for entertainment and fun as well. I learned programming early, but I was an exception at my school (now lots of kids learn programming at an even earlier age). And I still wasted a lot of high school playing Anarchy Online (MMORPG), to the point where it affected my grades. I'm not sure the value they'd get is the videos they watch regularly.. but just the knowledge/habit/skills around finding a video to help learn a new topic or solve a problem. I've heard that they're losing the skills around using a general purpose PC though, since they're so used to smart phones, iPad and simple ready-made web solutions for everything. Not sure that's a big problem though.

aspyct 4y ago

When I was a kid, my parents hated that I was passionate about "cheap mindless video games". Guess who's become a successful software engineer and happy human as a result? Don't dismiss what your kids are into because you don't understand it. Their peers will, and their peers will give them money for it.

dehrmann 3y ago

Now I know Mr Beast's target demo.