Posted February 03, 2018 06:35:33

Photo: Those making kids entertainment must remember the power they have over millions of impressionable viewers. (iStockPhoto | romrodinka)

YouTube itself is an unregulated medium. In fact, it's the wild west. This is fine if you're in your mid-30s home alone on a Friday night crying and watching montages of Mulder and Scully kissing and spooning over Sarah McLachlan's Angels.

But what about kids?

Talk to any exhausted parent, or go to any fine dining establishment where a kid is being placated by watching cartoons on an iPad with the volume all the way up, and you'll understand: YouTube is a trough. It's a calm-down cluster-bomb lobbed blindly into the rooms of kids to shut them up.

If you're exhausted by your kid — and you are — of course you're going to pop them down in front of the TV to watch an endless buffet of distractions. It's like running away from a rabid mastiff with a pocket full of sausages: those sausages, whilst delicious, will, if pelted over your shoulder, save your life.

When I was 11, my dad returned my Christmas Game Boy because I played it too much. I never imagined we'd bond over games.

And I get it. I look after nieces and nephews, and I grew up watching kids' TV: it can inform, enlighten and entertain. It can save lives.

But YouTube ISN'T television.

This is very important: YouTube is, as I said, the wild west. It's anything goes. There are verified, legit, caring curators of kids content on there, sure. Of course there are. But there's also anarchy.

And this is why people like Logan Paul can cause so much trouble.

Kids are wet cement

Since December 31, I haven't been able to get him out of my head. My first issue with Logan Paul was that he was exactly what I hated about YouTube stars: his vamping is loud and cloying. But I wasn't going to die at the hill of personal taste. Not everything is for me. And that's fine.

Then, he went to Aokigahara in Japan, and things got bad. You're probably already across this grotesque idiocy: Logan Paul decided a good way to drum up some hits, and controversy, was to wander into an infamous "suicide forest" in a stupid hat.

And voila. In one swift stroke, his 15.6 million subscribers, many of them young people, watched a video in which Logan and his clutch of chattering dullards happened upon a dead body. In, and I cannot stress this enough, the suicide forest.

This was their hope. This was their intent. This is the wild west.

Because there's no advisory board. There's no sheriff. There's backlash afterwards, sure, but children are wet cement. They're works in progress. They've already seen the video. It's not just them that needs parenting, it's their content.

Checks and balances on the small screen

Here's the crux of why this issue winds me up so much: I work in kids' TV. Back in 2013, I hosted and co-wrote Steam Punks, a kids' show on ABC ME in which I played The Inquisitor, a Dickensian nitwit working for an enormous, sentient machine. It was, quite simply, the most fun I've ever had.

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We shot several seasons in one go: 30- to 40-minute episodes in three weeks, each episode with four new, often bewildered, kids between 10 and 12 years old. It was terrifying, and every word I said, every movement I made, was stringently monitored for fear of saying or doing the wrong thing. It was stressful, and taxing, and unbelievably hard work.

But that's exactly how it should have been.

Kids entertainers and broadcasters should be terrified.

Not just for the kids I was making run through a gamut of tests, or plunge their hands into boxes full of insects, or slide down a byzantine series of tubes as I yelled at them. But for the kids watching at home.

Before I even stepped onto the set, I had to get a police check and be issued a working with children permit. There were countless other checks and balances and edits going on by the wonderful, hardworking and incredibly patient production team behind Steam Punks to ensure nothing, and I mean nothing, happened that would in any way harm a child.

Last year, myself and Tegan Higginbotham co-hosted Been There, Done That, a miniseries made by the ABC in conjunction with the Kids Helpline.

We answered actual vetted questions from kids having problems, and worked in conjunction with experts to make sure everything we said was responsible, helpful and kind. We are incredibly proud of it, and it wouldn't have even aired had it not passed a litany of tests.

A power to use responsibly

We need to shift the focus away from parenting that relies on threats and rewards, to one that nurtures meaningful parent-child and child-technology relationships.

Logan Paul's intent wasn't to scar kids. But much of his viewership comprises young people who enjoy and obsess over his work, and who have bought into his cult of personality, something young people are absolutely entitled to do! Hell, I used to send letters to Alanis Morrissette when I was a kid!

But Logan Paul is one of many people who've either forgotten or simply don't care about the power they have over millions of impressionable viewers.

The moronic gall someone can have to wield that kind of power and abuse it like that is… well, not surprising, actually. Look at the world right now. But I'm glad I had to run a gauntlet of checks and balances before I could entertain. I'm glad it was hard. Because it should be.

Kids are worth it.

Topics: arts-and-entertainment, games, family-and-children, children, internet-culture, information-and-communication, australia