LIGHTS, CAMERA … CHILDHOOD!
When every moment of youth can be recorded and shared, what happens to adolescence?
The boys in the YouTube videos always land their bottles perfectly upright. Max Cole has spent hours studying their routine, and now, his own viewers are waiting: Empty half the blue juice. Hold the Powerade bottle by its cap. Flip it into the air and … “Dude!” Max shouts. “It landed!” Max, who is six, waves his arms in the air. He knows just how to overreact to get his audience excited, what makes them click “thumbs up” and comment and subscribe.
“Oh, my gosh!” he yells. “That is insane!” But no one is watching. Max’s family is used to hearing him pretend that strangers on the Internet can see him. In the six years he’s been growing up, YouTube has become the largest platform for children’s entertainment on Earth.
Videos of kids simply acting like kids attract millions of viewers, sometimes billions. Every moment of childhood — getting new toys, tagging along to the grocery store, making up games in their back yards — is material that can be recorded and uploaded.
So is it any wonder that the children who watch these videos begin to act as if their entire lives are being recorded, too?
For the youngest members of the next generation, sometimes called Generation Z, the line between the online world and real life is fading. Parents are having to explain to their toddlers that the children whose whole lives they see on the screen aren’t actually their friends. They’re finding their kids methodically “unboxing” their toys, as if they’ve been paid to review them for an audience.
“For them it’s just normal,” Max’s mom, Shona Cole, says. “It wouldn’t even make sense to him not to film.”
The Coles have six kids, two dogs, three cats and 18 screens, nearly all with “record” buttons. Max’s little brother Mark Adam, who is three, knows how to start recording on an iPad. Their 10-year-old sister Annie posts videos, with her mother’s supervision, to her YouTube channel, Annie’s Vlogs.
Annie and her brothers never knew the time before the Internet, when kids were taught not to talk to strangers. Now, they want to share their lives with as many strangers as they can.
Mark Adam adores watching other boys who do nothing but open eggs with plastic toys inside. Max would rather watch another kid play Minecraft then play it himself. Annie doesn’t aspire to meet celebrities but the girls who get millions of views for braiding hair.
Kids have always learned by mimicking their peers. Now, the children watching YouTube are seeing role models who don’t just play — they perform. They’re not just experiencing childhood, but constantly considering how their experiences will be perceived by an audience.
Which is why, on Halloween, Annie is skipping down the sidewalk of a suburban neighbourhood, being filmed by her mother, aware that thousands of children will soon be watching her trick-or-treat.
“Get us walking toward you,” she tells her mom, pausing near a street light so she can be captured next to her best friend, Hope.
“I’m already almost to the top with candy!” Hope says to her own camera, which has a flip screen so she can see herself while she films. She and Annie have spent the evening trying to angle their lenses just right, so their costumes can still be seen in the darkness.
Annie presses record and sets the camera at the bottom of her pillowcase. She closes it, opens it, and drops a piece of candy in.
“Hey, guys!” she says to the audience inside the bag.
It was Hope who first showed Annie the videos of “challenges” and DIY activities girls their age were doing on YouTube. Could they put five Warheads in their mouths? Could they make their own green slime? Annie and Hope couldn’t just try the activities, they explained to their moms, they needed to film them.
Shona and Nikki Nixon, Hope’s mother, were wary. Both had homeschooled their children in an effort to have more control over how they were brought up. Putting their daughters on the Internet would expose them to commenters, and could provoke anxieties about how many page views they were getting and how they looked on camera.
But they were “say yes” parents, who filled their houses with books and art supplies and opportunities to try new things. They always encouraged their kids to follow their whims, especially the creative ones.
“When Matthew wanted to do competitive juggling, we took him to juggling,” Shona explains. “The girls want to do dance, I drive them to dance. What Annie wants is to do YouTube, and we had to support that.”
They could use YouTube as a chance for their kids to learn how to stick to a schedule. Their childhood memories would be captured forever. And if Shona and Nikki followed the plans they found in online courses about “the business of YouTube,” their daughters could even make money from the advertisements that played before the videos.
The positives seemed to outweigh the negatives, though they couldn’t be sure exactly what the negatives might be. The phenomenon hadn’t been around for long enough to know how it affects children long term.
So Shona and her husband, Mark, taped a sign on the family fridge that read, “Before Screens: “Chores “School “Food “Exercise” And before long, Annie and Hope were the stars of JazzyGirlsStuff Annie’s Vlogs and Hope’s Vlogs. A few months later, Hope’s whole family started a channel together called SuperheroKids.
The children dress up in costumes and put on imaginative performances, just as generations before them have always done. But now, their play time is actually work.
SuperheroKids has more than 300,000 subscribers and a sixfigure ad-revenue stream. Every week, there’s a show to put on — a new video to compete with the more than one billion others on YouTube.