These YouTube dads are making me look bad

Who, really, has time for this?

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash

The doctor recommended maximum amount of daily screen time for kids varies by source and seems to have lurched forward and backward depending on the flavor of the moment.

I’ve seen general guidelines of roughly one hour per day on weekdays and two on weekends, with more leeway as kids get older.

And as someone who was the parent of three small children during COVID, I’ve also obviously stretched the truth, sheepishly though not egregiously, on clinic surveys asking how much screen time our kids were getting.

There is what the most well-meaning and educated doctors will tell you is the right amount, and then there is the feeling at the end of another in a string of endless days when Mom and Dad just need a break.

Out of this level of exhaustion was born the concept of “YouTube Time,” an hour (as far as anyone is concerned) at the end of days during the work-from-home, school-from-home days of the pandemic during which our two girls (and toward the end our son, too) could gorge themselves on a buffet of questionable programming.

My wife and I would vet the videos as best we could, and usually they were harmless enough. When our girls became a little too enamored with creepy doll videos and our son unwittingly discovered the bizarre horror character Siren Head, we shut it down.

A lot of it was glorified advertising, but eventually they outgrew the worst of it. That more or less happily coincided with the pandemic becoming more a thing of the past than present, and “YouTube Time” as we knew it went with it.

Mostly.

Our two youngest, now 8 and 5, still ask sometimes to watch a specific brand of YouTube videos on the TV (and occasionally another genre of someone commenting on pranks and hacks with our 10 year old leading the charge on that one).

The genre for the two youngest can only be described as: Influencer family goes about their day and films everything.

Sometimes these involve set-ups or conceits. Other times it is literally just watching a day in the life.

And more than once, I have been asked some version of this question by one or both of our younger kids: Why does that dad get to hang out and do fun stuff with his kids all day but you don’t?

It is in these moments that I have to bite my tongue.

I do not tell them the full results of my quick Google searches, which often tell me that the families in these videos who are occupying increasingly large and nice houses are now multi-millionaires because of these YouTube videos.

I do not mention that it is not feasible for me, as much as I might like, to deliver a “best day ever” every single day of their lives.

And I certainly do not scream the thing that I am screaming here:

THESE YOUTUBE DADS ARE MAKING ME LOOK BAD.

I do mention to them, after a couple minutes of quieter introspection, that the videos they are watching are essentially that family at work.

Making these videos has become their job, one that is dependent on kids watching them and not skipping the ads too fast.

My job, by contrast, involves vast swaths of time away from my kids. A lot of this happens while they are at preschool/school, but some of it overlaps with time they are home.

I’m interviewing people, going to games, making podcasts and writing things. Unless they want to participate in a snarky takedown of the Twins’ free agent spending, my work will not coincide with their fun and we will not all be making one big video in the process.

The notion of an “influencer” still seems to me a part of a grotesque economy and is certainly not the sort of programming or advertising with which I grew up.

But … I slowly realize … it is completely normal to them. And … I slowly realize … was the more structured programming I used to feast on as a kid in the 1980s any better?

It did not have a catchy name like “YouTube Time,” but I would regularly watch two consecutive hours of syndicated sitcoms between the ages of, say, 11 and 13, after I was home from school but before my mom got home from work.

I cannot say with certainty, but I believe the programs I typically watched were:

• “Who’s the Boss?”

• “Growing Pains”

• “Mr. Belvedere”

• “Family Ties”

I don’t know if there was anything specific I was craving in these shows other than that I was bored and they were available. There was a plot involving some sort of dilemma or drama, and it was solved in 30 minutes with the help of a lesson and a laugh track.

I never asked my dad why he gave up on his dream of playing Major League Baseball to became a housekeeper in Connecticut, nor did I ever ask my mom why we never had a wise English butler helping out around the house.

I used to love playing Yahtzee with my mom and ping-pong with my dad during free time as a kid, but I also understood that my parents had real jobs!

For our kids, I think that’s more or less the case, too. They aren’t watching for something they are missing; generally, they just want to watch something and not be bored. They also see regular people getting famous doing regular things and think, “Hey, that could be us!”

Our 8-year-old wants to be an actress, and when we go places like the Minnesota Zoo she will make videos in the style of these influencer families. It’s harmless and creative fun; I’ve helped edit them and when we have posted a few of them to YouTube, she is delighted when they reach 20 views.

But the fact that the times they are watching these YouTube dads at work are generally when I am busy with work does tug at my heart.

And when they ask why I can’t play with them all the time like those dads, they are indirectly telling me, whether they know it or not, that they want to spend time with me once work is done — to have a “best day ever” when we can.

My wife and I succeed at this often enough that our 5-year-old is constantly asking, especially on weekends, “What fun thing are we going to do today?”

Over the long weekend — no school for our kids on Thursday and Friday, a topic my Star Tribune colleague Laura Yuen deftly tackled recently — we carved out a couple hours for some shopping and rides at Mall of America.

I took exactly one picture of our family and a couple short videos of our kids on rides, but nothing that would be influencer-quality.

Our kids squealed, screamed and laughed nonetheless, caught up in the excitement of the day.

Upon returning home, this occurred to me:

By having some balance in life and not putting every moment of our lives on TV, maybe I’m making the YouTube dads look bad?