A Critical Look at YouTube Videos: Causing Behavioral Change Among Children

Abstract

Media has always been assumed as one of the sources of building realities for the society. Media content is considered as an important cause of behavioral change in society. Children due to their minor age are more likely to get influenced by the content. Due to emergence of YouTube and its easy accessibility and negligence of parents due to their busy lives, we cannot limit its effects on our children. This research merely focuses on the behavioral change of children caused by watching YouTube videos. As per this research findings children have used YouTube as institute from where they have learned their basic education such as alphabets and counting, identification of colors and shapes and nursery rhymes. On other hand these changes have increased aggression, unhealthy mental growth, sleeping disorders and any other emotional or physical change. Semi-Structured interviews have been conducted with N=30 mothers of preschooler from Islamabad. Proportionate Stratified Sampling method has been adopted to cover most of the population. The sample has been divided into three class divisions such as Upper, Middle and Lower class, out of which N=10 samples are interviewed randomly. Mothers who belong to Upper class of the society are mostly more educated and they expose their children to comparatively positive and educating content. Whereas mothers of middle class have less control over the content and they are only focused on how to keep their child busy and distracted. Mothers of Lower class have no idea about the quality of content, and time their children are spending watching that content. One similar notion that can be seen in all three class divisions is that mothers want escapism and for that they are exposing their children to YouTube videos.