Why are you blaming YouTube? it’s not YouTube’s fault!
This is what my 12-year-old son asked me after I informed him that I have blocked YouTube on his laptop. Obviously, I have not just arbitrarily blocked YouTube, there are reasons why I have revoked his access to YouTube. As parents, we have to monitor our children’s Internet access and take appropriate action.
My reasons are; for years, my son has been accessing YouTube any way he can, including sneaking a tablet into his bedroom at night and watching YouTube videos until 2 to 4 am, copying audio onto his mp3 player and listening during the night, resulting in him not wanting to get up for school the next day.
I have expressed to him that I don’t like or want him to watch game streams due to the language used in these streams, which includes sexually oriented, sexist, homophobic and racist commentary. Despite this, he continues to watch these sort of videos for hours on end, going out of his way to hide his actions.
He will sit in the corner of the sofa against the wall with earbuds in and noise isolating headphones on, and whenever I approach him, he frantically closes browser windows. Obviously, this makes me suspicious, so I try to log into his Google account and find he changed the password to cover his tracks. And as he would need to know the existing password, he must have spied my password when I typed it.
Since I have told my son that YouTube is blocked, he hasn’t wanted to touch his laptop, which is a clear indication of what he was doing. I just hope that he doesn’t believe in and support these sort of racist, sexist, homophobic views. I also believe that he has created a second Google account as there is no history since January in the account I set up for him and he knows I monitor the account I set up.
My son changed the Windows password on his laptop as well, where there was no password set. He also discovered the Windows 10 bug which allows him to bypass the standard account limitation of not allowing for installation of new software by hitting cancel when it asks for the administrative password.
At this time, I have regained control of his Google account by recovering the password to my Email address and set a new password as he clearly knows the previous password. I guess he thinks he is being smart working around our monitoring efforts, but I work in IT and know the systems better than he does. All he is achieving is getting himself in trouble for not playing by the rules we set out for him.
He served a computer, video game and Internet ban last week because he had downloaded the offensive game stream audio to his mp3 player and was listening when he should be sleeping. When I asked him for his mp3 player as I wanted to check what was on it, he did a factory reset to hide his actions. Of course, the wife and I knew what he did, in fact, my wife called it while he was resetting the mp3 player.
Going back to the title of this blog post, I said to him that I am not blaming Google or YouTube, I am blaming him, he is the one taking the actions, YouTube is just a platform, YouTube does not make him take the actions he takes. I truly wish I could trust him to obey our rules, but his actions over the past 2 – 3 years have proven that we cannot allow him to have free and unmonitored access to the Internet.