Toddler Media Will Infect Your Algorithms Like a Plague

From Spotify to Netflix to YouTube, my kid's tastes have taken over

That episode of Bluey from S3 where the parents are obviously hung over. 10/10 (Bluey/ Ludo Productions)

I’m not a fan of giving or receiving unsolicited advice, but one thing I tell friends who are expecting their first child is that they should watch as many movies and shows that require concentration as they can during the waning months of pregnancy, because after that baby comes, it’ll be at least a few months before anybody reliably has two-plus hours of unburdened relaxation time. Sure, you might luck out and have an “easy” baby, but better to plan on things being average to hard. Upside surprises are easier to swallow than downside ones.

After our daughter moved from the newborn phase into the baby phase and her demands on us started feeling a little bit less like war crimes and a little bit more like bullying, there were a few golden months when my husband or I could put something on the TV while she played and she wouldn’t notice or care.

But then she started paying attention to what was on TV, our aspirations of being a no-screens-before-age-two house withered. Luckily, she has specific and, as far as I can tell, minimally annoying tastes. She loves Bluey (Juniper has watched so much Bluey that she says some words with a light Australian accent– which is actually pretty cute) and is so into the Fruit Bat episode that she asks for it by singing the Fruit Bat song, which, honestly, is a bop. 

She’s also still into YouTube videos of garbage and recycling trucks collecting trash, classic Sesame Street segments starring Cookie Monster or Ernie (both of whom she calls “Elmo”). She can jam with Ms. Rachel sometimes, but what she really prefers is this three hour long ambient loop on Disney Plus called Dory’s Reef Cam, which imagines that the character of Dory from Finding Nemo and Finding Dory has a Ring Camera outside of her house and many fish characters from the films swimming by and occasionally waving. It’s like Xanax for very small children. 

The video content Juniper watches doesn’t suck per se– Who doesn’t love Bluey? Who doesn’t love Xanax?-- but it has led all of the video streaming platforms to toss what must have been algorithms that were decades in the making and replace them with recommendations for toddler-centric recommendations that do suck. 

It’s like the person I was before Juniper came along died in a tragic algorithmic accident, because my recommendations are infused with kid stuff now. What about all that time I put into watching videos of the greatest marathon finishes of all time? What about cooking and baking competition shows featuring Christmas and/or Halloween food? What about all the prestige TV? What about that video of the children’s choir covering Tori Amos’ “1000 Oceans”? What about all the Steve Martin movies? What about all those videos of otters playing or zoo tigers being given Halloween pumpkins to play with? Do all those years mean nothing to you, YouTube? What do you have to say for yourself, Amazon Prime??

Now Netflix sees me as a person desperate to entertain a fickle child instead of a fully-realized adult woman who has lived a whole life and has a full 30-45 minutes of time to sit down and relax in front of the TV at the end of the day before passing out. (We don’t even watch any of the kids shows on Netflix because kids shows on Netflix, like most shows on Netflix, are not good. The algorithm keeps trying, like a perky Express employee who keeps throwing Editor Pants and jewel toned bandage blouses over the door of your fitting room when all you want is a tee shirt.)

But what is happening to my video streaming platforms is nothing compared to the utter destruction Juniper has wrought on Spotify. This is because music is often sufficient to distract her from being in a bad mood. Here’s something I didn’t realize before becoming a parent: the sound of a kid under two whining in the backseat of a car is actually more noxious to the human ear than those alleged sound waves that caused Havana Syndrome in diplomats. When I’m exposed to car whining, I’ll do whatever it takes to stop it without having to pull over, take the kid out of the carseat and go through the whole “hard child reset” song and dance. If I did that every time she started complaining, it would take me half an hour to drive a mile to CVS. 

Juniper’s car complaints are almost always because she’s bored, and the cure for the bored whining is almost always playing PinkFrog’s “Baby Shark,” sometimes several times in a row. Every time the jaunty little intro plays, her face will light up and she’ll start waving her hands and kicking her feet with pure joy, her brain bobbing in a wave pool of dopamine. There’s no such thing as the law of diminishing returns when it comes to a toddler listening to Baby Shark. Economists should study her.  

“Baby Shark” is a goddamn menace, not only to me, but to the entire world. The original Baby Shark music video has thirteen billion views on YouTube. It shows up everywhere on my Spotify recommended list, like in the middle of a “Happy Mix” that also contains such strange bedfellows as “If You’re Happy and You Know It (Clap Your Hands)”, “Stompy the Bear,” “Hakuna Matata,” the Muppet Show theme, and, for some reason, “Faith” by George Michael and “Electric Feel” by MGMT. My playlist recommendations are now monuments to the ways in which Cool Erin and Mom Erin struggle to coexist in the same body.  

Last year, when Spotify released my Year in Review, one of my top tracks was “Brown Noise.” Just hours of smooth static designed to help induce rest and relaxation. That’s a pretty good indicator of how my 2022 went. 

I know that by now most streaming services have the ability to switch profiles so that having a child’s tastes in the mix doesn’t create the litany of AI-generated misses waiting for me every time I log in. It’s possible– nay, probable– that this problem is a product of my own reluctance to take the extra step to switch profiles over to “kids” every time I’m going to watch or listen to something that is more for my kid than it is for me. But honestly? I don’t want to go through the extra steps. It’s annoying and, if I’m dealing with dreaded car whining, unsafe. Plus, after Spotify rolled out their “family profiles” account, I tried learning how to use it but gave up due to the fact that I take offense to technology companies trying to force me to learn a new thing. I’m paying you guys to make things easier for me and your CEO’s are making the equivalent of a small country’s GDP every few years. You figure it out, you know? 

What makes this seemingly minor “cul-de-sac problems” complaint sting is that time to oneself is of the essence when you’re a parent. Actually helpful recommendations from content platforms would save me precious minutes of sifting through recommendations for four-hour videos of trains or gangs of squeaky voiced animated cats with enormous eyes who fly around Kittydale doing cat-themed heroics and instead serve up shows that I– a person who still exists separately from their child– would actually want to watch. Algorithmic recommendations, theoretically, should help the people who have the least time and energy the most. But they don’t.

Plus, I know the day is coming, sooner than I would like, when my child wants to watch something that is truly shitty, like Cocomelon. I need this to be fixed before then. I don’t even want to wrap my mind around the uncanny valley children’s media horrors that may await.