What is the impact of YouTube binge-watching on children?
YouTube binge-watching ruins family dynamics. Smartphones can negatively impact children by fostering passive consumption, reducing face-to-face communication, and creating addictive behaviours. This is often reinforced by inconsistent parental boundaries and can lead children to ignore family and educational opportunities.
Over the last two months, I have been visiting my family in Nelson Mandela Bay, South Africa, where I grew up. Since 2024, I’ve been lecturing at a college in Changzhou, China, and I’ve realised again how heavily my Chinese students rely on their smartphones. Those who do not pay attention in class, mostly boys, are constantly watching short videos.
What I was not prepared for was to see in my own family how smartphones have ruin our lives. My younger sister moved in with my mother in December 2024, along with her family, after a few years of difficult living circumstances. She has three children, two girls and one boy.
Caleb is the eldest and 16 years old. Payton is the 2nd-oldest, 14 years old, and is just starting high school with her brother this year. Haydenm, the youngest, is 9 years old and still in their old primary school, having to repeat grade 2 this year for various reasons.
What are the signs of smartphone addiction in children?
The shock I experienced at their reliance, sometimes plain addiction to their smartphones was something I could not have been prepared for. Sometime ago, their father, my brother-in-law, had told me how strictly their smartphone access was limited to weekends, with no smartphone access during the school week. Now, they are using it before school, while taking a bath, after school, sometimes while making snacks, when they are in the toilet, and just walking around the house.
YouTube binge-watching ruins family dynamics in reality
In almost all cases, they were watching or listening to something on YouTube. This is a behaviour I know very well from my own experiences watching online videos for hours on end. There is a passivity that creeps in as you watch video after video. There’s always the next one, and the next one, and just one more. It’s an endless stream of highly targeted, personalised videos based on your YouTube and other short-form video app watch history.
When I tried to talk to my sister’s children, as their Uncle with extensive experience researching and lecturing on how smartphones affect behaviour, I was mostly dismissed or ignored. There were times I tried to remind them how to be smart and safe online, and in the past, when they did not each have their own smartphones, I always had their respect.
How does a parent’s behavior influence a child’s smartphone use?
So I realised that after almost 8 weeks of this non-stop nonsense of taking their smartphones into the bathroom or toilet, it was the bad example my sister, a high school English teacher, had set. Maybe because the flat-screen TVs were not mounted and connected to the satellite dish, since moving in with my mom, she has justified her own constant YouTube binge-watching behaviour on her laptop and smartphone. We never managed to address it directly with her and her husband, as he works away in a nearby town and only comes home every two weeks for the weekend.
It was extremely frustrating, as I wanted to communicate with them, learn about their passions as they have grown up, and see how I could introduce them to university study opportunities in China through the Chinese government scholarship I had received to complete my MBA at Ningbo University from 2013 to 2015.
How can family members talk to kids about screen time?
So this is a real predicament for me, as my family situation does not align with the ethos of this blog. It doesn’t align with my values and what I teach families about being smart and safe online. This is in contrast to some other parents I met on my recent holiday in South Africa, and how structured their parenting was to limit smartphone access, place clear boundaries on smartphone usage and also engage their children in active parenting by asking them about their online experiences, e.g. “What have you learned from what you’ve been watching?”
There will need to be a serious intervention with my sister’s children to address this problem by both parents. The boundaries may have been clearly defined in the past, but are no longer being reinforced. And to some extent, this is the primary role of the father in a parenting relationship. This is whow YouTube binge-watching ruins family dynamics