OPEN LETTERS
An Open Letter to the Screamo Youtubers My Kid is Obsessed With
There’s something about the pitch of your voices and the urgency of your unintelligible exuberance that I loathe and my kid loves
felipepelaquim via Unsplash
Dear Screamo YouTubers Targeting My Kid,
The hair rises on the back of my neck and the blood curdles in my pancreas whenever your voice streams out of those little speakers. It melts my brain cells. It’s not good for my anxiety.
You’re all freakin’ screaming constantly about some Minecraft/Roblox/prank show insipid game. Not to belittle your craft, but it is definitely not for my middle-aged mama ears.
We have a thing we call your videos in my house: yelly Youtube.
My eight-year-old, like most third graders, loves him some YouTube. Give that kid a person playing a game that he could easily be playing on one of three devices within arm’s reach (including the one he’s watching you on) and he is IN. By “in”, I mean he’ll watch it as loud as I’ll let him for as long as I’ll let him with it as close to his face as I’ll let him.
Then again, it doesn’t matter how loud his device’s volume is — you guys scream into the mic in such a way that the sound goes fuzzy buzzy. It’s definitely on purpose. It’s definitely a style.
Youtube’s algorithm encourages certain kinds of content by promoting it. I get it. You want your content promoted. Watchers go down the rabbit hole of subjects suggested on the side or automatically played at the end of a video. There’s a whole thing with monetization and Youtube that my kids have extolled me about in great detail. How long a video is, what its tags are, intros and outtros — the whole thing is driven by whatever it is Youtube thinks will keep eyeballs engaged. Krystal Wascher wrote a great piece on her earnings on Youtube and how the algorithm shapes her payouts.
Apparently, horrendous yelling is what keeps lots of kids engaged. Apparently, literal screaming is the thing the algorithm wants, and you are out to feed the monster.
You’re feeding your kids by screaming bloody murder a hair’s breath from the microphone when some giant oozy green bunny jumps around the corner at your avatar. It’s your literal job and I appreciate that. Your financial security is important. Nonetheless, for the sake of this single mama’s sanity . . .
I’m begging you.
Please.
Stop.
Dan TDM, MrBeast, CoryxKenshin, Unspeakable . . . y’all are giving me grey hair. And I know you don’t care cuz you’re screaming all the way to the bank.
Hyena + Goose = Youtuber Voice
The sound is difficult to put into words. It’s somewhere between a sustained goose honk and a hyena’s guffaw. Really, it’s not like anything I’ve ever heard on a kid’s show, and I’ve watched a whole slew of them with my older boys.
Want to know why Blue’s Clue’s has such staying power? Because the calm and steady sound of Steve lowered my blood pressure and eased my kid’s sense of crazy. Sesame Street is geared to chill everyone tf out. Those shows, even the slightly more intense variety like Yo Gabba Gabba, were curated in part to parents’ taste so that we’d be cool with kids having them on the TV screen in the living room. Now that we’ve got portable devices, what parents will put up with is not a driver anymore.
I refuse to send my son to another room all day or insist that he puts headphones in. I keep an ear out because he occasionally strays beyond what’s ok and I’ll hear a stream of obscenity come out of someone’s mouth on YouTube. Parental controls don’t fix this perfectly, so I’ve got to keep a tab on it.
I think I miss the days of one screen in the house, which I know I could bring back if I wanted to.
From the horse’s mouth
I interviewed my son about this. Here’s how that went. (He watched me while I typed his answers.)
- Me: Why do you like those screaming YouTubers?
- Kid: Because children like them and adults don’t like them.
- Me: So you like the crazy goose/hyena sound they make?
- Kid: No.
- Me: Is it the sound they make or something else?
- Kid: It’s the games that they play.
- Me: I would like it if they screamed less and still played.
- Kid: They only scream because of the games that they play.
I don’t have any idea what to do with that guys. Try to let him enjoy his life I guess? Limit his screen time? I do those things. He gets two of these things max in a day, and that feels like some solid parenting.
All I know is that your shrieking makes me want to shove a knitting needle into my ears as a way to end the crinkling, whole body overstimulation.
Maybe a compromise. . . could you perhaps back two inches away from the microphone at least?
Sincerely,
A frazzled mom in search of earplugs
