Babies Are Obsessed With Their iPads. Who Cares?

CoComelon and the fraught battle over the quality of youth

“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” CoComelon

When I was a young child, somewhere around four years old, my family visited the American Museum of Natural History to see a show at the planetarium. This trip did not end well.

It was a show on black holes, if I remember right. The specifics really wouldn’t have mattered. I was a sensitive young child, to put it kindly, for whom routine trips to the, say, dentist, were prone to interruptions by polite requests from the staff that I come back another time—my violent thrashing and guttural wailing were scaring the other children. The planetarium visit was particularly ripe for disaster. A dark, cavernous room, full of unfamiliar seats tilted back into funny positions in a gaping circle—a circle! I stretched my neck back, gazed into a black, simulated sky filled with whirling, bright dots, specks which a deep voice was telling me were each millions of times larger than Earth, themselves filled with their own suns and moons and emptiness. That emptiness. Such vastness is what really lodged in my chest. It never left. My coming to terms, in real time, with the scale of what’s really out there, right now, at this minute, its simultaneous significance and triviality, the gaps in meaning too devastating to process.

Weekend jaunt to AMC to catch “Racing Stripes” and suck down a birthday cake waffle cone from Cold Stone Creamery this was not. It was all, as my grandfather would say, too much. I started squirming, I’m sure, and my well-versed parents kindly escorted me from the theater and took me home.

I thought of this memory relentlessly as I read Jia Tolentino’s excellent New Yorker feature earlier this month on CoComelon, the “juggernaut” animation creator pumping out an almost unfathomable amount of YouTube content for toddlers (in the first quarter of 2023, over 60 billion hours of CoComelon content was streamed on YouTube). I worked in an elementary school for a year pretty recently, so I was surprised I’d never heard of the company until I realized its content is intended for an audience far younger than the fifth graders I taught; CoComelon’s target demographic is kids under four years old. The company is pursuing, in other words, babies.

As Tolentino notes, supposedly suspect content designed for children—and the inevitable backlash against it—dates back at least as far as Plato’s Republic, and has reemerged as such children’s shows as “Sesame Street,” “Teletubbies,” and “Baby Einstein” successively infiltrated nurseries around the world.¹ I try very, very hard on issues like these to keep the long lens of such history in mind—to remember that not so long ago the rise of the novel was bemoaned as the downfall of society.

Still, there’s something which feels particularly insidious about the way CoComelon has risen to the top of the toddler entertainment game. The spreadsheet-based, algorithmic-intensive mechanisms by which the low-salaried creatives at CoComelon design their content are clearly intended not only to be popular but to suck in. There are five-hour long CoComelon compilations available to stream freely on YouTube (freely, of course, as long as you can tolerate the ads; when I found “Bath Song,” the 6.7 billion-view CoComelon production, it was sandwiched between spots for USAA insurance and Shopify). Company executives issue edicts on episode endings like this: “Even if an episode was soundtracked by a lullaby, the characters should not go to sleep at the end of it. If they did, kids at home might be encouraged to press Pause and put the screen away.”

At the risk of belatedly joining the cacophony which emerged in the wake of Jonathan Haidt’s last book release, we must be approaching some sort of tipping point in terms of targeted content and screen obsession among children—if not for the kids themselves than for the adults obsessed over it. In my fifth grade classroom two years ago, phone use in class was easily the hottest point of contention between teachers and students (a close second: those fucking fidget poppers). They all had smartphones with giant screens.² They were obsessed with YouTube and Roblox and Stranger Things TikTok (a ten-year-old introduced me, rather happily, to the music of Kate Bush), all of which they accessed almost exclusively on their phones. Within an environment where I once broke up a fistfight between nine-year-olds squaring off like MMA fighters in the school auditorium, where I attempted on another day to sooth a child in the aftermath of his having wrapped a sweater around his neck and squeezed after a classmate told him he should kill himself, I found myself most perplexed by how addicted those kids, from second grade up, were to their phones.

Which begs the question: why? Why was I so fixated on the heavy screen time my ten-year-olds logged? Why do I, a single man-child who feels too much like a three-year-old myself to fathom having offspring of my own within this holocene, fret over the morality underlying the glistening wet soap and itsy-bitsy-spider knockoff tunes in the CoComelon videos made for babies? Why do I care? Tolentino herself addresses this question in her conclusion:

“I often feel that the anxiety I have about my kids’ screen time comes mainly from sublimated disappointment in myself. The most frightening studies I’ve seen found that parents, when using smartphones, respond to their children’s needs less, play with them less, and show decreased sensitivity and warmth. Parental device usage correlates strongly with children’s device usage; the average adult spends some four and a half hours each day looking at her phone. When it comes to the shows we allow our children to watch, we are afraid of—what, exactly? That our kids’ capacity for deep thought will be blunted by compulsive screen use? That they’ll lose their ability to sit with the plain fact of existence, to pay attention to the world as it is, to conceive of new possibilities? That they’ll grow up to be just like us, only worse?”

I mostly agree with this analysis—that our disappointment in children’s phone use is ultimately a disappointment in ourselves—but I think it overlooks a crucial aspect of the hysteria over early-onset screen addiction and the class from which the phone critique tends to emerge. Children’s screen time fretting, I suspect, arises from a much murkier place than most are willing to admit. Far from empirical yet so visceral as to be synonymous with truth, this place exists within a haze I can’t help but falling into when I discuss or think about my own childhood. It’s the same dust which covers that planetarium visit or snow day or conversation on a dodgeball court. These memories are varied, and far from unequivocally positive, but they are all shrouded within a heavy and mysterious blanket, one from under which I can squint and just barely make out the early rays of some long-lost sunrise poking through thick, fragrant strands of fabric.

My childhood is fucking sacred to me. And the memories associated with it are, in my mind, unpoisoned by the maleficent glow of an iPhone. They harken back to a time in my life when I dealt with stress and boredom not by binging four-minute “Seinfeld” clips on autoplay but by inventing games in the backyard, narrating my life under my breath like a sports announcer, visualizing how subatomic dots distributed randomly around the driveway would react to the cracks and contours of its ribbed, shiny concrete.

Consciously and unconsciously, I find myself striving—in my minute-to-minute awareness, in my writing—to summon some place, some state of being, which both never existed (see, nostalgia) but which nonetheless matters to me more than anything else. My childhood memories—not necessarily the events themselves, but the eerie glow which accompanies them—are my North Star, my guiding principle, my Platonic ideal for how I should be feeling when I’m passing time. I am horrified, then, on a level far closer to my gut than anything which could be proven by a study, at the thought that such a universe might be decimated by a force as mundanely pernicious as a CoComelon spreadsheet. This, to me, represents an intrusion of the highest order, the annihilation of Mecca, the evaporation of Jerusalem. Without the memories built around those early blank spaces in my childhood, I die. What would it have meant for those gaps to have been filled in by “Bath Song” on an endless loop instead? I sense that this less tangible, more pressing concern—whether legitimate or not—is at the root of most of the consternation over children’s screen time, why ostensibly disinterested onlookers like myself find ourselves so preoccupied with the issue.

It also isn’t a coincidence that writers—the ones most responsible for driving this discourse—are especially absorbed by the topic. Writers tend to emerge from a population pool which more or less self-selects for people who are keenly aware and interested in their childhoods, who place disproportionate value on the fuzzy cradle of youth. They are, generally speaking, people who are predisposed to be transported by Proust digging back in time, Baldwin elucidating the heaviness of adolescence, Tolentino describing the dread of handing her indignant four-year-old daughter an ameliorative iPad. For better or worse, the most hallowed spaces in both literature and nonfiction are occupied by accounts which, in their own ways, brush the closest to replicating the mysticism of childhood. 

Or, perhaps, that’s just why I am so moved by them. I’m keenly aware that my devotion to the sanctity of childhood is likely not a viewpoint shared by much, or necessarily most, of the world. I know so many people who purport to remember nothing of their early childhoods, who are blank slates before the age of eight or ten or twelve, who don’t and will never believe me when I tell them I can remember all sorts of stuff from when I was six. They feel no connection to their youths. I bubble up with incredulity whenever I hear such a perspective, which probably sounds patronizing but is in fact based in total disbelief; how could one live without a relationship with their inner child? But I’ve heard it enough to believe it to be true.

For this group of people, who may well be convinced intellectually by the hard data presented to them by authors like Haidt, the stakes of the screen time conversation nonetheless probably appear less grandiose than they do to those who have the inextricable relationship with early childhood most of the leading figures driving this discourse likely do. Ultimately, then, there’s a disconnect between who’s really invested in the early-age content issue; those, like me, who (perhaps foolishly) elevate childhood experience into a lofty, precious realm, and those who, for whatever reason, do not. The key question underpinning the future of early consumption habits, then, may not be how the quality of consumed content affects young children but whether the quality of their youth matters at all.

1. “Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have then they are grown up?” -Socrates

2. Not for nothing, my class was mostly nonwhite and low-income; a 2020 study Common Sense Media study cited by Tolentino found Black children under eight were on their screens roughly three times longer than white children of the same age.