Acta Pædiatrica ISSN 0803-5253

REGULAR ARTICLE

Children aged 6–24 months like to watch YouTube videos but could not
learn anything from them
Savita Yadav (savitaydv@yahoo.com)1, Pinaki Chakraborty1, Prabhat Mittal2, Udit Arora1
1.Division of Computer Engineering, Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India
2.Department of Commerce, Satyawati College (Evening), University of Delhi, Delhi, India

Keywords ABSTRACT
Infant entertainment, Infant learning, Smartphone, Aim: Parents sometimes show young children YouTube videos on their smartphones. We
Video, YouTube
studied the interaction of 55 Indian children born between December 2014 and May
Correspondence 2015 who watched YouTube videos when they were 6–24 months old.
S Yadav, Division of Computer Engineering, Netaji
Subhas Institute of Technology, New Delhi 110078, Methods: The children were recruited by the researchers using professional and personal
India. contacts and visited by the same two observers at four ages, for at least 10 minutes. The
Tel: 00 91 99680 77734 |
observers recorded the children’s abilities to interact with touch screens and identify people
Fax: 00 91 11250 00151 |
Email: savitaydv@yahoo.com in videos and noted what videos attracted them the most.
Received
Results: The children were attracted to music at six months of age and were interested in
9 October 2017; revised 18 December 2017; watching the videos at 12 months. They could identify their parents in videos at
accepted 13 February 2018. 12 months and themselves by 24 months. They started touching the screen at 18 months
DOI:10.1111/apa.14291 and could press the buttons that appeared on the screen, but did not understand their use.
The children preferred watching dance performances by multiple artists with melodical
music, advertisements for products they used and videos showing toys and balloons.
Conclusion: Children up to two years of age could be entertained and kept busy by
showing them YouTube clips on smartphones, but did not learn anything from the videos.

INTRODUCTION children have been reported to be attracted to salient

Parents and other adults often hand their smartphones to
young children for short periods of time (1), perhaps to
pacify them or to divert their attention from something. This
can allow parents to do some important work while
remaining close to their children. We conducted a longitu-
dinal study where we observed the interaction of children
from six months to two years of age with smartphones.
Children of this age cannot use apps, but they are attracted
to videos played on smartphones and can be kept busy with
them for some minutes. As a result, parents and other adults
often play YouTube videos on their smartphones and lend
them to children, typically for up to five minutes. This often
becomes the first interaction children have with digital
media.
Diener et al. (2) observed that children aged nine to ten
months were able to distinguish between real-world events
and videos and that videos conveyed meaning and emo-
tional impact to children of this age. However, children
were more interested in, and could be better engaged by,
real-world presentations. Demers et al. (3) observed that
children aged 12–21 months assigned greater value to
media content that their parents were looking at and were
more likely to look towards a screen and for a longer time if
their parents were also looking at it. Valkenburg and
Vroone (4) found that children paid attention to media
content that was only moderately different from their
existing knowledge and capabilities. Moreover, young
auditory and visual features like applause and visual
surprises. The attentional shift from such salient features
to general content starts between 18 and 30 months of age.
Barr et al. (5) reported that children aged 12–18 months
paid more attention to media if they had prior exposure to
such media and watching with their parents helped young
children to concentrate on media content. The same
observations were also made by Fidler et al. (6) when they
studied children aged 6–18 months.
Krcmar et al. (7) found that children aged 15–24 months
were able to learn novel words from watching television,
with some support from parents. However, the extent of this
learning and its long-term effects is debatable (8,9). Several
Key notes
 Observers studied the interaction of 55 children who
watched YouTube videos on smartphones when they
were 6–24 months of age.
 At six months, they were attracted to music, at
12 months, they watched videos and identified their
parents and at 18 months, they touched buttons, but
did not know what they did.
 Children up to 24 months were entertained by watch-
ing YouTube clips, but did not learn anything from
them.

©2018 Foundation Acta Pædiatrica. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd 1
Impact of YouTube videos on infants
other studies have actually arrived at a different conclusion.
Robb et al. (10) did not find any evidence of videos helping
children aged 12–15 months to learn words, and Christakis
(11) also made similar observations. Richert et al. (12)
found that children aged 12–24 months could hardly learn
words from videos without parental intervention.
DeLoache et al. (13) found that children aged 12–
18 months could not learn words from videos and felt that
parents who were sympathetic towards media use some-
times overestimated how much their children were learning
from such media.
Richards and Cronise (14) found that children aged 6–
12 months could not follow the sequential audio and video
of a programme. They were unable to differentiate between
a genuine video from a sequence of random screenshots.
Nevertheless, Kabali et al. (15) observed that slightly older
children liked to watch videos on YouTube and other video
sharing websites. Dayanim and Namy (16) found that
children aged 15 months could learn signs for expressive
communication from videos. However, young children
preferred to interact more with the real world than
watching videos. This was verified by Barr and Hayne
(17), who found that children aged 12–18 months were able
to imitate actions better if they had seen them in real world
than in videos. Courage et al. (18) also found that children
aged 6–18 months paid more attention to toys than to
videos.
Smartphones are highly portable, children seem to like
them (19), and they can be used to show videos to children
anywhere and at any time. The aim of this study was to
examine the interactions of children when they viewed
YouTube videos played on smartphones at four ages
between 6 and 24 months.
METHODS
This was a study of children born between December
2014 and May 2015 and living in New Delhi, India. The
researchers recruited children using their professional and
personal contacts, and they included the children of
relatives, colleagues, neighbours and friends. We met the
parents of the children when they were six months old
and asked them whether they had used music on their
smartphones to quieten their children down at that age. If
they said yes then we explained the objectives of our
study to the parents and included those children with the
parents’ verbal consent. There were no exclusion criteria.
We visited the children four times over the next
18 months at their homes in the presence of at least
one of their parents. We approached 88 parents, started
the study with 62 children and completed it with 55
children (31 girls). We had to discontinue visiting seven
children when it became difficult to get appointments
with their parents. We did not encourage the parents to
play music or videos to the children in any way at any
stage of the study.
The children belonged to upper-class Indian families and
had been exposed to smartphones along with other
2 ©2018 Foundation Acta Pædiatrica. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Yadav et al.
common household gadgets since birth. Their parents often
lent them their smartphones with YouTube videos playing.
On most occasions, the videos were of song and dance
performances in the families’ native language. Most of the
videos featured multiple dancers. The songs were generally
sung by multiple singers, with elaborate orchestra and
chorus support. We performed five experiments on these
children.
Experiment one
We tried to understand how the behaviour of the children
towards YouTube videos changed over time. We visited the
children when they were 6, 12, 18 and 24 months old at
their homes in the presence of their parents. The same two
observers visited all the children every time, and they
observed each child for at least 10 minutes. They observed
the children watching videos on YouTube without any
intervention.
Experiment two
We tried to determine when the children learned to identify
themselves and people they have met in real life in videos.
Videos of the children, their relatives and, in some cases,
family pets were recorded. These videos were uploaded to
YouTube and shown to the children on a smartphone. Two
types of videos were shown to the children. Some of the
videos were recent, while the others were recorded six
months previously. The children were asked to identify the
people and the animals in the videos. The experiment was
conducted when the children were 12, 18 and 24 months
old.
Experiment three
We tried to determine the ability of the children to identify
people who featured in the videos shown to them but were
otherwise not known to them. The children were shown a
video of a dance performance in which one dancer
appeared prominently. The video was shown to the children
repeatedly, and then they were asked to identify the same
dancer in other videos. The experiment was conducted
when the children were 18 and 24 months old.
Experiment four
We studied how easily the children interacted with smart-
phones using a custom designed video player app that
looked similar to the YouTube app, but had five modes of
operation. In mode one, the control buttons were displayed
on the screen for the entire duration of the video. In mode
two, the buttons appeared when the screen was touched
and vanished if the screen was not touched for three
seconds. Mode three was a variation of mode two, where
the buttons reappeared at random positions every time the
screen was touched. The buttons were half the size in mode
four and the buttons appeared in random colours in mode
five. A video was played using the app, and the children
were allowed to interact with the app without any inter-
vention. The experiment was conducted when the children
were 18 and 24 months old.
Yadav et al. Impact of YouTube videos on infants

Experiment five
We tried to find out what videos attracted the children more
when they were 24 months old. We classified the YouTube
videos that were typically shown to them into 10 categories:
a dance by multiple dancers with melodical music, a dance
by a single dancer with melodical music, singing without
dancing, playing musical instruments without singing and
dancing, movies and soap operas, cartoons, news and talk
shows, commercial advertisements, videos showing toys
and balloons and videos of animals, birds, butterflies and
fishes. The children were shown five videos from each
category. The number of times the children watched a video
for one minute or more was noted.
Statistics
The behaviour of the children who participated in the study
was analysed with frequency and descriptive statistics with
95% confidence intervals (95% CIs) across different age
categories. We used SPSS version 19 (IBM Corp, Armonk,
NY, USA) to report the results. Possible interactions
between age categories were evaluated, and differences
were tested using the k-proportion chi-square test. Because
experiment three and experiment four were only performed
when the children were 18 and 24 months old, we used the
Z-test to find significant differences between the propor-
tions at those ages.
RESULTS
In experiment one, we observed that the children were
attracted towards the music in YouTube videos at the age of
six months (Table 1). Although the children listened curi-
ously to sounds from different sources at this age, they were
attracted more towards YouTube videos especially if they
played melodical music. Some children (31%) danced when
the music was played and the nature of the dancing varied
widely among the children. Some shook their limbs slightly
while others jumped up and down if someone held their
torsos and enabled them to stay in a standing position. At
this age, the children showed no interest in watching the
videos. The children did not ask for videos to be played at
this age either.
At the age of 12 months, some children (38%) asked for
YouTube videos to be played to them. The dancing became
less frequent, and most of the children (67%) were now
interested in watching the videos. The children maintained
a steady head position and eye gaze while watching the
videos. The children listened to the music and watched the
videos passively. The children did not respond even if the
display was turned off suddenly with the music continuing
to play.
At the age of 18 months, the children continued to listen
to music and watch videos played on YouTube. More
children (65%) now asked for videos to be played to them
and were adamant about it sometimes. The children were
more active now and wanted to participate in the activity.
The children observed how adults played the videos by
touching the buttons that appeared on the smartphone
screen. Most of the children (76%) kept touching the screen
and when the buttons appeared they could press them with
ease. However, the children did not understand the use of
the different buttons. They expressed displeasure if the
video stopped playing because they pressed the buttons
randomly. The children generally (56%) got confused if the
display was turned off suddenly. Some of them picked up
the smartphone and turned it over expecting to find the
dancers there. A few of the children (16%) sometimes
confused a dancer with their relatives and uttered their
names.
At the age of 24 months, the children were more
confident users of smartphone. They could hold a smart-
phone in their hands firmly and were used to watching
videos on YouTube. The children asked for YouTube videos
to be played to them more frequently (80%) than before.
The children (80%) tried to interact more with the smart-
phone and touched the screen more frequently. However,
the children could only make simple gestures with their
fingers on the screen and could not control a smartphone.
The children now rarely thought a dancer was one of their
relatives.
The chi-square k-proportion test (k = 4) was conducted
to test the differences in proportions across the age
categories. It was observed that all treatments were signif-
icantly different at a 0.1% level across the age categories.
In experiment two, we observed that the children were
mostly (89%) able to identify their relatives and pets in the
videos at the age of 12 months (Table 2). However, the
children were not able to identify themselves in the videos

Table 1 Results of experiment one (n = 55)

Number of children who . . . Six months 12 months 18 months 24 months Chi-square statistic p Value

Were attracted to, and listened to, music from videos played on YouTube 55 55 55 55 – –
Danced when music was played 17 1 2 4 31.054 <0.001
Showed interest in watching the videos Nil 37 52 48 130.382 <0.001
Asked for videos to be played Nil 21 36 44 82.204 <0.01
Got confused when the display was turned off suddenly Nil Nil 31 2 98.787 <0.01
Misidentified a dancer as a parent or other relative Nil Nil 9 1 23.885 <0.01
Were keen in touching the screen and pressed the buttons when they appeared Nil Nil 42 44 141.346 <0.01
Could hold the smartphone firmly Nil Nil Nil 55 220.000 <0.01

©2018 Foundation Acta Pædiatrica. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd 3
Impact of YouTube videos on infants Yadav et al.

at this age. At the age of 18 months, some children (44%) indicated that proportion of children aged 18 and
were able to identify themselves in recent videos, but were 24 months of age were significantly different in identifying
unable to identify themselves in videos recorded six months the dancers when they appeared in another video in a
earlier. In some cases, the children thought the children in similar dress.
the videos were other children they knew. At the age of In experiment four, we observed that the children
24 months, most children (98%) were able to identify typically (64%) learnt to press the control buttons displayed
themselves in recent videos, and some (25%) were also on the screen by 18 months of age (Table 4). The children
able to identify themselves in older videos. The chi-square could press the buttons irrespective of whether they then
k-proportion test (k = 3) was conducted to test the differ- vanished, their random positions on the screen, smaller size
ences in proportions across the age categories. It was and random colours by 24 months of age (69%). However,
observed that all treatments were significantly different at a the children did not understand the use of the different
1% level across the age categories. buttons and kept pressing them randomly. The children
In experiment three, we observed that the children were could not use the sliding seek bar at this age. Table 4 also
not able to identify a prominently featured dancer when reports the Z statistics and the significance values of
they appeared in other videos when they were 18 months differences in the treatments for children aged 18 and
old (Table 3). At the age of 24 months, some children 24 months old. Differences in the proportion of children
(49%) were able to identify the dancer when they appeared belonging to the two age categories were found to be
in another video in a similar dress. However, the children insignificant with respect to pressing the buttons that
were not able to identify the dancer in other videos where appeared permanently on the screen and the buttons that
they appeared in other outfits. To find the significant appeared on touching the screen. On the contrary, the
differences in the proportion of two independent samples, ability to press the buttons whose position and colour
we used the Z-test. The significance value (p < 0.01) changed and the buttons of smaller size was significantly
different at 1 and 5%, respectively, for children aged 18 and
24 months old.
Table 5 reports the mean, standard error and 95% CI of
Table 2 Results of experiment two (n = 55) the number of videos a child watched for one minute or
Number of children 12 18 24 Chi-square more in experiment five. It was observed that children aged
who were . . . months months months statistic p Value 24 months preferred to watch dances by multiple dancers
with melodical music most (mean score 3.76, 95% CI: 0.50–
Able to identify 49 55 55 12.452 <0.01
1.03). Commercial advertisements (mean score 2.82) and
relatives and pets
videos showing toys and balloons (mean score 2.24) also
Able to identify self 1 24 54 102.924 <0.01
Able to identify self Nil Nil 14 30.596 <0.01
attracted children at this age. Furthermore, when we tested
in an older video the average scores at three, we found that the average scores
of most of the types of videos were significantly different
than three at the 1% level.

Table 3 Results of experiment three (n = 55) DISCUSSION

Number of children who were . . . 18 months 24 months Z value p Value
This study of children at four ages observed some interest-
ing trends regarding the use of smartphones. How often and
Able to identify a dancer Nil 27 5.982 <0.01 for how long children watched YouTube videos largely
in similar dresses depended on their parents. Lauricella et al. (20) made
Able to identify a dancer Nil Nil – – similar observations. We found that the total amount of
in different dresses
time the children spent watching YouTube videos typically
varied from 0 to 15 minutes per week. The children liked to

Table 4 Results of experiment four (n = 55)

Number of children who could . . . 18 months 24 months Z value p Value

Press buttons that appeared permanently on the screen 35 41 1.238 >0.05

Press buttons that appeared on touching the screen 35 41 1.238 >0.05
Press buttons whose positions on the screen changed Nil 38 7.619 <0.01
Press buttons of smaller size 19 41 4.213 <0.01
Press buttons of different colours 28 40 2.355 <0.05
Understand the use of the buttons Nil Nil – –
Control the seek bar Nil Nil – –

4 ©2018 Foundation Acta Pædiatrica. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd
Yadav et al. Impact of YouTube videos on infants

Table 5 The number of videos a child watched for one minute or more in experiment five
Type of videos Mean and SE 95% CI

Dance by multiple dancers with melodical music 3.76* (0.13) 0.50 1.03
Dance by a single dancer with melodical music 1.91* (0.17) 1.43 0.75
Singing without dancing 0.64* (0.08) 2.53 2.20
Playing of musical instruments without singing and dancing 0.65* (0.09) 2.54 2.15
Movies and soap operas 1.82* (0.15) 1.49 0.88
Cartoon films 1.98* (0.14) 1.30 0.74
News and talk shows 0.71* (0.11) 2.52 2.07
Commercial advertisements 2.82 (0.18) 0.55 0.19
Videos showing toys and balloons 2.24* (0.18) 1.12 0.40
Videos of animals, birds, butterflies and fishes 1.02* (0.12) 2.21 1.75

*p < 0.01.

hold a smartphone in their hands and touch its screen and
that the size and portability of a smartphone made it more
attractive for children than a personal computer. However,
the children were not able to control a smartphone at the
age of two years.
By the age of two years, children can identify characters
that appear in the videos regularly shown to them. The
characters may be historic, mythological, cartoon or fairy-
tale characters or relatives they have never met. Children
become more interested in characters if their photographs
or stickers are displayed in their homes. However, children
cannot remember the story of a fairytale, a cartoon or any
other play even after seeing it several times. Two-year-old
children are quite keen on watching advertisements for
products they consume, such as baby food, chocolates,
biscuits, toys, balloons and diapers. They are also more
interested in real videos than in animated ones at this age.
Children typically want to see a few favourite videos every
time they get a smartphone.
Two-year-old children cannot learn any new word from
videos by their own. However, children can learn words
that are used in videos if parents and other adults teach
them those words later. Children can only learn a few new
words at the age of two years and tend to forget them after a
few hours unless they are regularly used by adults in their
homes.
Children who are used to watching YouTube videos may
at time ask for videos to be played to them. However, that
behaviour is hardly compulsive. Courage et al. (18)
reported that children preferred to play with toys than
watch videos. We also observed that children who watched
YouTube videos also played with their toys and interacted
normally in the physical world. In our opinion, watching
YouTube videos does not provide any developmental
benefits for children up to two years of age, but they are
not harmful either.
CONCLUSION
This was an observational study that examined the interac-
tion of 55 children who watched YouTube videos on
smartphones when they were 6–24 months of age. At six
months, they were attracted to music, at 12 months, they
watched videos and identified their parents, and at
18 months, they touched buttons, but did not know what
they did. Our study concluded that children up to
24 months of age were entertained by watching YouTube
clips, but did not learn anything from them.
FINANCE
This study did not receive any specific funding.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The authors have no conflict of interests to declare.
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