Is Cocomelon Bad for Your Child?
Ming (Agents of Speech) examines whether Cocomelon and similar children’s screen content are harmful. He argues the media itself is not inherently poisonous but can create addictive, attention-grabbing behavior in young children because screens provide immediate cause–effect rewards and dopamine-driven reinforcement (illustrated with a pigeon-pecking analogy). He emphasizes use in short, scarce, supervised bursts, co-viewing, using screen time as an earned reward, modeling low adult device use, and gradual reduction rather than sudden removal. The video closes with a CTA to agentsofspeech.com for home-therapy tools.
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Hey, guys, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com let's talk about whether Cocomelon is bad for a child or not. And I've been getting a lot of questions about, like, how does screen time affect my child? Right? The short answer is, of course, as little screen time as possible. We've had some videos talking about what is screen time? What's virtual autism? How does screen time affect a child, right? And today I want to zoom in and double click into what screen time really does, okay? So Cocomelon is one of the things that children are addicted to right now. You know, you've got cocomelon, like live shows, you got cocomelon this, that and everything. Obviously it's a business. I'm not here to badmouth it. I think it's very good in terms of entertainment. But you gotta like, zoom out and see the whole picture, right? So what is this type of children stuff, right? So for instance, when I was a kid, I watched a lot of Sesame Street. I watch a lot of like, Japanese cartoons or whatever. And those do get you addicted, okay? And imagine right now you're watching this on your phone, right? And it's because you are trying to learn something, you're trying to solve a problem, right? It's a device that you can use to learn stuff. Whereas cocomelon or like iPhones or Android phones or whatever for a child is an entertainment. And I remember me as a kid, I can only speak from experience, right? Is that I got this remote TV thing when I was like, what, 10? I got this remote TV thing with a huge antenna and I could watch my favorite TV show whilst I was going home from school. Well, that is actually a form of addiction, right? Because I needed it so badly, I would actually go out of my way to get that device and watch it whilst I was on the bus, right? And that's why when you see children, they're like screaming and they're asking for the phone, they're, they're crying, everything like that. It's. They are addicted, right? And you think about cocomelon, which are very great. Like, they're super good at whatever they're doing. Like, you see the views that they, they rack up, right? We're talking about like nearly a billion views per video, right? Some of them have 100 million, some of them have, like, a lot more than that. And the reason is because professionals like myself, I do use those videos. It's not necessarily bad. It's about how you use it, right? And a lot of parents Will think, oh, I need a. It's like cocaine. I need to get rid of it. Right? You're right. It really is. If you leave them to their own devices, then of course it's gonna turn out bad. Because a child, their brain is so like, it's not mature yet. And you give them something, such a. Such an instantly gratifying device, right? Where you just press buttons and something happens, right? That's exactly what a toy is. And that's like the first level of play, which is what we call means end or cause effect, right? If you search online and you see so many different articles about all play skills, important of stuff. And the reason why children love the phone is because all they need to do is press and something happens. And let's talk about a case that we have right now over the Internet. I haven't. I've seen that this kid in person, but because I'm not around in the country or in the city, and that's, you know, like of the pandemic and everything. So we moved online. So what was happening was that she, she was always clicking. She was always trying to click on the screen. And the reason was because she just loved it when something happened on the screen. When it changed, it didn't matter what kind of video it was. It was that even if she was enjoying the video, she would try to press and change it. And that's something that you have to be careful of, right? There's a study of. I'm going to put the link of the study below, but I'm going to. Now here is a huge disclaimer. I'm going to compare a child to a pigeon, okay? And I'm going to compare you to a pigeon too. So right now in the study, the pigeon would press the button and get a treat. Even if the pigeon itself wasn't hungry, it would keep on pressing the button so that stuff would fall down and it could eat the treat, right? So what happens when the treat disappears? The pigeon goes crazy, goes nuts and keeps on pecking. Peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, peck, keeps on going and then nothing comes out. It seems like it was going insane. And so we can draw this parallel to this primitive behavior towards children who have a hold of a device where they can press present. Something happens, right? So what's going to happen if you give them the device and they keep on pressing it? They won't want to talk to you. They won't want to interact with you. All they want to do is just depress that thing to get a reward. Right. And even if the act of pressing isn't rewarding anymore, they still want to press it. And that's because of something called a dopamine release. Right? And this is the same as you, right? If you're using, you know, the short form content, the videos that you see on Instagram reels, Facebook reels, you know, like TikTok YouTube shorts, you will keep on scrolling, you just keep on swipe up and then you keep, you see the next one. Even if you don't even enjoy watching the videos anymore, all you do is just consume. So it's the same as a kid and you leave it to the kid and they do this for like an hour plus. That's not going to help them develop in terms of holistically. And the reason is because a child only has this much amount of attention span, you're talking about like a year and a half child who probably only has like five minutes tops of attention span. Right. If you're talking about three year old, you can maybe it might go up to 15 minutes or something, but you see them glued to a screen for hours on end, then you're really not training them to, to actually properly have a joint attention with you and not care about what you're looking at. Because a screen to, to the face is a one way communication. There's no two way. Right. @ the very least, if you're playing with a toy, you can see what happens to the world. Right. A phone, it is its own world. So therefore it's very difficult to be engaging with the phone. Right. So is cocomelon bad? Not really, I wouldn't say so. It's good in short bursts. And you use it as a reward, right. And you use it as a way to engage your kid. Some parents use it for, you know, potty training, some parents use it for, for feeding. All these are fine, you know, like as long as it's something that remains as something scarce. Right. It's not something abundant to the kid and therefore they will start learning, oh, I have to do something in order to earn it or mom wants me to do this first and then I'll get the screen time. And screen time is something that we share together. And mom is going to pause it, mom's going to put it away. You know, all these things your child needs to learn, all right. And it's not taken for granted. That's the word I'm trying to get to here is that if cocomelon is not poison itself, right. It's not detrimental, but the way that we use it the way that you see everyday life. You go to a restaurant, kids are on the. On the devices listening to cocomelon. Because of my profession. I hear the starting sound of it. I'm like, I'm just cringing already. I'm like, oh, man, I had enough of this at my job. Why am I hearing this in a restaurant? Right? I just want to relax. So you see, the other problem is fomo, right? So I want you to have some introspection as well. So if a child sees that you're using the phone a lot and you're not spending quality play time with your kids, and, you know, a lot of experts, you go online and say, oh, play with your kids, whatever. These are the things you have to look out for. Are you modeling something that they're. They're trying to mimic? Right? So what I mean by that is, if they see you using a phone a lot of the time and they see you watching stuff, they're gonna want to watch stuff as well. Right? Back to the client I was talking about, she uses a lot of iPad for a lot of her training, including toilet training, you know, including eating, including sensory. Right? All these things require her to have an iPad to reward her, right? And then her little brother, who's, like, around two and a half, he's starting to look, and he's getting jealous. He's getting fomo, right? He's like, dude, where's my iPad? And so he starts snatching it, right? And he starts just watching it himself, and he thinks it's normal. So therefore, you have to be careful about how you model yourself. Okay? So how do you deal with it? So we have loads of videos talking about how to deal with these problems. I think the biggest thing you can do right now is to watch with your child first, okay? If you cannot do that and you need some time off and give your child some screen time so that you can do your own thing, that's fine as well, but not too long, all right? People are saying that, you know, like, screen time is like a poison or whatever, but we've been using it forever, right? For. In terms of therapy, we've been using that for a type of reward. So as long as you keep it that way, then it's fine. So I want you to slowly transition and add some play into it. Like, when you want time off, you give your child some toys on the floor. Like how we grew up. Yeah. So back in the day, we would like. Back in the day, I'm saying, like, when you And I like the person who's watching this. Probably you're a parent and you're watching this. When you were a kid, you would be playing with toys on the floor. So I want you to think about that, okay? Cut down the screen time. Slowly, slowly, slowly. Because you never want to go cold turkey. What I mean is, you don't want to just go from 100 to zero. That's going to break an addict's mind, right? You imagine taking away alcohol inside of an alcoholic's house. He's going to go crazy for a few days, right? You don't want that. You want to slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly get it down. All right, so that's it for this video. I hope I've explained a little deeper about what screen time or cocomelon or whatever, like Paw Patrol, all these, all these brands out there, what they're doing is not evil. It's not bad. It's something that keeps the child entertained. All right? It's entertainment. And you need to use that correctly. Don't try to just leave them there. And I know that, you know, that's why you're watching this. And that's pretty much it, I guess. And before you go, if you want to start home therapy, then I suggest you go to agentsofspeech.com checklist to grab a list of tool and toys that I recommend you getting when you start. All right, so that's it. I'll see you in the next video. Bye. Bye.
