Allowing my child to use social media

If you follow me on FB you will have probably seen the latest in the Ebi family ventures…

Which led me to allowing my child to use social media

If not, I will fill you in. Ebi-kun who is now 10 years old has been talking about starting his own YouTube channel for a while and I have had my reservations – you know, with the internet being a big scary place and all that! So I had a good think and decided that with some guidelines in place it would be OK.

He backed up his argument to start the channel with the following reasons…

He thought it would be fun. Fun, I am down with that and we came up with the idea of food tasting because he LOVES trying new foods and sometimes (I wish I had videoed them all!) his reaction is hysterical.

He wants to learn how to make money! (Don’ we all?) Again, seems like a reasonable request for a 10 year old. Since selling cookies or doing a lemonade stand really isn’t the done thing here, in fact I don’t ever recall ever seeing kids trying to make money here! An alternative idea was needed.
More and more business is moving online so I feel it’s a great opportunity to follow his interests and help him learn at the same time.

He thought it would be good for picky eaters to see that trying new foods can be fun, even if they taste horrid. He can’t get his head around friends that won’t try new foods!
I agree with this, us adults can talk and bribe our kids until we are blue in the face and they won’t budge but maybe having a kid lead the way will make a difference. One of Ebi-kuns heroes is Jamie Oliver, his big goal is to get on one of Jamies’s shows!

Now, I have no idea whether this little venture of his will ever make any money, he doesn’t have a product (as of yet) so it will only be from ads shown on the video and you need a decent amount of traffic to make that happen. Or whether it will fizzle out after a couple of months, we will wait and see. We are embarking on a learning a new set of skills, together we are learning the tricks of the trade and we will see where this takes us!

I set up his channel on my YouTube account and I’m showing him all the tech side of things, how to edit, make the thumbnails, uploading and setting up each video etc. And we agreed that it would be best to do it as a weekly show. I’ve also been teaching him the benefits of batching and scheduling, skills I hope he will carry with him.

The rules we have in place…

1. He only uses his nickname online (as you know I have been doing this for years)

2. He never shares where we live other than in Japan or any other personal information.

3. All comments will be moderated by me (if anything mean or nasty is said, they will have to deal with mama bear!)

4. If it stops being fun, we stop doing it.

5. I have the right to amend the rules if I see the need to do so (hahaha, need this clause in there!)

The shows!

He only has a couple up at the moment, you can check them out below. It will make his day if you click through to You Tube and subscribe, give him and thumbs up or even leave him a lovely comment! (on youtube not here!) Ta.

And episode 2…

And if your kids use YouTube I’d love to hear your thoughts on it, do you have any rules in place?