Jennifer O’Connell: The toddler has discovered ‘unboxing’

Failing to become the parent you always thought you would be is not something that happens overnight. Rather, as every TV reality show contestant ever can attest, it’s a journey involving years of effort, tears and a thousand tiny compromises.

If there was video of the “best bits” of my journey to mediocre-at-best parenting, it would show the Fruit Shoots filling the part of the fridge where the organic vegetables are supposed to go; the school uniforms laundered with baby wipes; the Saturday morning lie-ins bought off with Custard Creams.

It would show me now, lying in my bed pretending to be asleep at 5 o’clock in the morning, as my toddler repeats the question she’s been asking every 30 seconds for the last hour. “Now can I have a YoopTupe?”

She recently discovered YouTube. She is two. I'm not sure how this happened, but here we are.

Now, she wants to be on it constantly – not, naturally, to take a course in Mandarin for babies. She wants to go on and watch someone open a Kinder Egg. Sometimes, she might mix it up a bit and watch someone open a Play Doh kit. But Kinder Eggs are her favourite.

This is a phenomenon known as “unboxing”. If you haven’t yet heard of unboxing, take this as your invitation to step away from the newspaper with some vestige of hope for the future of humanity intact.

The latest innovation brought to you by the century that gave us Sean Spicer’s press conferences as family entertainment involves watching people take things – Kinder Eggs, toys, iPhones – out of their packaging. That’s all there is to it. Literally.

The undisputed unboxing king is an apple-cheeked five-year-old called Ryan. A bigger hit on YouTube than WWE or Justin Bieber, Ryan's output consists of low-production value videos of him opening toys, and playing with them. "What's inside?" he'll ask. "A toy!" my daughter and millions of children around the world will shout. "Wow," he'll say.

Wealthy

Ryan's skilful opening of toys has made his parents – a chemistry teacher and a structural engineer, both now retired, obviously – extremely wealthy. His channel, Ryan ToysReview, is less than two years old, and is consistently in the top five YouTube channels globally. Some estimates put income from his videos at about $13 million. Ryan, mark my words, will be president of the United States one day.

As culturally bereft as it is, unboxing counts as high art alongside another phenomenon I recently encountered, courtesy of the toddler’s dexterous swiping. It doesn’t yet have a name, though the online video trend monitoring site, Tubefilter, describes it as the “hottest new trend for kids”.

This fad involves adults dressed up in Spiderman, Elsa and Joker costumes silently acting out skits that run the gamut from merely vomit-inducing to kindly-gouge-my-eyes-out-now.

The current most popular proponent of the trend, ToyScouter, is in the top four YouTube channels. ToyScouter’s oeuvre includes such cliffhangers as “Spiderman STUCK Inside the Toilet!”, which has 4.6 million views. I sat through eight seconds of this – enough to see Spiderman soiling himself with what I dearly hope was chocolate sauce.

Rival channel Toy Family is attracting millions of views for content with titles including "Spiderman Pee PRANK on Lady Spiderman! " and "Pregnant Frozen Elsa versus Pregnant Pink Spidergirl". (I'll spare you the spoilers.) In one Toy Family video, with over 6.1 million views, Spiderman and Hulk strip and sniff one another's parts. Later, Hulk attacks Elsa.

I’m not a total prude. I understand that every generation is obliged by some urge of biology or conditioning to produce its own particular culture, and that older generations are similarly obliged to find aspects of that culture baffling, disturbing or even dangerous. Objecting to the things your children like is part of the job description for even the most mediocre of parents. In the 18th century, European parents despaired over “self-indulgent” novel-reading. In the 50s, parents worried about Elvis.

But we live in a time when people are becoming millionaires by producing videos for preschoolers that are at least thematically inspired by porn. “Some creators within the superhero space have taken a fetishistic turn with content that verges on pornography,” notes Tubefilter.

‘Suggested videos’

This isn't confined to some murky corner of the internet: these are some of the fastest-growing channels on YouTube, which is owned by Google-parent company Alphabet. Household brand names help fund this content with advertising. Before I watched Spiderman soil himself, I sat through an ad for the same brand of bleach that's in my bathroom. Though most of these videos are filtered out of the child-friendly YouTubeKids app, they still pop up as "suggested videos" on the main app and website, so that children browsing without parental supervision risk stumbling on them.

“Can I have a YoopTupe?” the little voice asks again.

Yes, I made my own bed, and now I’m lying in it, pretending to be asleep. But this is one compromise I’m not prepared to make.

“Sorry, baby. YoopTupe is broken, “ I tell her, entirely truthfully.

joconnell@irishtimes.com