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greenjewelmonster ago

Another person that has a child with autism here. I made the mistake of allowing my child (preschooler) to watch videos on youtube. It seemed innocent enough, when you search on the actual site none of these nasty videos show up. No, that happens once the parent has walked away and its on autoplay or suggested videos. My child went through a phase, and when I say phase I mean a hellish unending cycle of constant crying/wanting only Youtube. No other shows, no interest even in the actual shows that the videos were supposed to be copying. Now my child has constant potty humor. Everything is butts, poop, My child is autistic and I've noticed their behavior is TERRIBLE when I allow access to youtube.

There is violent aggressive behavior, threats of self harm, threats of running away, bad personal space problems like hitting other people on the butt or pulling pants down to see underwear. It doesn't make sense because their was no one else displaying this behavior. I realized it was youtube. This was prior to any of these posts. I cut youtube at night because they would scream and cry hysterically because they wanted youtube to go to sleep. Even when they did originally have youtube, I would come back at 3am expecting a nice sleeping child as was normal for any other bedtime show, however the autoplay function and constant stimulation from the bright colors/music/ect. was keeping my child up literally all night.

Of course as a parent I disabled/blocked youtube and the behavior drastically became better. I understand that children are influenced by what they see, and I understand it's my fault for allowing access. However I never EVER knew that these autoplay suggested videos were so terribly inappropriate. My other child also watched the Spiderman/Elsa videos and I now understand why they were joking constantly about shots in butts, dating, and pretending to make dolls kiss. I even had to cut sleepovers because my non-autistic child was trying to "play doctor" with the friend (both 4), to the point I thought possibly my child must have seen this somewhere/experienced it/was possibly sexually abused.

These videos are introducing nasty fetishes literally to our children. So I have one example of atrocious aggressive/inappropriately sexual/nasty behavior caused in an autistic child, and another example of inappropriate sexual behavior in an non-autistic child. With my autistic child these videos seem to cause hyperactivity, aggression, and a complete lack of personal space when away from the videos. However when WATCHING the videos, my child initially seemed "calm" however I now believe it was more of a trance like state because when I broke concentration from the videos, the child would throw a fit/become upset/essentially only want to continue watching.

It's as if the videos were the only thing that could calm and entertain my child. I experienced similar behavior from my non-autistic child in that if they watched a lot of these videos for a long period, they would habitually ask to continue watching throughout the day. However since non-autistic children are less repetitive/more able to cope and so it was much easier to just convince them to move on to a more interactive activity like playing with actual toys.