![]() She gestures to her blocks and says ‘bahbah’ for the first time. This simultaneously makes us feel better, and worse, about her burgeoning Ms Rachel addiction, but it is not a feeling we interrogate for too long. With no little embarrassment, I can confirm that some combination of Ms Rachel’s uncanny pleasance and persistent tone have achieved feats of speech and gesture in our child that we have not managed in weeks as parents. My daughter is most assuredly one of them. She speaks loudly and clearly, and says, ‘Good job’ after each command, with the earned presumption that a million unseen babies are following her every word. My daughter’s favourite channel is, predictably for anyone who is currently in command of a pre-speech child, Ms Rachel, the kind, smiling educator who makes phenomenally popular content for early-years children. It’s impressively, even bafflingly, thorough, albeit a little jarring to see the same characters I’d just seen running away from a Yeti now cast as factory workers crying because they’ve been laid off from their jobs. One video, What Is Recession? lays out a dazzlingly detailed explainer on interest rates and investment yields, all with the same chintzy flash animation they use for videos about the chemical makeup of farts. ![]() Among the usual segments on dinosaur extinctions, planets, and bodily functions, you’ll find more on phytoplankton, schizophrenia and the life and times of Messi, Roger Federer and Genghis Khan. It is, in fact, difficult to gauge the age range at which it’s aimed. ![]() The tone of the channel can be grating, but the content is admirably wide for a children’s YouTube channel. In this, the titular PhD – a floating beard with binoculars for eyes – presents short cartoons that answer questions like What If You Could Fly? Why Do We Fart? Could Loch Ness Monster Be Real? It’s a comparison that’s unmistakable as he watches, zombified, his current favourite show, Dr Binocs. It’s nice to regard my son’s abyssal gazing as something like religious contemplation. It's nice to regard my son's abyssal gazing as something like religious contemplation I have, of course, sent it to every parent I know. Moreover, glancing through the gallery makes me feel better about my children’s viewing habits, elevating their increasingly frequent bouts of box-goggling to little acts of meditation and repose or, even, performance art. With the drifting of their imagination,’ Harris-Taylor writes,’their bodies are left in a kind of unselfconscious tranquillity.’ This is the nicest description I’ve ever read of that implacable TV-trance all parents will recognise.
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