By Jane Sonnenschein · First drafted June 9, 2026 · Revised October 11, 2026

Marshall McLuhan once wrote the famous line, “The medium is the message.”

When I first came across it, I thought of it mainly as an idea from media studies. It was only after becoming a parent, and watching Alicia gradually encounter phones, games, and short videos, that I began to understand it differently. When a child encounters a medium, she is not simply watching one video or hearing one story. The pace of the medium, the way it tells stories, and the emotions it emphasizes can all quietly shape how she learns to see the world.

That is why I have always felt conflicted about children watching short videos.

I know where the problems are. Short videos move quickly and deliver one stimulus after another, leaving almost no space to stop. Adults can easily lose an hour without noticing, so it is hardly surprising that children, whose self-control is still developing, find them difficult to resist. Getting used to that kind of immediate feedback over a long period is obviously not something I want to romanticize. Nor do I believe that children should simply be allowed to watch as much as they want because “at least they might learn something.”

But at the same time, I have found it increasingly difficult to dismiss short videos as nothing more than junk content, because I have seen another side of them in Alicia. Sometimes they also become a doorway through which she encounters language, other children, and a world beyond our home.

Alicia sometimes watches Chinese short videos. She likes crafts, gaming commentary, and other things that interest children, and through them she has picked up quite a few internet memes, rhymes, and expressions.

Once, when she was playing with a boy who had recently come from China, the two of them were speaking Chinese and casually picking up on jokes and references that children growing up in China would know. I was genuinely surprised listening to them, because it suddenly struck me that her Chinese was no longer limited to the Chinese she had learned from me.

For a child growing up in Germany, that difference matters.

A home language can very easily become a language of everyday instructions: Have you eaten? Have you finished your homework? Hurry up and get dressed. The language children use among themselves is different. It is alive. It keeps changing, developing new expressions and new kinds of humor, with a rhythm that belongs to their generation.

Through Chinese craft videos, gaming commentary, and short-form content, Alicia has entered at least part of that more living language world. She sometimes knows expressions I have never even heard, and she can talk in Chinese about her own world of games and crafts.

That does not cancel out the problems with short videos. But it does make it difficult for me to say simply that they offer children nothing of value.

What stayed with me even more, though, was something that happened on another occasion.

One day while we were walking, Alicia told me about a video she had seen. It seemed to involve a traffic accident, a mother, and a child. I no longer remember the details clearly.

But I do remember what she suddenly said while telling me about it:

“Sometimes the evil in human nature is really hard to imagine.”

Hearing that from a nine-year-old made me stop for a moment.

I do not know how deeply the video itself explored the subject. It may simply have been one of those emotionally intense stories that circulate on short-video platforms. But clearly she had not watched it and immediately swiped on.

Something about the story had stayed with her.

She had thought about it on her own, and eventually brought that confusion back into real life to ask me: Why would someone do something like that? Why is the world like this?

I have thought about that moment many times since.

Adults often imagine children as passive sponges in front of short-form content—as if they are simply being fed by algorithms and shaped by fragmented information. But children are also observing, making connections, and trying to interpret what they see. They take pieces from videos and try to fit them into the world they already know.

What worries me is not that Alicia is discovering at a young age that the world has an ugly side. She will learn that eventually.

What is more difficult is that what she sees is often a highly compressed fragment of reality, while she does not yet have enough life experience to judge how large a place that fragment actually occupies in the world.

A video about a dangerous person may leave a child feeling that the outside world is dangerous everywhere. A story about conflict at school may immediately become connected to her own classmates. A video about a mother suffering or a child being hurt may leave behind a deep sense of fear.

But a nine-year-old cannot easily judge for herself: Is this common or an extreme case? Has the video exaggerated certain details to attract attention? Does the emotion in the comments reflect reality? If one person does something terrible, does that mean most people cannot be trusted?

The algorithm will not help her answer those questions.

It simply moves on to the next piece of content that is strong enough to hold her attention.

So when I think about children and short videos now, I am increasingly interested in something beyond the question of whether they watch them at all. I care about what happens after those fragments enter a child’s world, and whether anyone helps put them back into a larger picture.

That is also why I am not particularly convinced by either complete freedom or simple prohibition.

Of course, there is content that should be kept away from children. Excessive violence, horror, humiliation, deliberately manufactured anxiety and comparison, or content that encourages dangerous behavior is simply not appropriate for them. Children’s brains are still developing, and filtering what reaches them is part of a parent’s responsibility.

But if the only method we have is “You’re not allowed to watch this, scroll that, or touch the phone,” the problem does not necessarily disappear.

Children live in a world of tablets, phones, classmates, games, and the internet. Sooner or later, they will encounter these things. A kind of safety that depends entirely on prohibition may last only as long as parents can control every entrance. Once a child begins accessing that world independently, she may have neither the experience to navigate it nor the willingness to tell her parents what she has seen.

I increasingly think of the parent’s role somewhat differently.

Yes, sometimes we need to be gatekeepers. But we cannot only be gatekeepers.

Sometimes we also need to be translators.

When a child sees an extreme story, we can help her understand that it may be a real part of the world without being the whole world. When she sees someone behaving terribly, we can talk about how to protect herself while also explaining that being careful does not require assuming every stranger is dangerous. When she is swept up by the emotion of a viral story, we can gradually help her understand that the anger, sadness, or fear contained in a video is not automatically the whole truth.

That kind of “translation” does not need to turn into a family lecture.

If Alicia says, “Sometimes the evil in human nature is really hard to imagine,” I do not need to give her an entire theory of human nature.

I can begin by acknowledging why she feels that way, then follow her question a little further. Yes, there are people who hurt others, which is why we need rules, awareness, and some idea of whom to ask for help when something feels unsafe. But there are also many people who help others, protect others, and follow rules. Seeing one terrible story does not mean we have to understand the whole of humanity through that one picture.

Sometimes I ask her, “How did you feel when you saw that?” or “If you were that child, what do you think you could do?” or “If something like that ever happened to you, who could you go to for help?”

The short video itself has not changed, but her relationship with it has.

Instead of being one stimulus immediately followed by another, it can become the beginning of a conversation.

I have long felt something similar when creating safety-related content for children. Stranger safety, conflict at school, friendship, money, rules, kindness, and boundaries do not stay outside a child’s life simply because she is young.

There is no reason to push every complexity of the adult world onto children too early. But when some of these things have already entered their world through classmates, games, short videos, or ordinary life, pretending that they should know nothing about them is not necessarily more protective.

Sometimes it is better to help them slowly build judgment using language they can understand.

The difficult part, of course, is that adults are not always very good at this either.

For a while, I became hooked on short-form dramas myself. I knew the storylines were repetitive. I could often guess where the next cliffhanger was coming. And yet I still found myself tapping on the next episode.

So I find it difficult to stand above a child and say that she simply needs more self-discipline.

Short-form content is designed around attention. It has pace, hooks, quick rewards, and constant emotional shifts. It makes perfect sense that children are drawn to it.

Instead of asking over and over again, “Why can’t she control herself?”, I am more interested now in another question:

After she has been drawn in, can we help the experience become something other than more scrolling?

If she watches a craft video and later gets out the materials and actually tries it, the content has at least moved from watching into action.

If she watches gaming commentary and then retells it to me in Chinese, she is also practicing language and expression.

If she sees a social story, we can talk about which risks are genuinely worth noticing and which emotions may have been amplified for attention.

Even an internet joke can sometimes become an opportunity to talk about language, humor, or culture.

When I watch Alicia, I often notice that she already makes these kinds of conversions.

She gets drawn into videos and may want to watch more, but she also comes to me with questions. She turns things she sees into crafts. She brings words from videos into her Chinese. Sometimes a story she encounters online becomes a question about the real world.

That does not mean she is already mature enough to navigate everything on her own. Nor does it mean I can simply stop paying attention to what she watches.

Quite the opposite.

It makes me feel that, while she still lacks enough experience to make sense of everything by herself, one of my jobs is simply to catch some of those things when they arrive.

A child’s world cannot remain sterile forever.

She will see tenderness, but she will also see cruelty. She will encounter kindness, but she will also learn that people lie and hurt one another.

We cannot keep all complexity outside the door forever.

What matters more may be whether, when she first begins to see those complexities, there is someone nearby she still wants to talk to.

That is one reason I now value ordinary parent-child conversations more than I used to.

Parents do not need to have a perfect answer ready every time.

Sometimes a child simply says, “Mom, I just saw a video.”

If our immediate response is always, “Why are you on your phone again?”, she may stop telling us next time.

But if we begin with:

“What did you see?”

“What did you think about it?”

what follows may be completely different.

A child gradually learns that a frightening, confusing, or upsetting story does not have to be something she processes alone. She can bring it back. She can ask questions. She can think it through again with an adult.

Perhaps a great deal of judgment grows through these small, ordinary conversations that hardly look like education at all.

So when I think about short videos now, I am less interested in deciding whether they are simply “good” or “bad.”

They can certainly train children to expect faster stimulation and consume time that might otherwise have gone to reading, playing, or simply being bored.

But for a child growing up abroad, they can also offer access to more living Chinese, show her how children her age speak, and sometimes spark a real interest through a craft, a game, or a story.

They can create anxiety, but they can also open a parent-child conversation. They can become mindless scrolling, or they can be transformed into making something, expressing something, or asking a question.

All of these possibilities can exist at the same time.

That is why I do not think the problem can be solved simply by attaching one absolute label to short videos.

What I truly do not want is for Alicia to see more and more of the world while having to interpret all those fragments by herself.

Because when everything a child receives comes in fragments, what remains most strongly is often not context, proportion, or cause and effect.

It is emotion.

What parents can do may not be anything grand.

Sometimes it is simply helping to build a small bridge between the screen and real life.

Helping a child understand that something shown in a video may be real, but one video rarely contains the whole truth.

That there are real dangers in the world and she needs to know how to protect herself, but that does not mean she should lose trust in everyone.

That people can do terrible things, but kindness, rules, and people helping one another are also real.

She can be curious. She can be moved. She can form her own judgments.

But while those judgments are still taking shape, she does not have to let an algorithm explain the world to her.

Children growing up in the age of short videos will probably encounter fragments of the world much earlier than we did.

We cannot pretend those fragments are not there, and we cannot stand in front of them forever.

What we can do is stay beside our children while they slowly piece them together.

The picture may never be complete, and there may not always be a correct answer. But somewhere in that process, a child can learn that after seeing something, she can stop and think again. She can ask, “Is it really like that?” And she can look back at real life to see what the world is actually like.

So I still limit Alicia’s short-video use, but I no longer see short videos simply as some kind of monster to be kept away at all costs.

More than worrying about every individual thing she may occasionally see, I care about whether there is still an open path between us after that content enters her life.

Because seeing that the world is complicated is not, in itself, what frightens me.

What worries me is the thought of her seeing so much and having to make sense of it all alone.

And while she still turns back to me and asks, “Mom, what do you think?”

I hope I am still here to answer.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 孩子看短视频不可怕，可怕的是没人陪她理解世界

German version: Kurzvideos sind nicht das Beängstigende – beängstigend ist, wenn niemand einem Kind hilft, die Welt zu verstehen