So here we are, choosing not only our own paths, but those of future generations as well. Hopefully you’ve least skimmed the previous post reproduced here from “The 74 Million” about the dangers of AI content for children, as we move forward with our children’s book project.

I like to think that learning from two generations of elder gardeners, about how the food we eat grows, still has value. The senior character in our story, Angelo Pellegrini is renowned for his contributions to the world of gardeners and cooks through his many books. He was truly living the regenerative lifestyle long before it became a marketing buzzword!

And his son Brent grew up with these practices in both the garden and the kitchen. Even though we only recently reconnected (after the transition of a mutual friend), when I told him of my intention to get this story published sooner rather than later, he offered to help. 

But to make it through the stages of updating a twenty year old manuscript with a story relevant to children who now grow up with tech devices as their babysitters, is challenging!

To complete this, we really need your support.

I offer gratitude from the depths of my heart to those of you who’ve already helped us get this process rolling: setting up the new non-profit entity, refurbishing the old blog to become our new website, and reconnect with Angelo’s family, while scanning, updating old content and adding new exercises to encourage another generation of plant people. This year has been busy!

We still need at least a month’s work covered to prepare it for one of two potential publishers. Please be as generous today as you possibly can, with a peaceful heart…

AI ‘Slop’ Is Flooding Children’s Media. Parents Should Be Very Alarmed.

Low-quality, mass-produced video content is a “monster problem” for child development, with few guardrails in place to stop it.

By Emily Tate Sullivan

This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox.

This story was co-published with Mother Jones. 

Updated March 27, 2026: In response to this story, YouTube terminated six channels for violating the platform’s terms of service and one channel for violating its spam policy.

In a video that has been played almost 50,000 times since it was posted five months ago, two cartoon children sing along as they guide viewers through the experience of riding in a car amid a vividly colored, utopian backdrop. 

At first, the video seems harmless. The song is upbeat and informative. The animation aligns with the promised subject. 

Except, hold on a second, did those lyrics just say, “Red means stop, and green means right”? And why are the characters changing in every frame — different hairstyles and colors, slightly different outfits for the girl and boy? 

Worst of all, for a video that purports to be “educational,” the visuals are sending precisely the wrong message about riding in a car. 

The video opens with the children riding, without seatbelts, in the front row of a moving vehicle. The next scene shows the girl defying physics, floating alongside a moving car, while the boy is seated in what appears to be the hood of the vehicle as it travels backward down a busy street. The third and fourth scenes show the children walking in the middle of the road with moving cars behind them. 

It’s not hard to imagine how the video could have gotten so many views. 

Maybe a parent needs to complete a task — fold some laundry, get dinner ready, hop in the shower — and is searching for an age-appropriate video on YouTube to entertain their toddler during that short time. Perhaps that toddler, increasingly independent and prone to running off, needs a better grasp of road safety. “Vroom Vroom! Car Ride Song | Educational Nursery Rhyme for Kids” presents itself as a win-win solution. 

But children’s media experts say this is AI-generated “slop,” and that it has infiltrated the internet, preying on young children and their unsuspecting caregivers. 

“We’re at the beginning of a monster problem, and we have to get hold of it quickly,” said Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Temple University and senior fellow at Brookings Institution who studies child development. 

She and other researchers, including Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago, have warned that AI-derived products for babies and children need to be reined in. 

“This is not neutral content,” said Suskind, author of the forthcoming book Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity, and Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI. “I think of this as toddler AI misinformation at an industrial scale. It’s very risky for the developing brain.”

It’s hard to say just how pervasive this type of content is, but it’s clear the problem is widespread and getting worse. One report published by video-editing company Kapwing in November 2025 found that about 21% of YouTube’s feed consists of low-quality, AI-generated videos. 

Jo Jo Funland, the creator of the “Vroom Vroom! Car Ride Song,” has posted more than 10,000 videos since its first release just seven months ago, in August 2025. That’s an average of about 50 new videos each day. Sesame Street, meanwhile, has published about 3,900 videos to YouTube in its entire 20 years on the platform. 

The cognitive decline associated with the consumption of AI slop — such as a shortened attention span, decreased focus and mental fog — is sometimes referred to as “brainrot.” But when the audience is children, there’s not much to rot, Suskind said. Because a child’s brain is still in its early development, still being built, what you get instead, she said, is “brain stunt.”

“Every experience is building a million new neural connections,” Suskind said of children who are still in their early years. “You will be unintentionally wiring the brain in incorrect ways.”

This is not neutral content. . . I think of this as toddler AI misinformation at an industrial scale. It’s very risky for the developing brain.

Dr. Dana Suskind, Professor of surgery and pediatrics at the University of Chicago

That comes at a cost. A child may absorb the implicit messages of something like the Vroom Vroom video and end up mimicking the “downright dangerous” behaviors they saw depicted there, said Carla Engelbrecht, who has created digital experiences for children’s media brands such as Sesame Street, PBS Kids and Highlights for Children and considers herself an AI educator and creator.

Engelbrecht is also something of a whistleblower when it comes to child-targeted AI slop. She has found countless examples of AI-generated videos that could cause real physical harm.

“The more content I find,” she said, “the more horrified I get.”

They include videos of a scared child being chased by a T-Rex; a crawling baby biting into an apple that appears bloody, swallowing whole grapes (a major choking hazard) and eating honey (which carries the potentially fatal risk of infant botulism); and a teacher eating raw elderberries (which are toxic when uncooked).

But there’s another category of AI slop in kids’ media, she said, with consequences that are more difficult to capture. These videos claim to pertain to learning and development, focusing on topics like literacy and numeracy, but due to the speed with which they are produced and the lack of quality checks, they end up introducing or enforcing the wrong lessons. And sometimes, the errors don’t come until midway through the content. That means if a parent previews the first few seconds of a video, they may miss the unreliable information that appears later in the clip.

A video about vowels includes visuals of consonants. It also depicts letters on screen that don’t align with the audio overlay. A video promising to teach about the 50 U.S. states sings along as butchered state names appear in text at the bottom of the screen — Ribio Island, Conmecticut, Oklolodia, Louggisslia. A video about the seven continents frequently shows a compass with more than four points and indecipherable symbols where the “N,” “S,” “E” and “W” should be.

These may seem like silly slips from a machine, but for a child, every “input” is part of their learning process, Engelbrecht explained. “Mixed signals means you are delaying them learning the cause and effect of a thing,” she said. “If you learn that red is blue and blue is red, that’s a delay.”

“If you’re inconsistent, it takes that much longer to learn,” she added. “Every delay they have means everything else gets pushed back. That’s taking their executive function offline to go learn nonsense.”

Amid all of this internet muck, the question of responsibility is a tricky one.

“Fundamentally, everybody has a responsibility,” Engelbrecht said, including platforms like YouTube; companies that operate large-language models, like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic; the people creating and publishing these poor-quality videos intended to reach kids; and parents. 

YouTube’s current policy requires creators to disclose videos that have been generated by or altered with AI when that content “seems realistic.” This does not apply to cartoons and animated content — which seems to be the majority of what’s reaching children — because it has long been assumed to be fictional content, Engelbrecht explained. 

The platform does have stricter “quality principles” for content targeting children than it does for its general viewership, said Boot Bullwinkle, a YouTube spokesperson, in a statement. It also has a “child safety policy.” (These web pages, however, do not specifically address the use of AI.)

Due to the volume of content on the platform, YouTube does not catch every video that violates its policies. (It did take action against at least seven channels on the platform in response to The 74’s reporting, including terminating two.) 

“The trust that parents and families put in YouTube is a responsibility we take very seriously, and we’ve invested deeply in age-appropriate environments that empower parents,” Bullwinkle wrote in the statement. “YouTube Kids, for instance, offers industry-leading parental controls and rigorous quality principles designed to provide a safer experience for families.”

YouTube Kids is a distinct version of the platform with content that has been curated for children from birth to 12. Many families continue to use the main YouTube platform to view children’s content, though, which means many creators still have an audience and earning opportunities there. None of the AI-generated videos reviewed for this story were found on YouTube Kids, although recent reporting in The New York Times found AI videos had penetrated that space as well.

Sierra Boone, executive producer of Boone Productions, a children’s media production company that makes original content for children ages 2 to 6, noted that kid-friendly competitors to YouTube, such as Sensical by Common Sense Media and Meevee, do exist. But they have struggled to break through to families. 

“Overcoming that juggernaut is extremely difficult,” Engelbrecht said of YouTube. “There’s a graveyard full of failed attempts to create a safe YouTube alternative.”

Boone suggested that some effective labeling would go a long way, not unlike the “content credentials” LinkedIn is phasing in, which aim to disclose when media has been created or edited by AI, in part or in whole. 

Engelbrecht thinks labels are a good idea, not least because they would be important for AI literacy, but she also believes they would penalize creators like her who use AI “thoughtfully” in their work. (She is developing, among other projects, an AI tool that detects AI slop in children’s videos on YouTube.)

As for who’s behind the videos, some of it originates overseas, but plenty is home-grown, created by Americans with access to phones or computers who are just trying to “make a quick buck,” as Boone put it. 

These people are often using AI at every step of the process — to develop themes and scripts for children’s videos, to generate the videos, and to automate the process of publishing the content regularly on “faceless” YouTube channels, in which the creator is anonymous and has no on-camera presence, Engelbrecht explained.

A little over a year ago, a popular content creator posted a video to YouTube in which she raves about a “huge opportunity” that would lead to “many millionaires.” The opportunity? AI-generated animated videos that inexperienced users could create with a simple prompt in just minutes. The target audience? Young children. 

That video has been viewed more than 335,000 times. 

“AI in general isn’t inherently good or bad, but it exposes people’s intentions,” said Boone, whose production studio is responsible for The Naptime Show. 

The flood of AI-generated content, she added, reveals how many people have “no regard for children or how they’re impacted,” as long as it benefits them. 

For Boone, who works painstakingly with her team on every episode of The Naptime Show — researching, writing the script, editing the script, placing props, doing table reads, going to set, filming, editing the video, publishing and promoting the final product — creating children’s media is an “honor” that should be taken seriously. 

“The very foundation of creating children’s media is you are creating something that a child, in their core developmental years, is going to be consuming,” Boone said. “So what is the level of intention that you’re bringing to that? I think we need to be holding the people who are uploading this content more accountable.”

Ultimately, though, in the absence of more regulation or content moderation, the burden falls on parents. 

Parents are likely putting YouTube videos in front of their children in the first place because “they are already so stretched,” said Suskind, who still sees patients in her pediatric practice and interacts with families often. So it’s inherently challenging to ask them to more closely monitor the content that is coming through their children’s screens. 

Yet that is what must be done, Hirsh-Pasek said. Until a better solution emerges, the onus is on parents to separate the slop from “the good stuff.”

“We owe it to our kids to protect them,” said Hirsh-Pasek. “That’s what they look to parents for, to keep them in safe spaces. If we don’t deal with that or do anything about that, we’ve absconded [from] our responsibility.”

Seriously, we could wildcraft and grow everything you see in this cauliflower crusted pizza except for the egg and cheese! The greens you see are nettles harvested from unsprayed parks that serve as a spring tonic. I like to harvest enough to freeze and dry throughout the year before they go to seed.

Nettles could be substituted with lamb’s quarters or arugula, while the cauliflower, onions and cherry tomatoes can all be planted from seed or nursery starts, in the upcoming weeks.

Do wear garden gloves and use scissors when harvesting your nettles 😉

Personally, I find the Celtic calendar, beginning Spring on February 1 as more accurate for those of us in northern latitudes. But no matter what you choose to call it, the plants growing around you will give you the real news.

That brings me back to the urge to teach our children to look at the earth for signs of life and color, bringing delight to the heart in a way that only Nature can do! What will their lives be like if they grow up with eyes fixed on screens instead of on their natural surroundings?

Let’s keep the knowledge of the natural world alive and growing within families. If you’d like to help this happen, please donate to help us complete the first of a series of children’s books and teaching materials.

Longtime friend and rainforesteco supporter, Sylvie Rokab, just returned from Egypt and shares a message from her newsletter, linked below. Many of us share her concern and I ask that we each, in our own way, focus upon peace on and with the earth, throughout the coming days. Several groups I know will come together for this focus on Wed, March 4 at 9am Pacific. Please consider a few minutes of silence at that time, within your own peaceful heart.

Sylvie writes:

Still jet-lagged, I’m processing my pilgrimage to Egypt – the birthplace of my parents – and I feel deeply inspired by Hatshepsut’s story, a powerful embodiment of renewal. 

In a world shaped by kings, she invited her people to imagine something radically different – a female ruler whose reign centered on peace, regeneration, and expansion, rather than conquest. Her leadership opened new routes of exchange, bringing healing herbs, incense, and abundance to ancient Egypt. 

No domination. No wars. Rather, flourishing. 

And as headlines once again speak of violence in the Middle East, Hatshepsut’s story stirs something tender and fierce in me: a longing for peace, connection, and regeneration – not as a fantasy, but as a lived practice. If this was possible 3,500 years ago in ancient Egypt, I want to believe that it can also be so today. There might not be a Hatshepsut to save the day, but as the late Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh famously said, “the next Buddha may be the Sangha (community).”

When we come together with a shared vision and take small, steady steps, something new can emerge. Read more