What do You Want To Be When You Grow Up?

I’m listing to my son make a YouTube video right now.  Apparently, he’s doing the sour candy challenge.  Every time he falls off his “skateboard” online he has to eat an extreme sour warhead candy.  I’ve seen him play.  He’s going to run out of candy.  The funniest part of him playing these games though is listening to him narrate the game while he’s playing.  He’s trying to play it extremely cool and nonchalant but it cracks me up.  It’s like he’s talking to a cooler version of himself.

Last night he and his sister did the same challenge playing another game while recording it.  They still had sores in their mouths when they woke up this morning.  Sometimes you just gotta let them do stupid things.

So now my children dream of becoming a YouTuber.  They’ve spent countless hours watching YouTube videos. Videos that would make me poke my eye out after five minutes.  Why is it interesting to watch adults play video games?  I don’t know but I have heard more discussions at the dinner table about DanTDM (a famous YouTuber) and what he’s been doing than I could possibly ever want to hear.  This guy has over 14,000,000 subscribers.  He plays video games online and narrates while doing it. I’m sure it’s more complicated than I’m saying but it blows my mind that he (and all the other YouTubes) makes a living doing this.  Dan’s even written a book.  Which we bought, of course.

Crazy!!!

It’s no wonder my kids all think that a quick and easy way to make money is to do YouTube videos. What they don’t realize is that it takes a huge amount of time to become good at it. It doesn’t just happen overnight – it takes time and a whole lot of patience and a willingness to learn the skill.  Something my kids are not so good with. So we’ll see how far they get with it.

When I was a kid our ambitions were pretty simple.  We had to go to school to get a good job.  If we wanted money as a teenager we worked at McDonald’s or got a paper route.

Nowadays, you just open a YouTube account.  Do your kids dream about becoming a famous Youtuber?

On a side note-I’d like to say that I appreciate that DanTDM keeps his videos clean.  As far as I can tell, the language in it is pretty good so he’s one of the few YouTuber’s that I can actually allow them to listen to without worrying about inappropriate content.