Parents between fillings may have a hard time giving their kids more independence online than micromanaging everything on their watch list. But there are plenty of YouTube channels that are both educational and creative, funny, quirky or crude enough to hold your child’s attention. Here are 9 of the best YouTube creators for young viewers, with content based on kid-friendly content and education disguised as fun.
Moriah Elizabeth
The Basics: Moriah works on a range of creative projects from baking to face painting, but is best known for her floppy makeovers. With the help of glue and paint, she transforms beloved and shimmery fondant into shiny new characters.
Twain’s Appeal: Silly personalities, piles of cute fudge, and Moriah’s creative fudge and feline friends.
Parental Appeal: Inspire children to create opportunities.
Bonus material: Moriah Elizabeth self-published two volumes of Create This Book, a workbook full of creative prompts and invitations to make a mess of your art; she also created an app called Spark Creative Play that features the same type of creative prompts.
Emily Graslie and The Brain Scoop
The Basics: Graslie hosted more than 200 videos for The Brain Scoop before moving on to create content on her own channel. She explores space, nature, history, paleontology, books and critters.
Twain Appeal: Taxidermy?
Parental Appeal: Behind-the-scenes gallery content with experts explaining everything.
Bonus material: two of Graslie’s video series – Art Lab and Prehistoric Road Trip.
Hart
The Basics: Hart blends music and math, making it fun with doodles and geometric paper tricks.
Twain Appeal: Hexaflexagons and Möbius Tapes.
Parental Appeal: Through music and art, Hart can demonstrate math concepts to children in new ways.
Bonus material: Cooking with math.
Get Smart with Joe Hansen
Basics: A PBS-branded channel covering biology, climate science, physics and more.
Tween appeal: Short videos (most are 10-15 minutes) with thorough answers to science mysteries, such as why blue is so rare and the magic of mirrors.
Parental appeal: PBS-level credibility and production quality.
Bonus material: In Our Nature, a wildlife documentary series.
Children’s Art Center
The Basics: Artist Rob Jensen gives step-by-step instructions for drawing popular characters, cute objects and seasonal themes with the help of his four children.
Tween Appeal: They post five videos a week and already have over 2,000 videos available, so most kids should be able to find a theme and skill level they like.
Parental Appeal: Because he is drawing with his child, Rob’s videos have built-in encouragement, good pacing, and examples of artistic variation.
Bonus material: A playlist of 51 videos about drawing Pokémon.
My Frog Stuff
The Basics: A mother-daughter team demonstrates clever structures, miniatures and doll makeovers for teens (and adults) who still enjoy playing with dollhouses.
Twain Appeal: Who doesn’t like dioramas?
Parental appeal: level of craftsmanship is challenging but replicable; video is not specifically aimed at children, but is safe for them
Bonus material: doll shows like Life on the Shelf and Sommer & Cali.
Physics Girl
The Basics: Through adventures and interviews with experts, Diana Cowern makes the mysteries of physics both exciting and accessible.
Twain Appeal: It may seem supernatural, but it’s science – videos about moving rocks in the Racetrack Playa, giant tunnels in the desert, and the mysteries of the universe.
Parental Appeal: It’s never too early to start understanding physics.
Bonus material: the explanation of time crystals, a “new” phase of matter, is somehow understandable.
Mike loves science
The Basics: Educator Mike Wilson uses music to make science and programming fun and accessible to kids. He calls the channel “a musical tool to help you in school.
Twain appeals: Mike is cool.
Parental Appeal: Don’t we all agree that our kids might need some basic coding knowledge?
Bonus material: water bears.
Brave Wilderness
The Basics: Hosts Coyote Peterson, Christina Wilson, Mark Vins and Mario Aldecoa are very close to nature.
Twain’s Attraction: Toxic insect stunts, mermaid training and disgusting challenges.
Parental Appeal: Watching videos of dangerous animals is preferable to visiting them in person.
Bonus material: some solid conservation content in all the shock value videos.
