My son the YouTuber

Robbie’s growing up fast. Way too fast. Long gone are the days where all he wanted to do was run around with his Dad and have a nightly dance party. Now he just want to be a YouTube kid.

Now I understand that kids love screens. It’s hardly a secret that as much as parents try to play it off that their kids are not all addicted to them, they are. That’s true, I wouldn’t just make it up.

As with most things in life Robbie has to take this to the extreme. All he wants to do in life is play his PlayStation and when he takes a break, he switches to YouTube to watch other people play PlayStation. What a life.

So I thought I would be smart, which as always is a mistake. I had a bright idea that I could use my Son’s love of screens against him and make him accidentally learn something. I suggested he makes the videos he watches.

Now in my head this is how it would play out. I already had a Playstation headset and microphone and also have a YouTube channel myself. I’m not the worst at editing and have video editor apps on my phone that can make me look far smarter than I am with this side of things.

Robbie has said for years now that he wanted to be a YouTuber when he was older, this was an ideal opportunity to teach him some skills.

In my strange mind, Robbie would record himself playing and chatting to ‘all his subscribers,’ then we would sit down and I would show him the basics of how that becomes a video that he would watch.

I would teach him the basics such as playing the game without a microphone and then hopping on an editor and talking people through his gameplay.

I would show him how to add effects, make his own music to go over it. However silly an aim to be a YouTuber may seem to his parents at this age I saw no harm in helping and encouraging towards this dream. Time spent editing his own video would be more educational than just mindlessly watching others play, right?

Nope. Let me sum up what happened in one sentence. Robbie now refers to me as ‘bruh.’ His sigma rizz is too much for me, even though I have no idea what that means. He literally told me the other night that if he goes for a bath I have to like and subscribe.

So now he talks like a YouTuber, acts like a YouTuber and does everything that a YouTuber could possibly do except for editing videos. That’s boring.

Robbie will now regularly pop on his headphones, close the doors so no noise can get through and then talk absolute nonsense for hours on end down the microphone. He’ll sing random songs, talk about what is going on in the house or just about his day in school. He’ll then tell me he’s made a video.

Obviously, I don’t actually publish this random spew into the big scary world of the internet for the world to laugh at. I do that on here.

It seems like such a long time ago that my little boy would want to spend his time with me, making little Paper Plate cars and racing them around the house. I didn’t realise at the time that these were moments that we would never get back. Now he shudders if I try and give him a hug. The thought of a kiss could send him into meltdown. I’ve lost my Son forever, well until he wants feeding.

At least he talks to me at bedtime though. He’ll ask me each night how many subscribers he has now and I’ll randomly add a couple to whichever number I made up the night before.

My desperate attempts to start a Father and Son project and teach him all the hard work and skills that go into creating the content he watches, as usual, ended in disaster.

So I’ll send my apologies now to any teachers, relatives or other unsuspecting adults who may be referred to as ‘bruh’ or ‘bro’ from now on. If he asks you ‘what the Sigma?’ Please don’t come to his parents, we have no idea what he’s going on about either.

For now though, I’ll just keep on pretending I don’t understand what ‘sigma’ means and he’ll keep pretending he doesn’t need his Dad. We both know the truth.

Thanks for reading and proving that some people in this world still can, rather than being glued to their TV screens!