In the last couple of posts, I’ve been writing about YouTube, screen time, and this tension a lot of parents feel.
We don’t really want to ban online videos completely, because they’re not all bad and honestly some of them are genuinely useful, especially when you’re tired and just need something that works for the kids for a while.
But at the same time, there’s this discomfort that keeps coming up, where you don’t feel fully in control of what your child ends up moving into once they start watching something.
It’s not just the content itself, but what sits around the content and even “decides” where things go next.
There’s always something waiting.
A suggested video, a thumbnail that looks a bit too interesting, an autoplay countdown that starts before anyone has actually made a decision.
And without you really deciding, that next thing has already started.
It gets exhausting for you as a parent because you end up constantly stepping in, again and again, to reset something that doesn’t naturally reset on its own.
So we started asking a different question.
What would it look like if the experience itself gave control back to the parent?
That’s what led us to building Muhsinaire TV.
Muhsinaire TV is a parent-controlled viewing environment for children.
It’s not an open platform where you browse everything or a system that keeps suggesting what to watch next.
It’s more contained than that.
Parents decide what content is available inside it before the child even presses play.
So the child is not moving through an endless space of options.
They’re just moving through what has already been chosen for them.
Inside Muhsinaire TV there are no open feeds, no autoplay into unrelated content, no algorithm quietly pushing the next thing, and no ads appearing in the middle of what was supposed to be a simple video.
We kept removing things that all basically do the same thing, which is that they take over the next decision without the parent being involved anymore.
One thing we noticed when thinking about this is that children don’t really experience videos as one-off events the way adults sometimes think they do.
They go back to things.
They repeat them.
Same video, same story, same song, again and again.
And actually, that repetition is often where a lot of learning happens, because it’s only after a few times that things really start to settle.
But most platforms are built in the opposite direction.
They’re always trying to move you forward to the next thing, even when what you just watched was actually good enough on its own.
Finding good content is still one of the hardest parts for parents, so Muhsinaire TV also tries to help with that by suggesting age-appropriate content as a starting point.
But the final decision always stays with the parent, because different families are going to have different standards and different comfort levels, and that’s completely normal.
The goal isn’t to replace that judgment, just to make it easier to act on it.
I think underneath all of this, the real question we kept circling back to wasn’t really about screen time in the way it’s usually discussed.
It was more about who is actually deciding the next step in what a child is watching.
Because once you see it that way, the problem stops being about individual videos and starts being about the system around them.
Muhsinaire TV is our first attempt at answering that question.
We’re not telling families to avoid technology or pretending digital spaces don’t exist.
But we’re asking:
What if technology could be designed around the values of the home, instead of families constantly adapting themselves around technology?
That is the question we’re continuing to explore.
Now we’d genuinely love to hear from you: have you found a way of handling screens in your home that feels good? Or does it still feel like something you’re figuring out?