We’ve all been there. Your kid starts begging you for the newest Lalaloopsy dolls, but you can’t afford them. You remind your kid over and over again that they received numerous presents at Christmas or that they’ve just had their birthday. If they are older, you tell them that they need to do more chores and save up more money so they can buy the damn dolls for themselves.

Well, they throw a tantrum and you don’t want to give in, but you also don’t want to hear the ungodly shrieking for one second more, so that’s when you go online and find a video featuring a kid unboxing the newest Lalaloopsy dolls. It doesn’t matter that Lalaloopsy dolls were discontinued 7 years ago. For a brief moment, all is well, and you can go back to hiding in your room, eking out 5 more minutes of “me time.” Just know, though, that you are essentially showing your child something that deserves to be called “toy porn.”

Porn. Just reading the word evokes such images as to make even the most experienced of parents blush. We all know what traditional porn is and we all have very strong opinions about porn and what it represents. But porn as we know it, you could argue, is really just a way for adult humans to see things that they may have never seen before, right? Traditional porn serves a purpose by scratching a sexual itch.

But “porn” takes on many forms. Besides traditional porn, there’s also food porn, car porn, boat porn, travel porn, decorating porn, pool porn, you-name-it porn. Seriously, anything you can think of, there’s probably porn associated with it. These different types of “porn” scratch a different kind of itch but an itch nonetheless. We all have desires to see certain things that we have never seen before—whether we may want them for ourselves or not.

What’s the appeal?

I mean, what is porn really? It’s an exploitation of something that’s desired by a specific audience. It’s a window for someone to peek at that which they usually might not be able to reach. It makes sense that a car enthusiast who’s never driven a Lamborghini would want to watch a video of someone driving, racing, hell, even washing one. They look on in awe as the sleek, aerodynamic body of the car speeds around a track flawlessly or drips with wet soap suds.

Well, it’s the same with kids. “Do you want that giant Lego Star Wars AT-AT? Sorry! Get a job, you 5 year old bum! Oh, but you would watch someone else open it, build it, and play with it? Have at it!”

Toy porn, like all of its porn brethren, is very much a real thing and quite frankly, I have mixed feelings about it. These toy porn videos involve a new, old, or often costly toy being unwrapped, unboxed, or played with by some kid YouTube star or even an adult who appeals to children. The first time you come across these channels, you’d be shocked at how many views these kinds of videos amass.

The reason kids get fascinated by these stimulating videos that conveniently feature mainstream characters is evident. Especially to a kid who is being shot down each time they ask their parents to buy them said toy. These videos activate motivation and desire, which psychologists call the “mimetic desire” to facilitate a need. A kid wants a toy, the parents say, “No way,” but the kid wants to see it and experience what it’s like to have the toy anyway. And because kids watch the same things repeatedly, YouTube’s algorithm recommends similar videos to them. Boom. Toy porn.

The business of toys

But it doesn’t necessarily stop with toys when it comes to toy porn. Some of these YouTubers will also bring their camera crews to indoor play spaces, cool playgrounds, skate parks, not to mention zoos, aquariums, and amusement parks all over the world.

If you live in North Dakota and your kids have always wanted to go to Disney World but you’re waiting to take out a second mortgage before you can even reserve your plane tickets, show them some videos on YouTube to tide them over. You can find walkthrough tours, ride videos, and even Disney food porn. I mean, nothing beats the real thing, but when the real thing isn’t currently an option, look to the internet!

Lest you think that this isn’t a lucrative business, let me set you straight. These kid stars are ballers. One of them, Ryan (of Ryan’s World), spun his unboxing empire into a line of toys and a Nickelodeon television show called Ryan’s Mystery Playdate.

Vlad and Niki have their own line of toys as well and a seemingly endless supply of smiles. And this guy named Blippi seems to have cornered the market on orange hats, glasses, and suspenders better than Urkel ever did. But he does get some cool guests like Shaun White to teach him how to skateboard.

For the Gen Alpha girls’ market, Youtube phenomenon Diana boasts 5 billion monthly views across 14 channels. The 6 year old has the most viewed channel in the US and the second most viewed channel in the world called Kids Diana Show.

Her online presence and success have seen digital kids’ content giant Pocket.watch throw its weight behind creating a global franchise for her that consists of a hybrid live-action, animated series, a mobile game, and a line of merchandise outside her existing channels. The company also partnered with Ryan. As lucrative as it gets.

When marketing’s newest foot soldiers play, millions watch

I have a confession to make. I have had real problems with most things on YouTube when it comes to my kid. Watching my son watch a video of someone else playing a video game feels like a next-level waste of time. I would rather my son play Minecraft for 48 hours straight than watch 10 minutes of someone else doing it. But I have come around a little bit.

In some cases, the videos my son watches can be informative. When it comes to a game like Minecraft, the virtual world is so vast. There are so many things to do and discover, so without some sort of guidance, he may not be getting the full experience when he plays the game on his own. In this way, maybe I’m too hard on the credibility of these YouTubers. Maybe he is learning valuable skills that he can then use during his own gaming time. Maybe.

In my opinion, my thoughts on this video game topic have a direct correlation to the toy porn phenomenon. My initial reaction is, “Why would you want your kid to watch someone else play with a toy instead of playing with a toy themselves?!” I mean, when I was a kid, yes, I had some cool Star Wars toys, but sometimes I just played with a stick and pretended it was a gun. “So what if these Youtube generation kids can’t have the newest Bakugan Ultimate Battle Arena? Tell them to go outside and find a tree to kick! They’ll be fine!”

But I am now starting to have sympathy for the little consumers-in-training. Because I’ve come to realize that if there was a video of someone playing with the Jabba’s Tatooine Skiff Playset from Star Wars: Return of the Jedi when I was a kid, I would absolutely have watched it over and over again, living vicariously through the lucky kid who got to own it. Oh wait, there was. It was called a television commercial.

I watched toy commercials like they were my business as a kid. In the Castle Grayskull from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe commercial, the castle is simply set on a kid’s coffee table in his living room. His businessman dad asks him and his friends about it. Not a big deal. No huge concept. No big-budget special effects of any kind. But the commercial made me drool every single time it came on! I wanted Castle Grayskull so bad, but I only had the commercial until I was finally able to get it.

If there had been a way to watch that commercial on loop or a video where some kid sets up all of his He-Man action figures around Castle Grayskull in an epic battle scene, you better believe I’d be a subscriber in a New York minute. My opportunity for toy porn was limited to getting lucky and recording these commercials on a VHS tape.

Regulating consumption

The world is moving pretty fast. First of all, if we were to buy our kids every single toy they’ve ever wanted, we’d all be creating spoiled little turd monsters. Secondly, we’d all have to build a structure just to house all of these soon-to-be-neglected toys. And thirdly, we’d be broke. So, maybe toy porn isn’t so bad after all.

Perhaps it’s a great way for them to scratch that itch. Maybe spending their time watching other kids have fun (ugh) isn’t such a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon (barf). Okay, my point is, maybe toy porn, in small spurts, is acceptable. Like everything else we expose our children to, we, the parents, need to pay attention and be there to guide them on their journey.

We need to have honest conversations with them about, say, why they won’t be able to own a particular toy, why some kid on the internet gets to, and why that has to be okay. If we just gave our kids an iPad with no restrictions on it and left them alone for an entire day, they would eventually become ruined humans. They would see things they had never seen, be terrified by them, and worse, have no one there to talk to them about all of the things they had just seen.

Our job is to be there for our children, sit down and talk to them, and answer questions about everything under the sun, including toy porn. Toy porn should not be abused but used as a tool, as a means of exposure. It shouldn’t be used as a means to get kids addicted to wanting expensive toys, but as a way to show them that yes, of course, those expensive toys are cool, but so are the toys they have sitting in front of them. And so is the real world around them. In other words, let them watch toy porn in moderation and then take them outside and teach them how to kick a tree.