Dear family you tubers.

We exist in a weird kind of love/ hate relationship you and I. On one hand, you give me a tool to motivate my four almost five year old to get shit done. She’s that obsessed with you all, she will pretty much comply to any of my demands- teeth, eating, dressing, tidying her room- to feed her addiction to watching you play and do endless CHALLENGES!!!!

On the other hand, you pretty much make my life a misery.

Whilst innocent enough and age appropriate in my choice of viewing for my offspring, your incessant desire to make everything into either a challenge, or some kind of exercise in massive overspending, it’s pretty much impossible for all us normal families to replicate the life that you are selling our small people. And I mean they really want us to be a family just like you. Hell, Im in direct competition with you, cool mums of family you tube channels.

But how can I ever win?

With days labelled “UNICORN THEMED POOL PARTY ON A ROOFTOP!!!!” as the norm, I’ve no hope. Family Fizz it’s great you have the means to take your kids and throw these insane parties for no apparent reason; I do appreciate how hard you work, but spare a thought for us little guys. It’s my daughters 5 th birthday on Friday and she comes up with endless completely impossible ideas of how to celebrate thanks to you lot. The ingham family; I’m sure there are lots of families that can afford to rent an entire pool out with inflatables for the whole class, but I don’t know any of them.

Let’s not get started on our families across the pond; whilst innocent enough, my goodness- endless, literally endless, toy smashes which seem to involve a kid going into toys r us and getting every single toy they show even a vague interest in, or videos where a small child is “testing” a pile of toys on a random Tuesday morning, that most kids wouldn’t get a quarter of for Christmas.

As a grown up I understand that these very popular you tube kids channels are sponsored or sent free toys in exchange for advertising, but my kid doesn’t get that. She wants to go to a toy shop and grab everything at random and take it home. When I ask her on a Saturday afternoon what she wants to do, we can’t just play a game or bake a cake anymore, it has to become some kind of weird challenge based activity that potentially involves odd food groups or jelly.

Why is there always jelly, or jello, as my now very much British daughter insists on calling it?

My next gripe is slime. Will you please, for the love of god, stop with the slime. There must be thousands of videos, if not millions by this point, purely about making slime, playing with slime and my personal favourite SLIME CHALLENGE!!!!

And none of them work.

My house had been covered in shaving foam, PVA or elmers glue, contact solution, washing powder, washing up liquid, more weird types of glue, blue tac, cornflour, food colouring; damn the list is endless.

But you know what we don’t have? Any usable slime.

What we do have however, is a stroppy tweenager and a tearful 4 year old that’s been banned from making, playing with or even talking about slime at this point.

You’ve turned me into a monster, you tube kids.

I don’t get to be the fun mummy anymore as there is simply no way I can compete with you and your perfect families where nothing goes wrong and if it does you deal with it with a laugh and smile. Again I understand editing, I understand you probably do lose your shit with your stroppy Kids sometimes like every other parent that has walked this earth, but not to my kids. To my kids you are perfect families where life is always fun and full of rainbows. And slime.

So I’m stuck being Mrs Trunchball instead.

I’m an unreasonable taskmaster for banning slime and insisting they clear up the carnage that’s spread not just around the kitchen, but to the bathroom and at least one bedroom in the process. I’m a monster for saying “no”. No we can’t buy that, no we can’t go there, nope there really isn’t a surprise trip to Disney Paris for your birthday. I’m so fed up with food based challenges, I really don’t want to eat mustard covered jellybeans while blindfolded or cold beans or have to deal with cleaning up pretty much every vessel from my cupboards that have been filled with miscellaneous liquids ever again.

I’m done I’m out.

Bugger off the lot of you, family fun pack, the hascheck sisters, matey b raps, family fizz and the bloody hundreds of happy, lovely wholesome families all over the Internet. I hate to sound bitter and ungrateful as you all seem like nice people, but I just want to bake some normal cupcakes, read a book to my kid, play a board game or go for a walk and splash in puddles. You know, play like we did before there was you.

So that’s what we are gonna do instead.

That is until the next time I need your help so I can get shit done.