10 of the Best Videos to Burn Off Your Kid's Energy

I first saw this valuable life hack on TikTok: Search “Mario Run” on YouTube when you need to keep your kid busy for a while. I did, but I wasn’t sure if the resulting videos would actually hold a kid’s attention. So I proposed to my kindergarten-age daughter that she try out a few. Her eyes widened when she saw the thumbnail on my screen. “We do these at school!” she squealed, and immediately started demanding I play her favorite ones on the living room TV.

These videos vary in style and theme, but they all have the feel of an interactive game. You might imagine them as virtual reality games, or the kind of thing you would play with a gesture-recognizing controller. But it turns out kids don’t necessarily care if the game is actually responding to their actions; they just want to run and jump around. So here are 10 of the best videos that fulfill this purpose—and you can play them directly from YouTube, no game console needed.

This video starts out like a standard Mario run: collect the coins and dodge the bad guys. But every now and then, there’s a warning that cries out “Danger! Danger!” and the kid has to go jump on the couch or any other non-lava object. Because the floor is lava, get it?

In this winter wonderland, you duck to avoid owls and dodge around wolves. You collect presents, for some reason (perhaps it’s meant to be Christmas themed.). But to make things interesting, cartoon ninjas also appear. You bob, weave, punch, and kick to defeat them. Then you’re running through the snowy woods again.

While there’s a lot to love about Minecraft (my kids have created some seriously amazing things in there), one aspect that fascinates me is the mythology behind it. There’s an entire fire-filled underworld that you can access by building a special kind of portal. When you get there, you can fight terrifying monsters. And that’s exactly what you get to do in this video: run along a firey tunnel, collect materials to make a bow and arrow, and then dodge and shoot at a Wither (a sort of floating...monster...thing).

Would I have picked this one? No. Did my daughter absolutely love it? For some reason I cannot fathom, yes. You’re playing hide and seek with Bruno, the character from Encanto who (spoiler) disappeared one day and was later found to have been hiding in the walls of the magical house for years. The movie’s characters each strike a yoga pose in front of their bedroom door, and you “guess” which door Bruno is hiding behind and imitate the pose. When Bruno appears, you get a dance break, and then it’s time for another round of hide-and-seek yoga.

In this video inspired by Turning Red (the unnecessarily controversial movie in which a girl turns into a red panda and goofs around) you get to dance to the sweet sounds of teen heartthrobs 4*Town. But when the wall appears, you need to strike a pose to dodge it.

If you don’t know the story time classic “We’re going on a bear hunt,” it’s a little tale in which you have to swish swish through the tall grass, swim through the river, and creep into a dark cave. This video follows the same basic story arc, including the ending where you have run away from the bear and do the whole adventure in reverse.

There’s no running in this classic dance-in-place game. When it’s dance time, music plays and different characters dance on screen. And then the music stops, and you have to hold whatever position you were in while the timer counts down.

In this one, you can run in place if you want—but you can also grab an object to be your steering wheel and play from a chair or seated on the floor. (It’s meant to be friendly to kids who need a seated adaptation, but you could also do any of the running games this way.) Duck and dodge the obstacles, and freeze if you see Bowser. The game makes it feel like you’re in a toy car riding around a school, scooting under desks and then warping onto a virtual highway.

This is another standard running game (dodge the baddies, collect the rings), but sometimes you get to stop running as Sonic and instead “play” as Tails and fly. Flap your arms to float through the clouds, and in the end you get to punch Doctor Eggman.

Here’s a great one for dino-loving kids. Jump over the randomly-placed patches of fire (a constant bit of scenery in the Jurassic, I’m sure), dodge the pterosaurs, and freeze when a T. rex walks by. Lest you complain that this world isn’t realistic, meteors start falling from the sky in the end.