Into the Digital Future: Youth Media Trends During the Pandemic with David Kleeman

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast provides excerpts of the conversation that have been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here. 

 

Strategist, analyst, author, speaker, connector — David Kleeman has led the children’s media industry in developing sustainable, child-friendly practices for 35 years, as president of the American Center for Children and Media and now as SVP of Global Trends for Dubit, a strategy/research consultancy and digital studio. When he began, “children’s media” meant television. Today, he is passionate about kids’ wide range of possibilities for entertainment, engagement, play, and learning. David is advisory board chair to the international children’s TV festival PRIX JEUNESSE, on the Children’s Media Association board and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center’s National Advisory Board. He was also a Senior Fellow of the Fred Rogers Center and Board Vice President for the National Association for Media Literacy Education.

 

Jordan Shapiro: David Kleeman, the Senior VP of Global Trends at Dubit, was among one of the first to ask important questions around how the pandemic was affecting the digital experience of young people. There’s a lot of people talking about it now, and there was talk about it throughout, but Dubit jumped right in, asked all the right questions and did the research. David presents that so clearly here and talks about those real differences with real important questions.

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Jordan: David, you’ve been involved in kids and screens and children’s and children’s media for longer than anyone I know. So how did that happen?

David Kleeman: It’s a long and multidirectional history. But basically, when I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be a preschool teacher and it was very unusual at the time. This was the mid-70s. Men didn’t want to be preschool teachers. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate. Harvard had no idea what to do with someone who wants to be a preschool teacher. I was lucky enough to discover one of the creators of Sesame Street who was teaching at the Ed school there and was a dean at the Ed school. And in the course of an hour’s guest lecturer in the class I was taking, I decided I’d rather teach through media than teach in a classroom, which was in the long run, a very good decision for a lot of kids.

So I’ve created a career where I can help people who do have that passion to make something, do their best, work, better understand child development, better understand the environment that kids are using media in. I’ve been incredibly fortunate. So for 25 years, I ran a creative professional development center for people who make children’s media, putting on seminars, workshops, screenings. When I was no longer able to keep that going financially, I was fortunate to find research companies that understood the value in bringing together all the people with a stake in children’s media: child development, child health, education, research, production, distribution, digital.

Jordan: So tell us a bit about what you’re doing now.

David: I’m the senior vice president of Global Trends for Dubit. Dubit is a British-based company that’s a research and strategy consultancy and a digital studio. So we make games, apps, virtual worlds, VR, AR for kids. I sit in between the research side and the studio side, trying to put a story to what we’re learning from our research. Our biggest research project is a global trends study that every six months we look at 2,000 families in the US and about 1500 in the UK and several other countries each time around. What devices kids have access to, how they use them, when they use them, where they use them, who they use them with, what brands and content are their favorites.

My job in Global Trends is to put story to that, to try to figure out what the patterns are and what can be helpful both to our clients, which are mainly media companies or toy companies or things like that, and parents as well. So I split my time speaking to parent groups, educators, and to companies that are making things for kids.

Laura Higgins: You have a new report out about unmasking kids of 2022. What sorts of things have you seen in this latest study?

David: Well, we’re finding some interesting things. What we found in a qualitative sense, is families are really doing their best to make this time as special as they can manage to make it—given budgets, given all those things, any money that they would have been spending on going to the cinema or going on vacations, they’re putting towards things at home that make them feel good. They are buying bicycles in huge numbers. Instead of just having a let’s watch a movie tonight, they’re having a movie night where they’ll sleep in the basement and bring in pizza and hot chocolate and make a real event out of it.

Laura: One of the things that I saw in your report that I thought was really interesting was this return of classic toys and games. People are going back and rediscovering things that perhaps have been lost for some time.

David: At least when we did our survey just a few weeks into the pandemic, kids were returning to video games that they hadn’t played in quite a while, Pokemon and things like that. Because, first of all, they were probably running through content at an alarming rate. And so when you’re finished everything else, then you go back and look for things you’ve done in the past. But second, this applies to toys and games. It applies to television, it applies to video games. They’re looking for comfort. Kids’ world has been completely turned upside down and they’re looking for the things that give them an anchor, a feeling of security.

Jordan: So is it just sort of moving from one platform to another?

David: They’re moving across all the platforms looking for the content that makes them satisfied in the moment. We have a model that we talk about called “emotional scheduling.” It turns out that kids have a far more innate and developed sense of what they need at any particular time than we might have given them credit for.

But they’re spreading it across multiple platforms and they are watching the streaming services, they are watching linear television still, they’re going to YouTube. My favorite quote from the entire set of research we’ve done during the pandemic, was the teenager who said, “I’ve finished YouTube. When does the next season start?”

Laura: Do you think we’re going to keep some of these [pandemic] behaviors or do you think we’re just going to immediately revert back to the old ways?

David: I think it’s a combination. From all that we’ve been seeing, families are eager to make this a special time. To feel like when it’s all over, to kind of put it behind them. But at the same time, they’ve discovered they really love a lot of the things that have happened during this time that have brought them together.

For years, we’ve been hearing from families, both kids and parents, that the main thing they want is more time with each other and that it just doesn’t seem to happen. Or if they are spending time together, they’re all on their separate devices. Now, kids and parents alike seem to be…. just really, truly spending that time together. That I think will absolutely stay.

I think one of the things that fascinates me most to watch happening is when kids go back to school. Because they have been in control of their own learning to some extent. When they go back into the classroom, I don’t think they’re going to want to sit in rows and listen to the sage on the stage. I think they’re going to be hungry for project-based learning, group learning, self-directed projects, and the ability to be a little more flexible.

Laura: Did you have anything from parents of young people that they’re worried about at the moment, where perhaps COVID was really impacting on them?

David: We’re just starting to parse out what we’ve seen between March or April 2020 and October 2020. And our head of research who runs our trends study was quite literally in tears reading some of the qualitative responses from kids about what worries them. The surface things are, “I can’t see my friends.” “I really miss my friends and I want to be back in school.” But a surprising number of kids talked about, “I’m worried that my parents will get sick, that my grandparents will get sick.” “I’m worried that I’ll die.” It’s just things that we have not had to hear so explicitly from kids in the past.

When we did some qualitative interviews with parents, what they were saying was, “I want my kids to have a break [from information about COVID]. I want them to know that other kids are going through this same thing, that they’re not alone. But, I also don’t want them to be constantly seeing stories about it, I don’t want it necessarily to be worked into the entertainment media that they’re watching, the storytelling media. Because I want them to get a break from it.”

But we’re at the same time, seeing some interest from the industry in creating news for kids, which in the US we haven’t had for a long time. The UK has had Newsround forever. And Newsround has been doing an incredible job of keeping families informed. And Newsround was always popular not just with kids, but with their parents as well. [In the US] ABC has started a news [show] for kids. And I think what they’re understanding is you can speak in an age-appropriate level. You can do it without scaring kids, but you need to treat kids with the respect that they know what’s going on and they want to be informed.

Jordan: You have such a meta view because you’ve been through so many of the changes that have happened in children’s media.

David: I try to have as much fun with that as I can when I’m speaking, particularly to parent groups. I spoke with Early Childhood Australia and had some fun with it, to talk about the similarities between the toys that we played with growing up and the toys now. The media that we used, that I used with my kids growing up and the media we use now.

I know there’s great fear about Alexa and the smart speakers, and are we outsourcing parenting if we let the devices tell stories to our kids? So I put up the picture of the device and then I switched to a picture of a Fisher-Price cassette player. That’s what put my kids to sleep when I couldn’t read them one more story. They listened to music and cassettes.

If you go back and look at toy telephones, when I was growing up, I had the Fisher-Price dial telephone that you pulled behind you on a string. But there’s a whole history of them now leading up to the plastic smartwatch. None of them do anything. They’re not technology-enabled. They’re just there for the very same purpose that they always have been, which is to let kids imitate the adults they see around them. So I always talk about how child development doesn’t change. It’s the context. The channels.

Jordan: How about cultural attitudes around screen media? The screen media has certainly changed. Has it just been the same sort of debate for as long as you can remember?

David: I think there are things that we didn’t have to think about 20, 30 years ago that we do now, such as data gathering and analytics and things like that. But a lot of the debate is exactly the same. We’re still talking about screen time after all this time. And when you look at the number of things that screens bring to kids’ lives, and allow them to create as well as consume, there’s just no point in measuring it with a stopwatch.

One of the positive things that’s come out of the pandemic—Jordan, you’ve written about this very recently—parents are paying more attention to what it is that their kids are doing with media and they are stopping and playing along with them. They’re joining in the games on Fortnite, or building in Minecraft or figuring out what Roblox is all about and starting to see, “Oh, wait, I had underestimated what this was.” We’ve been hearing for a while, for example, parents who would have limits on the amount of time their kids could spend on things. But when they would stop and watch, for example, building in Minecraft, it’s “I see how actively engaged they are. I see that they are really trying to puzzle out how to build something. And so I step back and I don’t put limits on it.” So the debates are largely the same, but I do think parents are starting to pay attention in a more nuanced way.

Laura: In my role at Roblox, we talk about this idea of the metaverse. We’re not just a place where people can create experience and games, but we have real social and entertainment elements as well. So, it’s kind of a one-stop shop for a lot of young people. Have you seen an increase in those sorts of things? How important do you think those sort of safe online social spaces are?

David: The phrase that I’ve been using is, “Down on the corner is now up on the server,” where kids used to be able to get together at the playground, out on their block and things like that. They can’t do that at this point. And so they’ve been flocking to social gaming spaces and they’re making it their own.

I’ve long had this feeling that you can design whatever you want to design, kids are going to figure out how they want to use it. And, you can respond to that and accommodate them or you can try to block it. But it’s a whole lot easier to keep a customer than it is to regain one that’s angry. So it’s much better to respond to them. They realized very quickly that their opportunity for being social with friends was in Roblox, was in Fortnite, was in Fortnite Creative, where instead of a gaming experience, it’s a more relaxed invite-your-friends over to be on your island with you. The waiting rooms in Roblox where you’re getting ready to play a game, become really strong social spaces.

Dubit produced a report on brands and Roblox, on why it’s an important place for companies to be, to be looking and to be present. We had to reprint the report about three weeks after we finished because the monthly active users have gone from 115 million to 150 million. That’s just an insane rise in use. Everything is going up.

It feels to me that everyone is in the kids space now, so you really have to be careful about your platforms. But I do think that the primary platforms for social gaming have been quite responsive to paying close attention to how kids are using it and heading off any possible problems. And you can look across the realm of that – Messenger Kids from Facebook launched in 70 new countries after the pandemic started, and has been trying to build in more interactive work around kindness, around patience.

So, across all these platforms, they really offer a lot of important things for kids. There are platforms where you can co-view a movie on Netflix or something, but games are much more about the communication that goes on. You don’t talk during a movie, you talk during the game. And you may start by talking about the game, but you end up by talking about anything you want to talk about down at the playground. You want to excel in it. It’s in some ways like sport that you want to show your prowess. You want to both support your teammates, but also maybe brag a little bit. So all the elements that you would have seen in a social dynamic, can get recreated in a game dynamic.

Jordan: I really want to hear from you, David, about some of the opportunities for the future of screens, the future of digital media? [You’ve spoken publicly] about how producers take risks, risks in addressing questions like gender and trauma and those kinds of, “Fred Rogers risks.” I want to know the social justice opportunities that are in the future of screen media, video games, where it still could go?

David: I think kids demand it. You’ll lose your audience very quickly if they sense one of two things, either that you lack diversity and attention to these issues or that you are pandering to them and are taking a superficial viewpoint. Because they are quite smart about it.

One of the media pieces to come out of the pandemic that I’ve been talking about most often that takes risks on a number of different levels is a production from Sinking Ship Entertainment in Canada, that’s called Lockdown. Lockdown was conceived, sold, developed, written, produced, edited, and aired within about six weeks. And it was shot entirely by teenagers in their homes with smartphones that were provided by Sinking Ship, and other equipment, ring lights, and things like that. It looks like a million-dollar series. But it was done in six weeks. And it is built around the story of the pandemic. It begins with the first day of lockdown. And it’s a mystery story.

But it’s all told in the platforms that kids and teens are used to right now. So it takes place over video chat, over TikTok, with gameplay. With all those different things. And at the same time, while it’s covering the story of lockdown, there are elements about racism. There are elements about family economics, there are elements about family health, really seriously treated elements. And because it was on the air in six weeks, it felt incredibly timely to the people who were watching a YouTube original production. They’re now in Series 2, which is going to be much more explicitly about Black Lives Matter.

I’ve been writing lately about the idea that the three-year development process for a children’s television series is not really sustainable any longer, that the idea that you have an idea and by the time you have developed it, pitched it, gotten feedback, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s three years later. And any sense of relevance, any sense of feeling like you’re a part of kids’ lives today may have been lost from it.

So they’ve found what I refer to as “agile production,” a way of making a series that is deep and thoughtful and tells a complete story, but doesn’t take three years to do.

Laura: Crystal ball —looking into the future. In terms of tech and media and where we’re going to go, what’s your vision for the next couple of years?

David: Mine has to do with handing over more control to young people. I’m thinking about the things that I saw on the last trip I took before everything locked down. So one of the things I saw at Toy Fair this year was—you can color in a picture using different colored markers and snap a picture of it and turn it into a playable video game. There’s also something called Play Table that is a big screen that sits on top of the coffee table. It comes with a lot of games built-in, but also with RFID chips so that you can create your own games, you can take your toys and invent a game and build it yourself on the play table.

I’m excited by the innovation that people are undertaking during the pandemic. I am excited by their sensitivity in a lot of cases to what kids need, to what they’re feeling right now. And I hope that we carry that forward, that it doesn’t become, “OK, there’s a vaccine now so we can go back to the kids-don’t-want-to-know about the world around them.”