At a time when young people’s mental health and well-being is of paramount importance, the LEGO Group and NYU are partnering with the Joan Ganz Cooney Center to investigate the relationship between parents, digital play, and children’s wellbeing. Parents, please share your thoughts about your kids and video games by visiting: bit.ly/gamesNYU and earn a chance to win a $100 gift card! For more information, check out the blog post below! 

Please share this survey with parents with kids 8-17 years old.

What do parents think about kids and video games? The question has been asked many times before by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and other colleagues, so why bring it up now? For years, New York University’s CREATE Lab and CUNY Graduate Center’s CHILD Lab have worked together to study how children learn from digital technologies, especially video games. Our research has found that playful learning can make an impact beyond traditional subjects like math and reading, whether it’s through designing video games to train self-regulation skills, or investigating the power of video games to help Syrian refugee children recover from trauma.  These findings, along with an impressive body of research in the field of family learning and children’s media, offer many more possibilities to be discovered, but also highlight great need. 

We’re living in a time in which young people’s mental health and well-being is of paramount importance. At the same time, play, one of the most important parts of childhood and a vital part of children’s growth and development, is being brought to the forefront of conversations in learning. But what about Digital Play? 

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Led by the LEGO Group and UNICEF, collaborators from around the world are working on the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children Project (RITEC) to examine the complex intersection of digital technology, play, and children’s well-being. Within our research group at the CREATE Lab and CHILD Lab, our work on this project focuses on digital play with video games, design, and child well-being. We’re looking for insights by working closely with children playing mobile video games and talking to parents of children ages 8-17 in a new survey and upcoming parent focus groups in 2023.  

Why parents? When parents get involved in play, the benefits to children increase.  A perfect example of this is a preschooler watching Sesame Street with a parent. Studies of joint media engagement, in which families learn through co-viewing and experiencing digital media together, have a rich history at Sesame Workshop across a variety of media platforms, often with an emphasis on younger age groups. But what happens once kids get older, begin to learn different things from media, and can control their own experiences? As children grow up, parenting styles and motivations change.  

CREATE Lab designs games like Gwakkamolé to improve self-regulation skills. Copyright: New York University.

Just last year, Common Sense Media found that 59% of American children between the ages of 8-18 years old reported playing games every day, with daily averages of about 2.5 hours among 8-12 year-olds and 3 hours among 13-18 year olds.  But as our colleagues at the Cooney Center have found, this “Missing Middle” age group of children in middle childhood into their teen years is often overlooked in media research. There is still a lot to be learned about how to create thoughtful media design for kids in this age range, which happens to coincide with the time that many children get their own devices and begin to  gain independence from their parents.  And there is so much more to understand about how kids and parents play video games, and how gaming fits into family life and belief systems, particularly as time goes on. 

Studies of family life in the digital age reveal amazing diversity in attitudes, beliefs, and parenting practices with technology to ensure children’s well-being, and warrant further study. We are currently in a moment of the gamer parent generation, where the first generation of people who grew up with digital games or as gamers themselves are now parents, often ready to play alongside their older children. In 2019, the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) found that as many as 57% of gamer parents play at least once a week with their kids. While today’s parents may have the potential, motivation, and ability to engage with their children by playing digital games more than ever before, they are also navigating new challenges of finding balance and healthy relationships with technology not seen in previous generations. Particularly during the height of the pandemic, families found their media habits changing, sometimes with unexpected benefits to mental health like those who began playing games like Animal Crossing together, while others undoubtedly felt concerned over increased time spent on technology.  

Digital games provide opportunities for reaching kids where they want to be, while also giving parents a chance to connect with them through a positive, shared experience. We’re interested in learning about parent attitudes towards games and gaming together.  Please help contribute to this work by completing our survey, and sharing it widely with your networks (it is available in English, Spanish and Chinese) so that we can hear from parents with a wide range of experiences to share: https://bit.ly/gamesNYU

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is thrilled to collaborate with NAMLE during U.S. Media Literacy Week to present three conversations between experts and youth around topics in youth digital culture, moderated by educator Dwight Dunston. Together, adults and teens explore issues like what kids are watching online, where they get their news, how they maintain a sense of well-being in the digital world, and what it’s like to collaborate with public media professionals to produce content.

Group Chat: Adolescent Well-being Online
Premiered Tuesday, October 25
It’s no secret that teens are deeply immersed in online spaces – for better and for worse. How do their online activities impact their well-being? Emily Weinstein and Carrie James from Project Zero surveyed 3,500 teens to understand how youth today must navigate their digital lives. Next Gen Public Media Youth Fellows Faiza Ashar and Jaden Thompson share their own perspectives as young people who are trying to figure things out for themselves.

Group Chat: Youth Creators in Public Media
Premiered Wednesday, October 26
Public media stations around the country are offering unique opportunities for young people to produce content. In this Group Chat, teens from WNET’s Youth Collective “Amplify Series” and MPB’s Student Council Podcast join Hannah Dawe (WNET, public media station in New York City) and Jasmine Harvey (Mississippi Public Broadcasting) to give us the scoop on what it’s like behind the scenes when adults and youth collaborate in the studio.

Group Chat: Youth Digital Culture
Premiered Thursday, October 27
What do young people really think about what they’re seeing online? Monica Anderson (Pew Research Center) and Joan Mukogosi (Data & Society) chat with Next Gen Public Media Youth Fellows Gabby Rodriguez and Audrey Gage about the platforms they use, how they find community online, and where they get their news.

These sessions are also available on the 2022 U.S. Media Literacy Week event site.

This series was funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of the By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences project.

This summer, 10 teenagers from around the country joined the Cooney Center for our first-ever Next Gen Public Media Youth Fellowship. The cohort met every other week throughout the summer to build community and prepare for events that the Cooney Center hosted in the Next Gen Public Media initiative. Over the course of the summer, youth fellows were guests in a Peer Learning Community meeting, panelists in a workshop, and discussants in our “Group Chat” webinar series (being released this fall). Through our partnership with this group of teens, we learned first-hand about the issues that they care about, how they want to approach them, and what adults often misunderstand. As a result, youth perspectives directly shaped each of these public events and the Next Gen Public Media initiative at large.

But what happens next? We wanted to give the youth fellows a platform that could reach beyond summer 2022 and the participants who were able to join us in real time. So we turned a question over to the youth fellows: what are the most important topics we addressed this summer, and what would you like people to know about them?

Here are some of the key takeaways:

Youth fellows generally believe that there is an increasing amount of cultural and racial diversity represented in media content, but it is still somewhat limited and sometimes comes across as tokenism.
Jaden (16, Massachusetts) feels that “There is so, so much more work and room to grow in this topic. Just because there is a little bit of diversity in [some] media does not mean that there is enough diversity at all in the media world.” Mahi (16, California) has experienced the failings of representation in media firsthand. She describes how it is a problem that she has personally faced, and one that faces her peers more broadly: “As a South Asian female athlete, I see a lot of misrepresentation of both my race and gender in the media. Through the youth fellowship, I learned the struggles of people from other backgrounds and the struggles they face in media too. I hope people understand how much still needs to be done to have accurate media representations.”

Jeremiah (17, Georgia) agrees, and wants readers to know that the path forward needs to go beyond tokenism. “Creating media that includes diversity is more than just adding a token character of color, or characters with different beliefs. To be truly diverse is to use these characters in ways that are relatable and that are uncommonly used… [Creating] media that shows [diverse kinds of] people as normal is a step in the right direction. The world would be greatly impacted if we see characters not only embody the culture they represent but still interact like normal youths would.”

There is something uniquely valuable to young people about having their perspectives shared on a broader platform.
Faiza (16, Maryland) describes what’s important about having a platform, and about ways that public media can do that in better ways than social media: “There is a reason why many youth may feel safer broadcasting their own opinions online, as it is one of the only platforms that can help their voice reach other like-minded youth, creating a bond stronger than the criticism that may come from adults about our current state in our world. These perspectives, whether virtual or in-person, are critical for a better understanding of our world. We are the future and the new generation that will help implement change through new ideas and productivity, but we primarily need a platform to broadcast our ideas and thoughts.”

Mahi agrees: “Giving a voice to youth in spaces of public media can impact young people in a variety of ways. Through discussions with the other youth fellows, I realized that many people use social media as a platform to speak out about issues, since they are not always given a voice on mainstream media platforms. However, the unethical design of social media, whose primary goal is to keep teens addicted to their screens, does not always create the best environment for teens to be spending their time. Giving them a voice on a larger platform, such as public media, can help them feel heard in front of a larger audience.”

Mental health and well-being is a critically important topic for teens.
Youth fellows believe there needs to be more dialogue around mental health in ways that reflect the diversity of experiences teens have. Gabby (18, Pennsylvania) underscores the importance of authenticity when talking about mental health with youth:

“I used to think it was just me who felt this way until I started having conversations with those within the fellowship. It was interesting to see how disconnected youth, including myself, were from mental health discussions. I was also captivated at how everyone found different ways of learning about mental health that resulted in doing our own research or watching videos on YouTube, TikTok, etc. The way we are taught about mental health is different from how we actually deal with it.

Mental health shouldn’t be a white-centric conversation, and many times it is. It’s hard to connect with something or talk about something when it doesn’t come from your own community’s background. Mental health can be very taboo in certain cultures or religions. Talking about generational trauma, depression, suicide and much more all depend on the way you were raised or the standards of your community. It’s different for everyone and that difference is not taken into account. 

With that cultural divide, there is then a generation divide. It’s hard for an adult to fully understand our thoughts. Oftentimes the videos we see in class about mental health come across as “fake” or “staged” and sometimes it feels that our thoughts aren’t listened to. These conversations need to be more youth-led and have more youth perspectives from different backgrounds. 

It’s sad to see how many of these conversations end up and how many teens stopped listening to them.

When it comes to mental health, we need to be more engaging with youth. If there was more engagement, more youth-led discussions, more spaces that felt safe, I feel that mental health could be a topic that is properly taught about. The world could be different if youth became more involved.” 

   
Online culture is an important part of teens’ everyday experiences both for better and for worse. But the ways that reality gets distorted online, and teens compare themselves to those distortions, can be difficult to bear and difficult to change.
Rebecca (15, Virginia) describes some of her experiences, both positive and negative: “People are able to connect on such a variety of subjects and form very real, personal connections, even though they are online. Just because a connection is made over the internet, doesn’t mean that the relationship is any less than a relationship formed face to face. Realistically, I don’t think that social media will ever go away, or stop being ‘highlight reels’ of people’s lives. However, I do think that we should change our view of social media. We should just view it as a place where people can share their happy moments, rather than a place where people are vying for likes and attention.”

Making this kind of change is hard. As Remy (17, Tennessee) described it, “Body image isn’t the only way reality is distorted online and in media. Which reactions and consequences are seen as acceptable online are different from the ones many people would think are acceptable in real life, and most people put on some sort of front online. The scale of things online will likely always be very different from how it is in real life, and I don’t know how to fix that.” 

Audrey (17, Virginia) describes her own experience working on making this change, while acknowledging that it’s difficult to do, and hard on kids in the meantime: “Kids are just too young to realize that what they see online isn’t reality. Once I learned that the images I was seeing were often altered or idealized versions of someone’s life, I dropped many of my insecurities. [But still] today I compare myself to other people online and feel as if I can’t be happy if my life isn’t a certain way. I always want my life to be more productive, more fun, and more ‘aesthetic.’ At the end of the day, I just want to learn how to live happily in the moment instead of constantly comparing everything in my mind.”

Youth culture online is complex; so is the part of it that we call “cancel culture.” Youth fellows make a distinction between the kind of transgressions made by people in power, who may “deserve” to be “canceled,” and the kind of mistakes that they and their peers make, which deserve a chance for learning and growth.
Grace (16, Wisconsin) believes that, “Most of cancel culture is very, very toxic to be living through, and as a general rule I think it’s best to communicate instead of shun. ‘Canceling’ practices are inherently anti-education. Most people who end up getting canceled, ‘influencer’ or not, are very young. The way to teach a young person isn’t to shame them – that will only end in festering hatred. To educate them and invite them to learn from their mistakes, a dialogue is imperative. In the current social media climate, there is no room for that. From my perspective, I think the dialogues online should be focused towards kindness and mutual understanding instead of shame – it’s difficult because the current political climate is so polarizing, but an important step to making it less so is to make this online change.”

Gabby agrees, and elaborates on the complexity of this cultural norm, which has “no in-between”: “There are things that people should be canceled for and there are wrongs that people should know not to do. There are many celebrities that deserved to be canceled as well. But when you start focusing on teens in high school, who grew up in different environments, different norms, this is where issues arise. I’ve always been a person who wants to get all sides of the story and wants to talk things out. With cancel culture, it has created a way to isolate someone for mistakes they have made and expose them over social media. It’s something that could either be fully aggressive or kind-of light — no in between. Cancel culture needs to have more possibilities of discussion and teaching. When you teach someone what they did was wrong, that opens up growth, and growth opens up more possibilities then just shutting someone out.”

There’s so much more to learn. These five takeaways are just a few of the youth fellows’ insights that have shaped our efforts to work by/with/for youth. For more, check out our recent research briefs and tune into our upcoming webinars:

• Research brief: “Models of Youth-Adult Collaboration for Public Media” (published April 2022)
• Research brief: “Understanding Youth: A Prerequisite for Creating Programs By/With/For Tweens and Teens” (published June 2022)
• Research brief: “Content and Platform Innovation with Youth” (published September 2022)
• “Group Chat: Youth Digital Culture” (coming October 2022)
• “Group Chat: Adolescent Wellbeing Online” (coming October 2022)
• “Group Chat: Youth Creators in Public Media” (coming October 2022)

To learn more about the challenge and submit your designs please visit openideo.com.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center is excited to join forces with Riot Games, IDEO, and the Fair Play Alliance to announce the “The Designing for Digital Thriving Challenge.” Co-hosted by Riot and IDEO, the Challenge is inspired by the work that the Fair Play Alliance (FPA) and the Cooney Center are doing to establish “Digital Thriving,” a field-initiated approach to building healthy interactions and resilient communities in online game spaces. 

The FPA and Joan Ganz Cooney Center define digital thriving as the outcome of online spaces intentionally designed to foster feelings of well-being, accomplishment, and belonging, and meaningful relationships in individuals, groups, and communities. We know the digital future will be a collective experience for all of us – including children – and it’s something that we must build together.

FPA, founded in 2017, is a cross-industry initiative of over 250 gaming companies around the world, including Riot, working together to encourage healthy communities and player interactions. Riot’s Weszt Hart has been a key driver of the digital thriving work along with Kimberly Voll (Brace Yourself Games) who co-founded FPA, and Natasha Miller (Activision Blizzard). The Cooney Center is thrilled to work with this coalition of creative and innovative leaders.

We are all driven by a mission to create digital spaces that are not only safe, but intentionally foster positive outcomes for all of us. More info about the Designing for Digital Thriving project can be found on FPA’s website.

Opening the Challenge of Innovation to Everyone

Over the course of the last 11 years, IDEO has run over 70 Challenges with partners who feel passionate about creating positive impact in our world. Designing for digital thriving is uncharted territory, which is why Riot, FPA and the Cooney Center are teaming up with IDEO to invite diverse perspectives and catalyze new ideas that can help build and sustain flourishing, thriving online spaces. 

The “Designing for Digital Thriving Challenge” is open to academics, community managers, educators, designers, developers, innovators, parents, researchers, students, and all other individuals who are committed to designing for digital spaces. Participants from all over the world will be able to draw inspiration from three topic areas when creating their innovations and designs: “Designing for Marginalized Voices,” “Fostering Healthy and Resilient Digital Spaces,” and “Building a Future for Kids and Families.” 

The winning submissions will receive funding and support from IDEO and Riot Games to help implement their ideas in hopes of establishing digital thriving as a high watermark for the industry as a whole. Winners will be announced in late November 2022. To learn more about the challenge and submit your designs please visit openideo.com.

On September 14, 2022, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center was thrilled to co-host Building a Better Tech Future for Children with our colleagues at All Tech Is Human.

Dr. Elizabeth Milovidov, Senior Manager, Digital Child Safety at the LEGO Group, delivered a keynote address that inspired us all. She discussed the Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children (RITEC) project and the importance of designing digital media experiences with children’s well-being in mind.

David Ryan Polgar (All Tech is Human) introduced a panel led by Mina Aslan (Headstream) featuring Emma Leiken (Omidyar), Bre’Lynn Lombard (TikTok), Ishva Mehta (Headstream Accelerator), Michael Rich (Digital Wellness Lab), and Guilherma Souza (Headstream Accelerator).

Together, they discussed what “digital well-being” means to young people who are growing up in a world in which the boundaries between digital and analog are blurring. What are steps that policymakers or media and technology producers can take to build digital experiences that foster a sense of well-being? What should children and families do to ensure positive experiences?

We are so grateful to all of our partners and participants who came together with a shared commitment to create a tech future that prioritizes wellbeing, creativity, and authenticity for children … and for all of us.