Tag Archives: tweens

In this episode of ‘Into the Digital Future,’ hosts Laura Higgins and Jordan Shapiro speak with psychologist and best-selling author Dr. Lisa Damour  about the complex emotional lives of teenagers and their digital habits. They explore how some digital habits can serve as a form of self-care,  the impact of algorithms on social media experiences, and strategies for parents to support their teenagers’ mental health. Dr. Damour emphasizes the importance of understanding each child’s unique needs and provides practical advice…

Today’s parents and caregivers often find themselves caught between two powerful forces: on the one side, harrowing headlines about how social media harms kids, and on the other, kids’ vigorous lobbying for social media accounts. Not surprisingly, this leaves many adults feeling that they must choose between two terrible options. Should they refuse to give their tween or teen access to social media and, in so doing strain their relationship with their child while likely harming their kid’s peer connections?…

In today’s rapidly evolving world of youth and digital media, it is crucial to stay up-to-date with the latest changes and discover innovative ways to cater to the needs of children, tweens, and teens. At BeMe Health, we are using media to connect and support Gen Z and Gen Alpha wellness, drawing inspiration from the Cooney Center’s recent research on tweens and teens to create the BeMe app, a mobile mental health platform designed to improve teen well-being by bringing…

This transcript of the Into the Digital Future podcast has been edited for clarity. Please listen to the full episode here and learn about the full series here.   Laura Higgins: The work Michael Preston does around youth perspectives and technology is really important. This is one of those conversations that’s going to appeal to all different audiences —a lot of parents, and actually for a lot of industry people, I think there’s a lot they can learn from listening…

“While new technology is connecting us to each other in different and much faster ways, these changes will necessarily have a knock-on effect to how we interact with one another, how younger generations open up to new cultures and ideas, and how we interpret this cultural Tower of Babel from one era to the next.” –Julian Vigo (Forbes, 2019) Generation Z, born mainly between 1997 and 2010, inhabit a world with 24/7/365 access to on-demand media, social media, mobile devices,…

In the 1960s, Joan Ganz Cooney published The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education, a report that would revolutionize television for children. Where others saw a “vast wasteland,” Cooney saw possibility, and from it, educational programming for children, like Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was born. Half a century later, the Joan Ganz Cooney Center and Corporation for Public Broadcasting seek to carry forward this vision of programming with the By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences…

Unlike kids in the 70s, tweens and teens today are posting, dancing, and streaming across platforms from TikTok to Twitch. They have no interest in being corralled to discrete brands or destinations. They enjoy a banquet of high-quality digital offerings that are ready when and where they are. And they’re always one step ahead of us. While just about everything has changed in terms of media consumption, something essential has not: kids’ curiosity and desire for agency. The Corporation for…

It seems like we’re having a lot of conversations about teens and tweens these days. Or youth? Young people? All of these terms get used by various disciplines, and some even get used by the young people themselves. However you talk about it, it’s clear that public media needs to be ready for the next generation of audiences (and technology)—because they’re already here. Right now, we’re in the middle of a new research project called By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen…

The following post is part of a series springing from the Cooney Center’s joint initiative with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, By/With/For Youth: Inspiring Next Gen Public Media Audiences. This is a project aimed at exploring the role of public media in the lives of young people by taking stock of the current landscape and imagining a future that public media can build alongside teens and tweens. With that in mind, we are inviting public media practitioners who are already experimenting…

“It’s hard to think of a more important audience than kids who are developing their sense of self and their connections to their communities all in this fairly messy and quickly evolving media landscape.”  – Michael Preston Even before the massive disruptions that have now defined 2020, public media leaders were expressing a growing urgency to address the many and diverse needs of youth audiences, who today have more options at their fingertips than ever before within an overwhelming media…