24 Jul Our Takeaways from KidScreen 2022
Last week Allison Caplovitz and Stefanie Cousins traveled to Miami to attend the Kidscreen Summit, one of the most important events for the kids’ entertainment industry. Attendees from all over the world return year after year to engage in critical conversations affecting the industry, conduct business meetings, and participate in key networking opportunities.
The week kicked off with a keynote by New York Times best-selling author and Newbery Award winner Kwame Alexander about the power of yes, specifically saying yes to creativity, saying yes to thinking outside the box, and saying yes to every opportunity. It was an impactful event, setting a positive tone for the rest of the week.
Streaming platforms, networks, production companies, animators, writers, and researchers were well represented on the stage and in the crowd last week. While not all sessions focused on COVID, several of the sessions Stefanie and Allison attended looked at kids’ content through that lens. Here are a few of their takeaways:
• A panel of kids’ content experts from Sesame Workshop, Warner Brothers Discovery, Duolingo, and Crandall Consulting discussed Lessons in Social Emotional Learning. They emphasized that infusing positive psychology, human-centric learning, and social-emotional learning into kids’ content is more critical than ever for kids to overcome the adversity they experienced during COVID. All panelists emphasized that soft skills, like resilience, collaboration, cooperation, and communication must be the nutrition we pack into programming.
• In their session, Coming out of COVID, experts from Dubit looked at the toll the pandemic has taken on kids, specifically their relationship with media. Dubit found that familiar, low risk, interactive, and comforting entertainment brands bring stability to kids and families now.
• Nickelodeon presented research in Mind the Gap, about “bridge” programs, which are geared toward 4-7-year-old, between preschool and big kid age groups. Bridge shows are just the right mix of comfort and excitement and are more like preschool programming than programs for big kids. Bluey, Gaby’s Dollhouse, and Wild Kratts are all examples of bridge programs. In our post-COVID world, bridge shows are thought to be more supportive of children in both age groups.
• The session, Pandemic Education Fallout: How COVID-19 Has Changed Everything, featured Sesame Workshop and The Family Room sharing research about the shifting learning priorities parents have for their preschoolers since the onset of the pandemic and how content creators can use this new information to impact their educational programming. Sesame Street, for example, has used this research in the development of its content for next season, focusing on curiosity (I wonder…) creative thinking (What if…), and task persistence (Let’s try…).
The next KidScreen Summit returns to Miami in February 2023 and we’re looking forward to another powerful week. See you there!