Kids Tag

08 Apr

Posted at 14:05h in Kids, Qualitative Research, Research Camp


We’re beyond excited to announce that Research Camp is growing! In addition to our beloved Boston location at New England Base Camp, we’re launching a second site at Colorado Adventure Point in Denver.

Why Denver? Colorado Adventure Point is an incredible 20,000-square-foot Scouting and adventure education facility featuring:

• A two-story rock-climbing wall
• Archery & air rifle ranges
• Technology & culinary labs
• An outdoor adventure park

At Research Camp, kids take on real-world research and design challenges while experiencing the best of summer camp. By using participatory research methods, we uncover kids’ ideas, emotions, and experiences—helping our clients gain deep, meaningful insights.

Want a sneak peek at our new Denver camp? Check it out here.

Curious about Research Camp and how to get involved? Learn more: here!

We can’t wait to see how our Denver campers bring fresh perspectives to our research.

24 May

Posted at 11:06h in Children, Kids, Research

One of the most consistent findings I have noticed while studying families and digital media over the years is that parents want their children to be less dependent on them. At the same time, however, parents must also supervise their children and ensure their children’s online safety. In various studies about educational apps, children’s media, digital gaming, non-digital play, and reading, many parents have admitted that whatever the medium, they want their children to be both safe and independent. Therein lies the parenting conundrum.

Parents tend to opt for solo activities and resources for their children that can offer the safest options and the most autonomy. For example, while co-reading is important to parents to allow time to bond, they also want their child to grow to love reading and eventually choose to read independently on their own. Similarly, parents often prefer to send their children to the yard (if one is available to them) instead of a public park, since they can provide supervision while getting other things done at home.

While this idea may seem like a no-brainer (especially to parents), the solutions that research offers as the best and safest options for children—co-viewing and co-playing, for example, which we fully support—can admittedly leave parents feeling that they have to make a hard choice. They feel they have to choose between what they should do to be a “good parent” and what they end up doing in reality, which is often pushing their child toward the easiest solution that gets them out of their hair. We have heard from many parents that they struggle to balance their children’s need for activities that are educational, fun, and physically active —activities that often require supervision—with their own need for time to do what they need to do, which often requires their child to act independently.

According to our research, the capacity for independent play is one of the key drivers for parents to allow technology use among young children, beating out most other anxieties parents report having about screen time and active time. This is a particularly interesting finding to see come up time and again, especially given the vats of ink spilled over screen time since the debut of the iPad in 2010 (not to mention the invention of the television). Complicating the picture further, the levers for safety and autonomy are different for each family. A family most concerned about exposure, for example, might allow their 11-year-old to access any video game they want as long as their device is not connected to the internet. Another family concerned about contact and location might give their 11-year-old a phone so that they can be reached wherever they are, with less concern about how the child uses it.

Regardless of each family’s situation, however, there are certain takeaways tech companies might consider to help parents feel more confident in their child’s safety when using technology independently. Ideally, with this peace of mind, parents might be less anxious about not striking the balance between wanting to engage with their children and needing time to be more hands off.

1) Support the balance of learning and fun.

We have heard from many parents that, if their children are going to be on a screen anyway, they want the time spent to be as educational as possible. For some parents, an engaging educational app is a relief, since the alternatives are “mindless” apps that just waste time. But above all, we have heard that parents take cues from their children about what is engaging for them and worth spending time and money on. If it is educational but no fun, it is not going to be worth the time, let alone the money. App designers should strive for the happy medium. Note, however, that the desire for educational apps seems to change over time: as older children have increased responsibilities at school, parents want their children to relax and are more okay with “mindless” fun.

2) Support parents’ search for appropriate content.

We have likely all experienced the inundation of choices that have resulted from the proliferation of streamers, channels, and podcast networks. The children’s media landscape is no different. There is no shortage of options for devices, apps, or shows to choose from, and parents are operating on a combination of word of mouth, pre-vetting (using the apps themselves for a while), and trial and error. Issues with app store rating systems have been well documented, but in addition to overdue changes to those systems, parents need to be made aware of websites like Common Sense Media (CSM) that include parent and child reviews and media research. Outlets such as CSM can also help parents differentiate high-quality, research-based content from popular apps that claim to be educational. This information can help parents make their own decisions about what is right for their family.

3) Support parents’ efforts to keep their children safe.

Parents trust devices and apps that help them maintain control over what their children are exposed to. While they can control most of what comes into their home in other ways, technology can be a conduit to the wider world that parents have comparatively little control over. We have found that parents are not completely comfortable with company-imposed or set-it-and-forget-it filters, so we suggest clear controls that allow parents to customize and revisit the boundaries they’ve set over time.

4) Support regulations on children’s time.

Although parents like that technology can occupy their children’s time, they also fear and dislike the complete and utter takeover of their attention. Parents we have talked to complain about being excluded from engagement with their child while they are on devices. While some parents have outsourced being the screen time “bad guy” to timers and house rules, many parents wish apps and devices integrated periodic breaks after an appropriate amount of time. This feature would make transitions between activities smoother for everyone.

5) Support optional parent participation.

Although parents want and need their children to be independent, they still see the value of co-engagement and participation in their interests. Multiplayer modes and prompts for optional parent participation in activities invite parents to engage with their children in digital spaces rather than exclude them. Portals or logins that give parents a view of what their child is doing and the progress they have made also help parents feel connected without interrupting their child’s screen time.

Conducting research with parents and children provides me and my colleagues at Fluent with the opportunity to advise tech companies on how their products and services might have a positive impact on kids and their parents. These are some of the most common insights we have heard from families across our research studies. I look forward to seeing how Fluent Research continues to help make new innovations even better for them.

By Tiffany Salone*

07 Apr

Posted at 17:31h in Children, Content, Kids, Media, Research, Technology

A wise and dear professor once told me, “The medium is not the message. The message is the message.” And when television was the medium, that was certainly true. But is that still the case with the proliferation of interactive media for children taking hold? Does the interactivity of the medium outweigh the content being delivered on it?

In the podcast series, Chasing Life, Dr. Sanjay Gupta delves into the science behind the impact of technology on our brains. This particular episode, Inside a Lab Studying Toddlers and Touchscreens,” explores the impact of interactive touchscreen technologies on very young children. Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician and director of Seattle Children’s Research Institute, explains how his research is finding that children between the ages of 18 and 24 months struggle to disengage from an app in comparison to a traditional toy. This knowledge triggers questions for both parents of young children as well as the technology companies that create these apps. What can parents and tech companies do to prevent adverse effects on children’s young brains from this relatively new technology?

As a parent myself, I see in my teenagers how the interactivity and stimulation of technology keeps them fully engaged and immersed. And in my role as Director of Content Research and Evaluation at Fluent Research, I help technology and media companies understand how children and parents experience apps, games, and other products so designers and producers who create digital content for kids do so with their wellbeing in mind. This is more important than ever as technology continues to evolve and draw in the attention of a generation. As Dr. Christakis says, “Every program is educational. The question is, ‘What is it teaching?’” We need to do better for our children.

By Allison Caplovitz, PhD

21 Jul

Posted at 23:49h in Children, Kids, Media, Methodology, Qualitative Research, Research

Digital contexts are becoming more prevalent in children’s lives than ever before, fueled in part by the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to move various aspects of children’s lives online*. Since human development is a holistic and dynamic process between the developing person and his or her context* and children develop in positive and healthy ways when their strengths are combined with the strengths of their contexts, we have an opportunity as researchers to bring this framework to the changing landscape of children’s lives.

What has become apparent in our company’s recent requests for proposals, is that there is a lack of fit between the knowledge and experience of many designers and the developmental needs and abilities of children. This lack of fit signals a fundamental problem, and an opportunity, given the growing presence of digital technology as a context for children’s development. The virtual world is a new frontier and there has been a land rush of companies looking to stake their claim flag.  This rapid growth has seemed to create holes in the capabilities of these frontier companies. More precisely, the talent needed to design for adults does not adequately translate to designing for kids. In the absence of comprehensive knowledge about child development, current designers may err in using themselves or those close to them as the markers of success and/or “normality”.

“We all have a blind spot and it’s shaped exactly like us.” – Junto Diaz, Author

Short of extensive training in child development, designers can utilize a few central rules of thumb when designing for kids. Keeping these in mind will go a long way to minimizing, or at least acknowledging, our biases:

1) All humans are whole. Sometimes by necessity, we need to zoom in and focus on a specific part of children’s development, such as their literacy level or their ability to swipe on a tablet. But it is important to understand those parts within the context of the whole developing person. We then need to further adjust our lens to view that person as situated within a dynamic relationship with his or her context.

2) There is no ‘typical’ child. Much of what we know and have studied about children is approximations that are gathered from information that has been averaged over large groups from mostly Westernized societies. Expectations about children should be considered approximations that can get you close to understanding.

3) All households are different. A common mistake is to view children’s development as unfolding in a vacuum. Rules and expectations differ greatly by household and are driven by cultural, situational, and practical factors. Just because a child is developmentally capable of something does not mean that they will do it.

4) Child development is less linear than it appears. Because development is an iterative process, there are often regressions that ebb and flow with progressions. Development of a skill or competency may occur steadily over time or rapidly in spurts. While many abilities get better over time, it is not always the case.  Some abilities, like attention span increase gradually over time during childhood while other capacities, like learning a new language, decrease over time. Other aspects of development, like identity development, are latent during younger years and then rapidly develop.

If there is one mantra that we could recommend to all designers and those thinking about how to best support kids, we would strongly offer this:

“Every [child] is like all other [children], some other [children], and no other [child].” – Kluckhohn & Murray, Anthropologist & Psychologist

By Dan and Amy Warren.

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1*Responsible Innovation in Technology for Children. UNICEF Office of Research – Innocenti, Florence, 2022.

*Lerner, R. M., Lerner, J. V., Almerigi, J., Theokas, C., Phelps, E., Gestsdóttir, S. Naudeau, S., Jelicic, H., Alberts, A. E., Ma, L., Smith, L. M., Bobek, D. L., Richman-Raphael, D., Simpson, I., Christiansen, E. D., & von Eye, A. (2005). Positive youth development, participation in community youth development programs, and community contributions of fifth-grade adolescents: Findings from the first wave of the 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development. Journal of Early Adolescence, 25(1), 17-71.

 

16 Feb

Posted at 07:05h in Children, Kids, Market Research, Methodology, Research

Here at Fluent Research, we find ourselves interacting with kids nearly all year around. We interview them about playtime and class time, film them at home and at school, play games with them, and even watch videos alongside them. We talk to kids a lot for the research we conduct on behalf of our clients!

Some researchers may be intimidated by talking to children. It’s understandable. We were young people too once, but we might not remember what it’s like to be 4, 6, or 8 years old. Well, fear no more! Our Director of Youth Development and Education Dan Warren put together the above video to help you get through your next interaction with a small human and have fun at the same time!

If you would like to download the slide show, click here.