The bombarding of childhood

Listen to this essay 19 minute listen I am at the airport gate waiting to depart, watching passengers hurry past with rolling suitcases and paper cups of coffee. A small boy sits very still beside his mother. He holds an iPad close to his chest, almost in a cramp, clutching the screen as if it might otherwise run away. I hear loud clapping hands and squeaking children’s voices. I lean over and see a cartoon character in green snatch a toy from another character in pink. The pink character begins to cry, tears splashing from enormous eyes like sprinkles. The green character shouts sorry. Instantly, the tears stop and a wide smile replaces the tears before I have blinked. And, before I have even worked out whether the characters are speaking English or Arabic (as the mother does to the boy), the scene has changed and the two characters are rowing a boat with a random song in the background. The boy’s eyes dart on the screen from right to left, centre, down. His body is still but his attention is being hurried from cue to cue. This is the problem I have come to think of as the pace of children’s media. Children’s media are usually judged by their content and quantity: how many minutes watched and whether it was educational, age-appropriate, diverse, prosocial, commercial or safe. These questions matter and, with my colleagues, I have studied them through experiments and contributed to guidelines, regulations, or toolkits for designers. But we have been missing a bigger design feature that may be just as consequential: the time a medium gives a child to make meaning. A programme or app can contain good lessons and still move too quickly for those lessons to settle. For instance, in the US animated educational series Ask the StoryBots (2016-20), the subject matter may be genuinely rich – why the sky is blue, how eyes work, or where planets come from – but the explanation unfolds through rapid jokes, songs, visual shifts and sudden changes in style. Before a child has time to sit with one image or idea, the scene has moved on to the next, with a burst of information. Different media have different temporal demands: a digital picture book, a game, a television episode and an app each ask a child to attend differently. But, across media, the important question is whether the pace suits the experience that the narrative claims to support. Does it give children time to follow a story, grasp a concept, identify with a character, regulate emotion or share attention with another person? Or does it continually hurry them toward the next cue, the next reward, the next burst of stimulation? When media move too quickly, the layers of experience collapse into one another. A child may laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel but imitate only the visible silliness, missing the anticipation and reversal that make the joke work. A character may comfort a friend, but if the scene moves on too quickly, the child has little time to recognise the repair, or imagine doing the same in the kindergarten room. To develop empathy in the early years, a child must notice that another person feels something different. That small act of crossing over takes time. In this sense, pace is not a minor stylistic feature of children’s media. It is one of the ways media imagine the child. Is the child a consumer to be retained, a nervous system to be stimulated, a vessel to be filled with educational content – or a person whose attention is still forming, and who therefore needs time to arrive? People who worry about children and screens tend to worry about violent content, advertising, or whether a phonics app calling itself ‘educational’ truly supports phonics. These are reasonable worries and I share them. But spend five minutes watching what many young children watch, and you will see how fast, loud and bright everything on the screen has become. It does not matter whether the child is watching on a smartphone in the car or on a television at home. The screen has inherited the adult logic of media design. That logic is, for the most part, the logic of the attention economy. It overwhelms and overshouts, making it easier for the screen to steer the viewer. The attention economy has introduced a host of small design features for shortening time. The Like button is faster than writing an appreciative comment. A progress bar tells us how many minutes remain in an article before we have decided whether to read to the end. Increasingly, AI appears beside long documents with an offer that sounds helpful but carries a philosophy: this text is long; would you like a quick summary? The child is swept along by urgency rather than invited to dwell on responsibility or care for the other There are, of course, features that work in the opposite direction. The delayed message and the pop-up that asks: ‘Are you sure you want to delete this?’ are two examples. Such features interrupt automatic action and return a fragment of judgment to the user. A nature documentary with linearity and the interpretive presence of an adult voice is a great model for children’s media; for example, in the TV show Prehistoric Planet (2022-25), David Attenborough’s voiceover and the camera’s zoom-ins encourage children to look closely and wonder about unfamiliar life. But these are exceptions within a larger system in which speed is treated as the default. When learning is crowded with content that keeps jumping ahead – a crisis appears, a mission begins, a spaceship launches, a door opens – the child’s attention is restarted as each problem is introduced and immediately solved. Such media may gesture at teamwork or perseverance, but the speed of the format leaves little time for those lessons to sink in. In the animated TV series Paw Patrol (2013-), for instance, a rescue is clear and reassuring: someone is in trouble, pups assemble, each uses a skill, and order is restored. Yet the movement from problem to rescue to resolution is often so efficient that the child is swept along by urgency rather than invited to dwell on responsibility or care for the other. Similarly, in the app-based game Hot Wheels Unlimited, building tracks and racing cars may suggest creativity and problem-solving, but the dominant rhythm is acceleration: boost, race, crash, win, unlock, repeat. Research has told us many useful things about children’s media. We know that some educational television (like Sesame Street) can support learning. We know that some apps are better designed than others. We know that interactive features in digital books can help when they serve the story, and distract when they do not. We know that characters and narratives shape children’s ideas about identity, gender and social life. Pace cuts across all of these questions as the condition under which content becomes experience. Screen time can run fast or slow. This is partly why merely clocking ‘screen time’ is too crude a measure. Two children may each watch 20 minutes of media and have entirely different encounters with time. In one case, the child is moved through a coherent story with pauses, repetitions and recognisable emotional beats. In another, she is pulled through 10 clips, 30 characters, flashing colours, sudden songs and rewards that arrive before thought has had time to form. The clock records the same duration but the child does not live the same time. And parents are rightly worried: a four-year-old does not come to media with adult reserves of self-regulation. She is still learning how to stay with a feeling, how to wait for a story to unfold, how to connect one event to another, how to notice that a character’s sadness matters before the joke wipes it away. If a programme moves too quickly, it may encourage a child to expect information to arrive in rapid, constantly shifting bursts, making slower, more sustained forms of attention harder to tolerate. Stopping this vicious cycle starts by asking what exactly makes children’s media fast or slow. A child can look intensely engaged while being given very little time to think Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that slow is always good or better than fast media. Some lively children’s media can be excellent; some slow media can be dull, inert or badly made. The point is that good children’s media give a child time to complete an act of attention. Bad media keep interrupting that act before it can become a memory or play. When my research group compared children’s shows, apps and digital stories, we saw that pace can become a set of design choices. A story can move in a way that helps a child anticipate what comes next, or it can jump so quickly between scenes that cause and effect become blurred. A screen can guide the eye toward one important object, or fill the frame with competing movement. This is why the familiar adult language of ‘engagement’ is so poor for children. A child can look intensely engaged while being given very little time to think. In the Children’s Slow Media Project, we have therefore tried to make these differences visible. We evaluate children’s media by looking at how these media organise time. We ask whether the narrative is coherent enough to follow; whether the sensory field overwhelms meaning-making at specific age junctures; whether the design builds in stopping points, where the story can be digested before it goes on. Does a piece of media allow learning to develop through meaningful repetition? And does a story or piece create openings for a child and adult, or two children, to notice something together? When in March 2026 the UK Department for Education advised parents of children aged under five to choose ‘slow-paced, age-appropriate’ content, without saying what slow-paced actually is, our group sought to make the term concrete. What makes a show slow or fast for a given child? It depends. Children differ by age, temperament, language, sensory sensitivity and circumstance; thus, without testing their responses, it is impossible to provide a firm recommendation: a show that suits one four-year-old may overwhelm another. We therefore give ratings only to provide a map for adult judgment. The ratings are illustrations, inviting parents to check whether their child is being given enough time to complete an act of attention. The shows scoring highest on the slow rubric are those that leave room around the characters’ actions and allow the child to recognise the actions. Often there is a face, a puppet, a song, a greeting, a familiar body on screen that treats attention as a relationship. Indeed, the power of programmes such as the US show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968-2001), the Norwegian series Fantorangen (2007-), and the British shows In the Night Garden… (2007-09) and Teletubbies (1997-2001) lies in their ability to build a rapport with the child and then repeat, almost as in a ritual. Here, small acts and greetings or songs provide a familiar frame, almost like a safety net, within which new concepts can be introduced. In the Australian animated series Bluey (2018-24), play often begins in an ordinary family situation and develops into imaginative games that involve parents, siblings and friends; the pace can be lively, but it tends to return the child to pretend play, negotiation and emotional understanding. In the animated TV series The Adventures of Paddington (2019-25) – a British-French co-production – gentle mishaps are usually held inside a world of curiosity, politeness, family and repair, so comedy becomes a route into perseverance or social understanding. Such programmes are slow because they leave openings through which the story can travel back into meaning and play. The child’s attention is kept in motion by a manipulative rhythm that continuously restarts attention with the next tune, next bright image, next comic beat Conversations between characters are another way in which higher-ranked shows convey new concepts with appropriate pace. When introduced with context, a new word or idea might not be immediately clear, but the child can notice and infer. Over time, the child arrives at understanding, and this slow, even arduous process helps the concept stick. For example, in one episode of Daniel Tiger’s Neighbourhood (2012-) – based on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood – Daniel is nervous about trying the swing. The scene allows that feeling to be acknowledged, sung through, and gradually transformed into confidence, with support from Daniel’s friend Jodi and her grandmother. Similarly, in the Sesame Street-based game app Elmo Loves ABCs, a letter is traced, sounded, repeated, connected to words, and encountered through touch and play. The lowest-scoring media are those in which the child’s attention is kept in motion by a manipulative rhythm that continuously restarts attention with the next tune, next bright image, next comic beat, next loop of familiarity or personalised nudge. Instead of allowing the child to settle into the story, such children’s shows repeatedly pull attention back; the same is true of many preschool game apps built around loops of reward and progression. Evaluating children’s popular media taught me that pace is a revealing measure of quality but also a proxy for a deeper question about the child’s agency, their own sense of self. The real distinction is whether a medium leaves room for the child’s own attention or continually redirects it. When every pause is filled, every uncertainty immediately resolved and every wandering thought pulled back by a brighter cue, waiting and reflection can begin to feel intolerable. The child learns to reach for the next stimulus before the previous one has had time to settle. To give space for a child’s attention to drift inward, to reflect, is therefore to leave room for the child’s inner life. Slow media changes the relation between screen and child by saying: you may arrive at your own pace. Some critics may dismiss slow media as nostalgia: a longing for the children’s television of the previous generation, or a privilege available only to parents with time and large bookshelves and big houses with quiet rooms. But that is a notion we should refuse. The attention economy has trained us to treat a child’s pause as a problem, a wandering gaze as lost engagement, and an unfilled moment as wasted time. The opposite is true – slow time gives children the space to perceive, process, respond and make meaning – and it can be designed for in children’s media. Like energy drinks, fast media promise more capacity than the child actually has: more attention is supposed to lead to better performance. Fast media feel like an extension of the child’s energy, but the bargain is unsustainable and unhealthy. What looks like support can become dependency, and what promises engagement and learning is actually compulsion. Children need media that do not merely occupy them, instruct them or keep them quiet. They benefit and grow from stories and shows that preserve children’s capacity for inwardness and their relation to others. In fast media, the child’s attention is continually propped up by the next stimulus. Slow media insist on the opposite. In the end, the aim is not to withdraw children from the digital world, but to make that world more worthy of them.