Children’s Media Summit ’26 Opening Speech
Baroness Beeban Kidron opened the second Children’s Media Summit with a speech which addressed some of the key issues facing the children’s audience, the creators of content that serves them, and the platforms that now control how they see that content.
I want to start with making two observations.
First is that the media of my childhood was a collective affair. What I saw at home — The Waltons, Crackerjack, Top of the Pops or Tomorrow’s World — was picked over in the playground. On sleepovers we would cry out “Good night Sue Ellen, goodnight John Boy” in our best American accents. On any given day, at five to five we would shout out “Crackerjack”, and we would together build our vison of the future on the world that Raymond Baxter conjured up for us – just as we would all perform our best dance moves to whatever topped the charts.
I don’t say that as someone who was an avid TV watcher — on the contrary I was largely head in a book — nor am I particularly nostalgic about my own childhood – there was plenty of room for improvement. But my point is, that it was the collective experience rather than the content itself that created the culture of my youth.
The value lay not just in what we watched, but in the fact that we watched it together.
And that is the point I want to hold onto this morning: culture was not simply delivered to us, it was something we made together out of the same raw material. Even those who only half watched still belonged to the conversation. The programmes were prompts for social interaction, not the final destinations.
My second observation is about the cartoon Cocomelon — watched by hundreds of millions of children and regularly topping Netflix and YouTube’s most watched programmes of any kind.
I first came across Cocomelon when it was subject to an exposé in The New Yorker that claimed that as part of the editing process they put a child in front of the proposed cut, and at any point the child looked away from the screen they re-edited — ensuring the final product was – mesmerising.
The makers insisted that was not true, but whistle blowers who talked to the journalist said otherwise — just as they said the episodes that featured Black children were longer because, they tended to come from lower socioeconomic families with less childcare. But while the detail is contested, the scale of engagement is not — billions of hours are spent watching Cocomelon by children right across the world.
And it is important to note that it is not Cocomelon’s subject matter that is inherently bad for children, but its rapid visuals and non-stop sensory input — designed to be deliberately compelling, which is unsuitable for developing brains. Affecting attention span, focus, speech and emotional balance in toddlers, especially those who spend long periods in unsupervised screen time. And it is notable that within Cocomelon’s target audience are millions of children 12–24 months.
I am not looking for a scapegoat in the form of a single cartoon, but I am offering Cocomelon as an illustration of a system in which success is measured by retention, repetition and scale — not by what a child understands, imagines, or later shares with another child.
Taken together, these two examples describe a profound shift — from media that children experienced together and shared, to media that is individually delivered and commercially optimised to hold their attention.
That shift — from shared culture to individually targeted consumption — is fundamental to how we think about what we want from children’s media.
I make these two points at the outset of your deliberations – because when we talk about the harms of the online world, and when we reach for solutions, it is easy to focus on content. But more of the same delivered in the same way does not beginning to tackle the problem. I would contend that both the problems and the solutions lie in the context — the context of the child and the context of the content.
We have spent years asking, “What are children watching?” when we should also be asking, “For what reason is it designed to be watched? With whom? To what end?”
If that is the shift, what has driven it? I would suggest two enormous pressures shaping what children now consume.
The first is the shift from shared experience to radical individualisation — variously named personalisation, on demand, individual learning, tailored, reflecting interests. Whether at home or at school, whether for entertainment or learning, there is a pressure — or worse still the promise — that each child will be treated separately.
Personalisation is not without value. It can support children with different needs, different paces of learning, different interests. Nor is all digital play isolating — some of it is creative and social. But the overwhelming majority is not. The question is not whether technology belongs in childhood, but whether it has been designed with childhood in mind.
And design, not technology itself, is where responsibility sits.
Because this individualisation carries with it an opportunity cost: not sharing culture, not sharing learning, not experiencing both in situations where everything from embarrassment to support, courage to humour — or even dance moves — are shared.
Children do not only develop cognitively. They develop socially — by negotiating meaning together, by laughing at the same joke, by being confused at the same moment, by copying, arguing and collaborating. Shared cultural reference points are how children learn not just language, but belonging. When every child’s feed is different, those moments of shared negotiation are eroded.
The other pressure is that media now sits inside a digital economy based on capturing attention — which, again, in many social and educational areas of children’s lives, holds their attention at the cost of the rest of their development needs: emotional, social, intellectual, and even the freedom to do nothing or think for yourself.
This is not accidental. We have allowed the tech sector to build an economy in which the most successful products are those that are hardest to stop using. But a product optimised to hold attention is not the same as an experience designed for childhood. Childhood requires pauses, boredom, reflection, and the chance to turn away.
So if the problem is contextual, the solutions must be too.
The first session is — ban or build better. The real question is not simply “ban, block, or how much?” but “What is this time doing in a child’s life?” Is it replacing interaction, or provoking it? Is it closing down imagination, or opening it up? Not simply what children consume, but the purposes for which it is designed, the context in which it is consumed, and the people with whom it is shared.
Because even if we ban some of it, there are no suggestions on the table to ban Cocomelon. And while I am a passionate believer in free play, on and offline, there is – sadly – no unified movement for a wholesale change in provision for the spaces and places in which that can happen. If all your friends are online gaming and there is no version of “going out to play” in the real or virtual worlds, then gaming becomes the de facto – best option.
So the task before us is not to rewind history, but to design forward — to ask what a healthy digital childhood would look like if we were inventing it from scratch today.
For me, build back better starts with acknowledging the need of children to do many things, including things that have nothing to do with media – even doing nothing at all. It may not be the most useful thing to say to this audience, but depending on age, a cardboard box, a wall and a spray can, a dressing up box – or simply being a teenager staring grumpily at the ceiling – may be the best thing a child can do.
In other words, creativity is rarely optimised – it is about self-direction and discovery — and that is precisely why it matters.
But equally we need to be tougher about the design of the media itself, for example, age-rating addictive loops and persuasive design. Which may indeed put Cocomelon out of the range of the very children it is designed for, because no toddler should be left alone with it. Companies that expose children to danger or exploit children commercially should not be allowed to have them as customers. And more excitingly we could imagine media deliberately structured for co-viewing, so that children can share culture as we do great sports events — and digital equivalents of a film club or youth centre — where being together is the point, with natural stopping points, prompts for discussion, and design that assumes or even requires the presence of another human being. The possibilities are endless we simply need the commitment and the vision.
The point is, we should measure success not only in clicks and time spent (dwell time), but in conversations, random outcomes and wellbeing. And this is where institutions — particularly public service media — still have a unique role to play. If I were magically given the role of determining the future of the BBC, I would put content made for and by children at its heart, offer a non-advertising environment that young people can use, and crucially – draw on its deep cultural and news history and reach – to create bespoke AI products that offer the latest technology in a forum designed with children in mind.
The Newsbeat chat bot, a design lab for kids, a message service with values and duty of care – etc. I would not provide raw material for YouTube.
In a personalised age, PBS media may mean creating some of the few remaining shared spaces — trusted, non-extractive environments where children are citizens rather than users.
And finally on the question of the SM ban itself, I have been working with colleagues in the Lords to make access to children conditional on providing a suitable service — in other words, don’t ban the kids, but ban companies from accessing them unless they offer safety by design, high privacy and a duty of care. This is an active conversation, and we hope to bring both sides of the argument together to include children in the digital world on the precondition treated children with respect. Access to childhood should be earned, not assumed.
If we get this right, the goal is not a smaller world for children, but a richer one: a world where technology supports development rather than competes with it, where culture is once again something children recognise in and make with one another, and where the digital environments they grow up in are shaped deliberately for childhood, not as the cost of market incentives.
Because, ultimately, anything that is made – can be made better.
Watch the full session here:
Why We Couldn’t Wait: Launching Children United and TVCU The Children’s Media Summit ’26: Ban or Build Better?