‘Story’: Equipment for Life

August 12, 2026 , 1

Mikael Shields is the producer, team writer and series voice director for Bing, at Acamar Films and leads on Acamar’s Again! Again! channel. He has worked on film and television projects including: Oscar-winning Wallace & Gromit, Pingu, Bafta-winning Hilltop Hospital, the multi-award winning Flatworld, and Rex The Runt, Noddy, Funny Bones, Operavox, The Animals of Farthing Wood, Narnia, The Borrowers and Pond Life. Mikael has led creative teams at the BBC, EVA Entertainment, Pearson Television, Atom Films and Ealing Studios.

“‘Thou shalt not’ is soon forgotten, but ‘Once upon a time’ lasts forever” – Philip Pullman.

The need to advocate for children’s media is acute, so there are pressing reasons to find the best words to properly express the value of ‘story.’ I love this line from Philip Pullman. It draws a bright boundary between the language of prohibition and the sheer power of story in the lives of us humans. Children have never needed our rules as much as they have needed our stories. But what exactly is ‘story?’ Why is it important and what are the stakes?

The evidence tells us that high-quality children’s media is not just entertainment (although it can be that), but vital equipment for life – as consequential to positive life outcomes as nutrition, sleep or early years care. It’s important to be able to express this persuasively, and without apology, in every room where the future of children’s media is being discussed: in parliament, at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, at Ofcom, in commissioning and editorial meetings, in boardrooms and around kitchen tables.

At this time of accelerating change, when our cherished legacy platforms are losing their cultural reach and algorithms are so cleverly hooking attention, the stakes are increasing. The clock can’t go back. The change we’re experiencing is ours to deal with: broadcasters, streamers, platforms, writers, directors, producers, researchers, government representatives and parents are not each other’s problem. We can, however, be each other’s opportunity.

So to the evidence. Kenneth Burke, the American literary theorist, wrote in 1941 that literature is “equipment for living” – not decoration or escape, but a set of strategies for dealing with what life will throw at us. Jerome Bruner, one of the most influential cognitive psychologists of the 20th century, put the same insight in developmental terms. Humans think in two modes, equally fundamental: the logical, which seeks truth; and the narrative, which seeks meaning. In young children the narrative mode comes first. They don’t need to be taught to think in story. They arrive already doing it.

We’ve been working for over a decade now on a long-running series for the youngest segment of the preschool audience. This has been a long journey of learning. We’re immersed in the development of cognition, language, emotional and social mastery. A newborn’s brain is a tiny fraction of the adult size. Just 36 months later it’s already around 75% of adult size.

It’s a daily miracle that the synaptic connections of young children grow in complexity from 2,500 to 15,000 synapses per neuron by the time they are three years old. This growth literally makes us humans possible. Synaptic connections and language acquisition go hand in hand, and here’s the point: one of the primary pieces of training equipment used by the youngest brains, to acquire words, for this critical early development is endlessly repeated story. When a two- to three-year-old pesters so energetically to repeat a favourite story or to re-watch an episode, they are driven by a deep need to grow. This is what ‘story’ does for young humans, and it goes on equipping them for life as they grow older.

Now, to the national context. It’s arresting. In 2026, 4.5 million children in the UK are living in poverty – 31% of all children, a record high, and an increase of over 100,000 on last year. More than 3.1 million children are in deep poverty, in households with less than half the median income. In a typical classroom of 30, 10 children are on relatively low income. Nearly half of all children in poverty live in families with a child under five – that is, inside the vital early developmental window itself.

We can join the dots, from early neglect or developmental disadvantage to a range of deteriorating life outcomes. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are the traumatic events and chronic stressors a child cannot escape: abuse, neglect, domestic violence, parental addiction or imprisonment, mental illness in the home, family breakdown.

British research is unambiguous. Adults who experienced four or more such ACE events as children are nearly nine times more likely to end up in prison, almost four times more likely to be a smoker and significantly more likely to suffer lifelong mental and physical ill-health. More than a third of English firstborns experience at least one adverse event in the first thousand days of life. In the Welsh male prison population, 84% report one ACE or more; 45% report four or more. These are not other people’s children: they are a large proportion of the audience we produce programmes for.

These are the children who will watch whatever is on the screen, or offered up by the platform, tonight. Some of these children live in extremely challenging situations, where screentime of the right quality can be a proven lifeline.

So what is the audience watching? A decade ago, UK public service broadcasters produced 672 hours of first-run children’s programming in a year; last year it was 380 hours – a drop of 43%. Real-terms spending has fallen over the same period from £118m (US$158m) to £77m. Daily broadcast viewing among four- to 15-year-olds has collapsed from over 100 minutes to about 36.

The landscape of British children’s commissioning is not only shrinking but changing hands. Children have not stopped watching. As we all know, they have moved – principally to YouTube, which now accounts for 28% of all viewing. This is not anyone’s fault. It is a structural shift driven by technology, and it brings opportunities as well as challenges. But it leaves a question: who is now responsible for ensuring the quality of what our children see?

Here is what makes this argument hopeful rather than grim. We have known for over 40 years that high-quality storytelling works. In 2019, the economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine published the largest natural experiment ever conducted in children’s media. Using a quirk of American broadcast licensing in 1969, they were able to isolate the effect of preschool exposure to Sesame Street on life outcomes. The children with access to Sesame were (decades later) 14% more likely to have stayed at their expected grade through school, with evidence also pointing to stronger long-run employment and earnings.

The effect was strongest for boys, for black and Hispanic children, and for children growing up in poverty. It was most effective where it was most needed. Kearney and Levine called Sesame Street “perhaps the biggest, yet least costly, early childhood intervention” ever attempted. The cost was about US$5 per child, per year. The Head Start programme, by comparison, costs over US$7,000.

High-quality children’s storytelling is not merely entertainment. It is the quiet, daily work of building emotional vocabulary, rehearsing empathy, practising persistence and – in Fred Rogers’ phrase – making difficult feelings mentionable and manageable. It is the work of equipping a child for a life they cannot yet imagine but will have to live. Every serious pedagogy agrees. Every honest economist who has looked at the data agrees. The question is not whether it works – the question is whether the policies we lobby for and implement support it. The even bigger question is: what are the costs if we neglect this? What does it cost us in poor educational and health outcomes, in the quality of our democracy and in economic terms?

So what makes a difference? First, let’s agree on what is actually at stake. Use language that matches those stakes and is persuasive. Then collaborate as though this were as serious as early years care or public health – because all the evidence tells us that it is. The infrastructure of high-quality children’s storytelling in this country has thinned, but it has not yet disappeared. There are still brilliant commissioners, producers, writers, performers and researchers at work, inside an extremely challenged system. The new distribution routes can, if we engage with them constructively, reach more children than any national broadcaster. The tools empower the audience more than ever before.

Every time we describe high-quality children’s media accurately – as vital social equipment, as the earliest form of public investment, as a critical step in a generation’s capacity to be informed, emotionally resilient and humane – we make our generation’s version of a case that often needs to be remade. The Children’s Laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, calls quality storytelling “the apparatus of happiness.” Kenneth Burke called it “equipment for living.” The names change. The work is the same. We know how to do it. We need to continue to find the right words to do it again.

This article was written for the Children’s Media Yearbook.

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