The Future Needs You
Children’s Media is the message…
I’m asking you in this issue of the Context Maker to support the Children’s Media Foundation with a donation. You can do it now because you’re a trailblazer. Here’s the link. Or you can wait till the end of the essay when I’ll ask you again. But please do support their work.
It’s an odd but undeniable part of my career trajectory that as I have aged, the focus of much of my work has shifted to an ever younger audience. Perhaps this was an inevitable result of my journey from documentaries to animation and interactive media. It was certainly accelerated by my return from the US to the UK where animation for older audiences was less prevalent, and my employment by the BBC. It was also driven by my interest in working at the innovative edge of creative practice. Kids Media is a hot bed of innovation and exploration, as the audience is naturally about play and exploration, so any serious maker of content for kids must be too. By the early 2000s, I was focused on what we now call 360 degree content, thinking about how to tell stories across platforms, and kids were the first to embrace what has since become the norm - lean forward engagement with media. But of course, kids have also been the first to encounter all the extremes good and bad in this. And they were the first to emigrate en masse away from traditional TV to digital platforms (even though these had not been designed with kids’ needs in mind). The resulting social problems for children and families are well documented, as are the devastating consequences for the kids media industry.
The Children’s Media Foundation’s recent submission to the BBC Charter Review - the once-a-decade process by which the British government sets the terms of the BBC’s existence and public mission - puts it succinctly:
“Children and young teenagers are not merely early adopters of media platforms: they are behavioural innovators who establish consumption habits that subsequently colonise adult media use. The history of digital media is substantially a history of children’s viewing and play mechanics becoming adult habits.”
This isn’t a niche argument about media behaviour. It’s a civilisational issue with a clear lesson. Shape what children watch, play and learn from, and you shape the society that follows. Neglect it, and you find out what that costs - in wellbeing, in culture, in the kind of citizens a democracy needs.
For 16 years, the Children’s Media Foundation has been telling this to anyone who’ll listen.
I’ve been a member of CMF for most of that time, and serve pro-bono on its executive policy group, also advising more generally on digital and AI developments.
The Children’s Media Foundation doesn’t have a large office, or a large budget, or - and this is worth stating plainly - any government funding at all. It runs entirely on donations, from as little as £25 a year. What it does have is Greg Childs OBE and Colin Ward, its director and deputy director, and a network of volunteers who’ve spent their careers caring about what children actually watch, and why it matters.
I have huge admiration for Greg (and some annoyance too at how he effectively nudges me to get involved in some new project as if it was my idea). Greg’s own trajectory is a kind of mirror image of mine. He spent over 25 years at the BBC, mainly directing, producing, and executive producing children’s programmes. He created the first Children’s BBC websites and, as Head of Children’s Digital, developed and launched the CBBC and CBeebies channels. He left the BBC in 2004 and by 2012 had become director of the Children’s Media Foundation.
Greg isn’t bombastic or loud. He’s a careful, precise thinker who has a way of making the case for children’s media feel both urgent and obvious - obvious in the way things that are actually true feel obvious once someone has been brave enough to say them baldly. His position is simple: “Children’s media plays a powerful part in the story of how our kids become the future. Diversity and quality really matter, as does ensuring content reflects their lives and tells their stories, if we expect them to grow up connected to their culture and as engaged citizens.”
Obvious, right? Straight out of the public service media playbook. So why is it that it is now an increasingly rare goal for platforms and the producers who thrive on them? How can we reinvent a coherent commercial, creative and regulatory framework that restores those principles? For over a decade, the CMF has been the organisation updating that framework into policy pressure, research, and advocacy - consistently, without fanfare, in rooms where it matters.
And increasingly the CMF’s voice is being heard by tech platforms, regulatory bodies, the UK media industry and in the heart of government. But there’s much more to be done.
Last November, Greg appeared before the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee - the parliamentary inquiry into children’s television and video that the CMF had itself campaigned into existence. He was accompanied by Children’s Laureate and CMF Lifetime Patron Frank Cottrell-Boyce. The Committee’s chair specifically acknowledged the CMF’s role in putting children’s media on the legislative agenda. That’s a parliamentary committee crediting a small, donation-funded organisation with shaping the terms of a national inquiry. It matters.
You can see a video of Greg and Frank’s testimony to the DCMS Committee here. You may also want to watch YouTube’s prevaricating appearance before the same committee here.
This February, I spoke at the second Children’s Media Summit at BAFTA - convened by the CMF to build on the momentum of the hearings. My session focused on something deceptively simple, responding to a direct request from the committee: how do we judge when children’s media is genuinely ‘good’? Not just safe or popular - genuinely valuable. The CMF is building a framework to explore that question rigorously with the combined expertise of stakeholders across the UK, so that our work might influence how platforms surface content. We’re not there yet. Our goal is NOT for CMF to be an arbiter of what is good but to serve as a conduit for the knowledge and expertise of commissioners, content makers, researchers, carers and, of course, children, so that there is some kind of ground truth for value that can be shared by all. The CMF, the little engine that could, IS the organisation doing the work of outreach, recruitment, prototyping and assessment, because no one else is.
Other speakers at the BAFTA event included Baroness Beeban Kidron, Sonia Livingston of 5Rights, Patricia Hidalgo, director of BBC Children’s, Natasha Irons MP, Lucy Murphy (former commissioner at Sky Kids), Oli Hyatt of Blue Zoo, YouTuber Maddie Moate, Jiella Esmit of 8 Lions and many more.
You can read about or watch all the keynotes and panels from the Summit on the CMF website.
Earlier, I quoted from the CMF’s submission to the BBC Charter Review. Many of the core group at the CMF have the BBC in our backgrounds and its public service values in our bones. So the submission Greg drafted primarily with my former BBC colleague and fellow mischief maker Marc Goodchild is infused with a great love for the institution. But it is also a passionate call for change.
Its diagnosis starts with audience. The submission argues that the BBC’s long-held assumption - that loyalty built in childhood naturally carries into adulthood and gets passed to the next generation - is not merely weakening. The data disproves it entirely:
“The current cradle-to-grave lifetime appeal ‘funnel’ is a misnomer. There is no gravitational pull that automatically returns audiences to the BBC at the next life stage. If the habit is not formed in the relevant window, it is not formed at all.”
And the consequences compound. When a child migrates to YouTube at five or six, they don’t just take themselves:
“This does not merely represent the loss of one young viewer. It accelerates the parents’ own migration to non-BBC services.”
The child leads the family out. Which means investing in children isn’t a welfare cost - it is the only viable long-term strategy for a public broadcaster that needs the public to believe in it.
The submission’s argument for change is equally precise. The BBC’s public purposes - as currently written - are, in the document’s phrase:
“Written in the grammar of the broadcast era. Their operative verbs are ‘provide’, ‘offer’, ‘show’, ‘reflect’ and ‘deliver’. These are verbs of supply. They describe what the BBC puts into the world, not what happens when it does.”
It calls for a shift from that grammar of supply to a grammar of outcomes. And at the centre of it is a proposition that applies everywhere, not just to public broadcasters:
“The BBC’s most important investment is not in the audiences it has today. It is in the citizens it will serve tomorrow.”
That’s the CMF’s north star. And it should be everyone’s.
You can become a member or a patron at thechildrensmediafoundation.org/support. Twenty-five pounds a year. Less than a couple of months of a streaming subscription. If you work in media, education, tech, or simply care about what kind of adults today’s children become - this is where your money does something real. And if you’re reading this from outside the UK - this is not a parochial British problem. The collapse of quality children’s media, the migration to unregulated platforms, the algorithmic optimisation of childhood attention: these are happening everywhere. The CMF’s work is rooted in the UK, but the problem it’s addressing is universal.
In these precarious times we are living though, doing something to improve our future is really all we have. So please consider supporting the CMF. We need your help (and, if you have time to give, your expertise in our ongoing work on surfacing quality).
I’m going to channel my inner Humphrey Bogart (with apologies for completely inverting Rick’s meaning in Casablanca) and say: “Readers, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of our children amount to a ginormous hill of beans we can actually do something about right now in this crazy world. I hope you’ll understand that.”
Here’s looking at you, kids.