What is a Child’s Place?

By Alexus Torres

What is a child’s place? Many have asked and few have ever come up with a defi nite physical or even metaphorical place where children reside. The ambiguity of a child’s place arises because it can have multiple locations. Whether it be outside on a playground, listening to the radio, in front of a television screen, or scrolling on a tablet, children have found their place in play for centuries. Children’s view of the world is vastly different from adults, as they let their imaginations guide them into worlds unknown. As a kid you can pretend you are the king of the world at the top of the slide, or you can act out entire alternate universes with regular household objects. Children are visionaries who can take the ordinary and mundane and make it exciting.

At the turn of the 20th century with the invention of the television and the internet, a child’s place included watching morning and afterschool cartoons, and playing games on gaming consoles, apps, and websites. Regardless of its platform, a child’s place has always resided in their ability to escape the world around them through imagination.

A child’s place is not diffi cult to fi nd; however, it has become increasingly harder and harder to maintain with the introduction of new technology to what we think of as the typical kid’s space. The playground has now been transformed into various virtual playgrounds that do not abide by house rules. With virtual playgrounds being lawless we have turned what was once a safe space for children into a disorderly oasis. But the virtual playground has not always been this way. The jump from the physical playground to the virtual one was abrupt, but gradual.

Although the introduction of technology in children’s spaces is a relatively new phenomenon in human history, it is not as recent as most people would assume. The creation of the radio in 1895 brought a new interest in technology within American households. Looking at the Golden Age of Radio from the 1920s to 1930s, when on average 60-70 % of the American population owned at least one radio in their homes, there was already a substantial amount of airtime dedicated specifi cally to children’s programming. As found by The Guide to American Popular Culture, during the Golden Age, the time of 5 P.M. to 6 P.M. became known as the ‘children’s hour’ since kids would need to wind down for bed after coming home from school and playing outside. Sunday morning radio programs were often geared toward children because kids required entertainment in the morning before their families started their weekend plans. Both of these blocks of time featured storytelling that stretched across all ages and genres, from light-hearted moral fables for younger kids to thrilling action stories for older kids. As we can see from the radio, the introduction of a children’s space within adult technology is not as new as we are led to believe.

Similar to radio, television coincided with the implementation of a children’s space in the form of programming and games dedicated to younger audiences. The television, created in 1927, did not rise in popularity in the United States of America until the 1950s-1960s, post World War II. While only 9% of Americans owned televisions in 1950, that fi gure severely jumped to 80% by the 1960s. With this boom came the implementation of children’s programming blocks similar to those already on the radio. Television even adapted shows that were currently on the radio to be broadcastable to children, such as “Howdy Doody” on NBC in 1947. By the 1960s, there was offi cial children’s block programming for after school hours and weekend mornings on all three channels offered on television.

In the ‘80s, ‘90s, and the 2000s, television began to devote entire networks to kids full time. Instead of only kid’s hours and Saturday morning cartoons, now there was children’s programming 24/7, 365 days a year. Broadcast for the fi rst time in 1979 debuted a channel dedicated to airing children’s programming 24/7, Nickelodeon. The network saw its peak viewership from the 1980s-1990s. Disney Channel (1983) saw its peak viewership in the 2000s. Cartoon Network (1992), focused on airing animated cartoons for children, saw peak viewership in the 1990s-2000s. Finally, PBS KIDS (1993) started as a children’s block (much like the “children’s blocks” mentioned previously) on the PBS channel, and then branched off into a separate channel in 2017. PBS KIDS saw its most popular shows produced in the late 90s to early 2000s.

The offi cial birthday of the internet is considered to be January 1, 1983. Similar to the progression of radio and television, we see children’s spaces being developed on the internet through the creation of the World Wide Web during the major boom of its popularity in the 1990s-2000s. While not exactly like its predecessors, children’s programming on the internet took form in many different ways. Whether it was television shows encouraging kids to go online to visit their sites to play games or to write electronic letters (now known as emails) to the stations to be featured on their programming, kids’ encouragement to investigate and explore the internet was forefronted by other media platforms. Child usage of the internet became so widespread in the United States that the federal government passed the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA), which imposed restrictions on what age children could access internet websites without parental assistance or guidance.

In 1996, Adobe launched Adobe Flash, which assisted in playing videos and animating websites, allowing games for kids to start popping up all over the internet. In 1997, a website familiar to many kids who were in school during the early 2000s-2010s, coolmathgames.com, was established. Other gaming websites that were frequently visited by children in the U.S. were established in the early 2000s, such as kongregate.com in 2006 and miniclip.com in 2001.

The infl ux of child-dedicated space in the 1980s-2010 in overall larger adult spheres resulted in benefi ts to children and parents alike. Educational gaming websites like coolmathgames.com show strong positive correlation between the performance of children in reading and mathematical standardized testing and the volume of searches of the site. Additionally, coolmathgames.com was shown to be more frequently searched in low income households, suggesting the website provided enrichment learning to children in households that they may not have been able to afford elsewhere.

As we can see from the 1990s-2000s, there was no shortage of children’s places on mainstream television or the internet. These television stations and websites became a ‘home away from home’ for many kids growing up in the U.S. If you are anywhere between 20-30 years old like I am, you will probably remember staying up to catch the new episode of a show you really loved on Nickelodeon or Disney Channel. You might recall being sat in a computer lab with your classmates in the 5th grade and being told you can only visit a typing practice website or coolmathgames.com and thinking “who’s choosing the typing practice?” But if children’s spaces peaked in the 1990s-2000s, this suggests pivotal falls from the late 2010s until now

Technology has become a staple in our day to day lives. This century has witnessed the perfection of the smartphone, specifi cally the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. Following, screens that once kept people entertained in front of a television or a desktop became several times smaller. The smartphone’s appeal at the time was its ability to have everything you would need all at the tip of your fi ngers, with the simple reach into your pocket. The smartphone’s smaller screen produced a need for new media that didn’t have to be accessed through a web browser or a television, but through an application on a phone.

Social media existed long before the smartphone did; Six Degrees, which launched in 1996, is typically regarded as the fi rst social media site, though its perfection and standardization did not begin until the smartphone. Early social media sites that were curated for physical websites like Six Degrees, or MySpace, founded in 2003, required basic coding skills to change your profi le which drew out the average child away from the sites. This is a far cry from how we navigate social media apps today like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Tiktok; all changes are able to be made in the app with a simple press of a button. The switch from websites to applications on phones made social media increasingly accessible to the masses of people with smartphones. Advancements within social media technology allowed for social media to blossom — today, about ⅔ of the entire human population use some form of social media. Zooming in on that statistic shows that 90% of Americans use some sort of social media.

Design by Coral Utnehmer

Social media is in its most accessible and popular age at the current moment. Like we have seen in trends within radio, television, and the internet, social media in its current boom has also become popular within children’s spheres as well. A Pew research study shows that 97% of teens ages 13-17 in the U.S. report using social media sites like Facebook, Tiktok, and Snapchat. These statistics are not solely constrained to teens, as studies also fi nd that 65% of tweens, ages 8-12, hold an active presence on social media sites.

While there is no fully fl eshed-out empirical research on social media usage compared to television usage, we can see how the newer media is gradually starting to replace the old. TV News programming and channels used to be many people’s primary source for current events, but the Pew Research Center reports that 8 out of 10 adult Americans report getting their news often or sometimes from digital devices. Specifi cally, 48% of adult Americans report getting their news from social media websites or apps.

The switch to social media based entertainment like Instagram, Facebook, Tiktok, Twitter, and Youtube has provoked the social deaths of children’s spaces in other technological spheres. Overall viewership of television has seen declines since the late 2010s. For example, between 2017 to 2022, viewership for adult-driven programming like sport and news programs fell 19%, and unscripted television fell 34%. These numbers are shocking but they are nothing in comparison to children’s programming, which fell by 76% in viewership between 2017 and 2022. In 2021, Nickelodeon reported that it had dropped to 32% of its audience and it lost 71% of its viewership within the last four years (2017-2021). Disney Channel saw a similar trend in the year of 2021 with its viewership dropping 35%. Cartoon Network reports the same trends as it saw a 26% drop in viewership in 2021. As we can see, the children of today have begun to move out of the domains that dominated childhoods for the past 30 years and are turning to new forms of media like social media to keep them entertained. While there is dedicated kid space still on television, you will rarely fi nd a child in this child’s place.

Children’s internet is not faring much better. Adobe Flash was offi cially shut down in 2020. Unlike coolmathgames.com, which switched to HTML5 format to support its games, many such gaming websites shut down or went through extreme makeovers, leading them to look almost unrecognizable. Kongregate.com collaborated with museum conservationists to preserve its Flash games, but many familiar and iconic aspects of the website changed. The biggest loss to the Flash shut down comes at the hands of miniclip.com, which had to get rid of all their Flash games and now only have two games on the site: Agrio and 8 Ball Pool.

With television and online website gaming currently experiencing social death, there must be something that kids are turning to instead. If we follow the trend of new forms of children’s entertainment replacing the one that came before, a new phenomena is necessary to take the place of the television and the internet. The answer would be a resounding yes, but this new popular media might not be exactly “a child’s place.”

As previous trends have shown, with the popularity of social media comes children into these spaces, but unlike any previous technology, there were no spaces carved out for children. In all actuality, children were never supposed to have access to social media as these sites require business practices that would be illegal to carry out on children younger than 13. COPPA requires that websites not collect data for any persons under 13 years of age, but essentially all social media sites collect data from users. In response to COPPA, social networking sites and apps have never seriously considered the younger kids using their sites and have refused to create sites catered to that demographic. Although laws like COPPA exist, they are simply not enforced. Children as young as 8 are reported to use social media; even big hitters such as Facebook have called for greater expansions of their social media sites into tween audiences, illegality and all.

Additionally, in terms of what is considered a child it is clear that 13-17 year olds are still too young to occupy the same social space as adults. Children ages 13-17 are still developing their social brain and it is harmful to push them into the same domain as adults. However, since many kids have nowhere else to go for expression and entertainment they turn to social media.

So how are kids navigating this new media that both isn’t made for them and refuses to legally make space?

As we have seen, children as young as the babbling age all the way up to angsty awkward teens have a presence on social media sites. Many children have established their own spaces on social sites such as Youtube or Tiktok by posting kid related content like toy reviews or crafting videos. Unfortunately, some children are immersed into the adult space of their chosen site, either because of the lack of child-produced content or because they have been recommended adult content. Most of the social networking sites currently run on an algorithm, or a set of rules and signals that automatically ranks content on a social platform based on how likely each social media user is to like it and interact with it. If your kid likes toy reviews they will most likely see toy reviews in their timeline. Algorithms also work based on what is currently popular on the site. This means that if something goes viral, like a music video, your kid will also get to see that too.

Considering how many kids falsely claim to be older than they are to receive access to media, it’s no wonder exposure to adult content is rising. Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s communication’s regulator, reports that 32% of children ages 8-17 pretend to be of age on social media to receive total access to the sites that would otherwise be restricted if they were underage. But even children who register using their real age are still subjected to being in adults’ spaces. For example, Meta, which owns both Facebook and Instagram, allows for children to have public accounts, meaning anyone can discover them on both these social media sites, and offers protection for minors only by restricting content that has been reported as adult content by other accounts.

The newest popular platform among children, Tiktok, has slightly stricter guidelines for minors’ accounts. Children with registered underage accounts are not able to appear on the For You Page, a random discovery timeline that works on a personalized algorithm allowing you to see videos from users you may not follow through accessing your likes (but also showing content that is popular on the site). People who register as younger than 18 cannot host livestreams, or, if younger than 16, cannot even send direct messages to other users. However, social networking regulations regularly fail at protecting children: in 2019 the Chartered Institute of Marketing found that 46% of kids ages 13-17 report seeing harmful content on social media.

In situations like the one we are currently facing, people love to point fi ngers at the very victims themselves. Discussions on whose fault it is that children are seeing adult content has risen in social media discourses. Some argue that it is the kid’s own fault for being in adult business and not staying in a child’s place which leads them to encounter content not suitable for children. Still, if we look at the situation closer, we can see how the infi ltrators are not children but adults.

The social media site known as Musical.ly, launched in 2014 and proposed originally as a child’s educational app saw its success in a child’s place. The education-turned-DIY-music-video-publishing-platform has always been for kids, as told by the creators. Even in its heyday, Musical.ly was known as the “kid social media.” Adults had Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Children had Musical.ly, Vine, and Snapchat. Unfortunately, the child space that Musical.ly constructed was destroyed when the app was bought out by Bytedance in 2018 and used to create the powerful Tiktok we know today. Musical.ly was literally absorbed by Tiktok, transferring accounts and videos automatically to the new site. A site that was once known for catering to children was thrust into a social media platform that serves all demographics, thus virtually erasing what was a child’s space and forcing kids into a sphere of adult content.

While processes like the creation of Tiktok are not common in social networking spheres, the infi ltration of adults into a child’s place is not so rare. This is the case for “kidfl uencers,” children you see on YouTube, Tiktok, Facebook, and various other social media sites that produce content for other kids to enjoy. Just like other social media infl uencers, kidfl uencers work to not only make enjoyable content for their audience but also make money from their craft by marketing products to other children. Kidfl uencers are not a new phenomena; child stars have been around ever since the birth of the entertainment industry. What is particularly special about kidfl uencers today is their accessibility to their audiences.

Watching someone on YouTube does not invoke the starstruck feeling we get from celebrities in movies and television; instead, it feels like you are watching a friend or a family member, creating a sense of closeness. YouTube is a free service where you can see people create the content you enjoy unlimitedly. Kidfl uencers are marketed to kids and family audiences, but there is a dark side to the exploitation of children on the site. Content that was made for children and thought to be a child’s place is being infi ltrated by a slew of pedophiles. Typically, kidfl uencers across social media usually follow under two specifi c archetypes: family channel kidfl uencers and self-made kidfl uencers. Both are highly likely to be targeted by sexual predators because of their active presence on social media. Kidfl uencers who are a part of family vlogging content are typically forced to appear on camera by their parents and used as cash cows to make money for their families. Family vlogging content raises many problems like child labor law and children’s right to privacy, and its biggest issue is its ability to expose children’s livelihoods to pedophiles. The other type of kidfl uencers are the self-made kidfl uencers, who occupy a bit more freedom in the content that they create, as they are not being forced by their parents to create content but do it because they want to. This form of kidfl uencing is susceptible to predators because the kidfl uencer accounts feature no adult supervision, so on regular bases these children are directly interacting with adults. Having to navigate the same social space as adults leads to pedophiles pushing the narrative that kidfl uencers are “mature for their age” and results in the sexualization, grooming, and harassment of children.

At alarming rates, we witness everyday stories of children’s media being sexualized by adults because of adults infi ltrating into a child’s place. Even popular content viewed by children, like crafting videos, is consumed by adults for sexual pleasure since it replicates a lot of fetish content.

YouTube, Tiktok, and other video publishing platforms have established a child’s place where kids are able to express themselves and use their imaginations to create content. However, because these sites are also places that do not solely cater to children, they have become unsafe environments for children to create and explore in. Unlike its predecessors like radio and television, there is no one curating what can be marketed towards children and who can occupy these spaces. YouTube falls in a weird ambiguous middle-ground of television and social media, as it is not really a social networking site, but it does produce a space where anyone can post videos watched by mass audiences. Although YouTube’s platform invokes confusion on its identity, YouTube clearly is able to reach child audiences. There is nothing bigger right now in the world of kid viewership on YouTube than family channels, slime making videos, and toy reviews. YouTube has become the main way children watch videos over any other streaming platform or television channel. Studies show that 53% of tweens and 59% of teens say they watch it the most out of all other entertainment options like television. A Pew Research study showed 81% of parents of children 11 or younger allow their children to watch Youtube content. But unlike television and radio that promised to solely provide children’s content, there is no guarantee that your child will stay in a child’s place on YouTube.

We are in a new age. Everything in our life has moved from televisions, desktops, or even laptops to phones and tablets. We have left children behind and unsafe. It is the adults’ responsibility, as it was years prior, to outline what a child’s place is — and they dropped the ball. When children begin to carve out their own spaces, entitlement results in adults forcefully taking over and occupying these spaces as well. Discourse around children in an “adult’s place” is emerging on multiple social networking sites. Many adults argue that it is not their personal responsibility to make sure that children do not see their content and that kids should stay in a child’s place. What they fail to recognize is that there is no child’s place because of historical adult interference. Whether it be the case of infi ltrating spaces, like we see with Tiktok’s absorption of Musical.ly or turning children’s spaces into sexual fantasies as we see across all platforms, adults of the internet age stay in children’s business. We judge kids for being on adult sides of platforms, when the way that the software works on these sites allows them to view the content we as adults can also see. While I agree that it is not our personal responsibility to make sure all children across the world are not viewing content that is inappropriate for their age, I do believe it is our responsibility to make sure that children have their own space to be creative and imaginative and entertained, just like adults have.

It is unfair that the children of this generation don’t have any safe spaces left. Instead of reprimanding kids for not staying in a child’s place, which adults have made essentially impossible, we as adults need to stay in an adult’s place. Instead of blaming kids for seeing adult content, we must push for more regulations on child cyber security laws and labor laws. Let’s start creating internet platforms that are made solely for children. Let’s start requiring that social media sites actually hold up their policies in regards to kids, and protect them in their social journeys. Let’s start caring about kids and a little less about ourselves. Let’s give children a child’s place again.

Ribs by Lorde

Few songs lyrically and sonically capture the vivid and fleeting sense of adolescence as perfectly as “Ribs” by Lorde. The rising synths that run through the track complement lines about “getting old” and laughing like children to encapsulate the fears and joys of growing up. I love how the song ages as we do too. When “Pure Heroine” came out in 2013, I was a precocious pretween whose version of “getting old” was training bra shopping and going to the mall unchaperoned, but now at 21 as a senior in college “getting old” is going to bars with my real ID and getting a Bachelor’s Degree. (Kelsey Ngante)

R.I.P. 2 My Youth by The Neighbourhood

The Neighbourhood’s “Wiped Out”, Lorde’s “Pure Heroine”, Lana Del Rey’s “Ultraviolence”, and Arctic Monkeys’s “A.M.” are all distinctly early-mid 2010s alternative albums that capture the Tumblr era in its peak. All of these albums have black and white album covers, which harkens to a time when the peak of chic was posting a black and white filtered photo in a tennis skirt. “R.I.P. 2 My Youth” is just that brand of edgy, a 2010s pop song in alternative rock cosplay for burgeoning teenagers to mourn their lost youths.(Kelsey Ngante)