Opinion: Let's talk about children’s TV again

Massimo Fenati, Creative Director of Froglets producer, Eaglet Pictures, on why Children’s TV has to be part of the national conversation once again

I blame it on the knitted frogs. When I was directing our new Froglets show last autumn (recently launched on CBeebies), I didn’t expect that working with puppets would be such a nostalgic process: it unexpectedly brought back flashes of happy childhood days playing with homemade toys, of older and gentler TV shows we were watching at the time, and with that also memories of when it was very common to read about children’s TV on the pages of a newspaper or a TV listing magazine – a small corner addressed to parents to inform them of what was on and whether it was any good.

Those corners have practically disappeared. As children’s programmes migrated from breakfast or teatime terrestrial slots to 24h streaming platforms, the press gradually stopped covering them. But at a time when children are more exposed than ever to content that isn’t designed for them, either for its ADHD-inducing pace or its harmful subject matters, and when the producers of kinder alternatives are fighting for survival, the media’s silence feels like a wrong choice with bad consequences, and definitely something worth reversing.

The scale of the decline in children’s programming has been dramatic, and largely invisible to the public because of the lack of coverage outside the trade press. In the UK, CITV closed its linear service in 2023 after more than 40 years, Sky stopped commissioning children’s programmes after years of brilliant hits, and nowadays most funding for new commissions comes almost entirely from the BBC. The BBC’s integrity and unwavering commitment to public service broadcasting means they are still heroically investing in children’s content and championing fresh ideas, but their budgets are under enormous pressure, and the spend on children’s programming has fallen well below its levels of a decade ago, whilst production costs have risen. Global streamers tend to invest only a limited budget on “local” productions outside of US, and the mighty power of YouTube doesn’t commission anything at all, offering producers only the option to self-fund programmes in the hope of a hit. This is something that broadcasters, producers and regulators are all well aware of, but it has been largely absent from the pages of national newspapers, which will promote glossy drama series or report the latest controversy of a talent show, but consider children’s TV unworthy of column inches. The media have spent the last two decades reporting extensively on the harms of unregulated online content reaching children, and rightly so. But warning parents about the danger without pointing them toward the alternative is only half the job.

But setting knitted frogs aside for a moment, the argument for reviving coverage is crucially not about nostalgia, it’s about protection. The audience most affected by this lack of information – young children and the adults responsible for their upbringing – is a slice of the public mostly unequipped to research and make informed choices on their own. The overview of children’s content-consumption is pretty depressing, as also Ofcom flags: teenagers constantly come across potentially harmful content, from violence and misinformation to sexual material, and many children encounter pornography by accident, sometimes before the age of eleven. But without even reaching such extremes, a resuscitation of the national discourse on children’s TV is needed to even simply guide families to gentler, more age-appropriate kinds of shows. There has been much talk about “slow TV” lately, a type of programmes with calm tones and slow rhythm that avoid the “wired” feeling or post-screen meltdowns that high-octane shows can trigger. By avoiding sensory overload and nervous system overstimulation, children have the mental space to develop attention spans and absorb more deeply any lesson about empathy and cooperation. It’s the opposite of the sugar-rush-effect that frantic-paced shows produce. But again this is something the industry is observing and talking about, whereas the general public isn’t made aware of the conversation.

Another important aspect of children’s TV is children and parents co-viewing. It gives adults knowledge of what their child is watching, they can talk about it and participate, and most importantly they can guide their child to choose what to watch and shape their taste, rather than simply react to whatever an algorithm has decided is engaging. But none of that works if parents don’t know these programmes exist, when or where they’re on, or what they are about. As a programme-maker myself, I’m always delighted to receive feedback from parents that say they enjoy my shows just as much as their children do. This also shows that there is definitely an appetite for parents to find reviews and coverage on children’s show in the press, because they do pay attention to it. And this matters probably even more for grandparents and other caregivers, who are frequently the ones in charge to pick up a child from school and struggle more with app settings, parental controls or simply don’t know which platforms are actually safe, but still end up handing over a phone or tablet in order to make a child happy. Coverage aimed at general readers can reach this wider circle of caregivers in a way that niche parenting blogs and app-store reviews do not.

Scrolling a VOD platform’s carousel has almost no editorial guidance about what is good, age-appropriate, or worth a child’s time — only algorithmic suggestions, mostly engineered to keep a child watching. A newspaper feature, a weekly recommendation column, or even a modest listings box can offer independent, human judgement about quality, exercised on behalf of a child who cannot exercise it for themselves.

This is all quite a lot of ruminating triggered by animating small knitted frog puppets, I know, but children’s television — however struggling — still exists, is being made with genuine care and passion, and it’s of paramount importance in the formation of future grown-ups. So giving it space in the press again, even in small, occasional amounts, can contribute to a better future for our world.