Bring Back Tween Media: A Necessary Resurrection

Photo by Raymond Yeung via Unsplash

Teenagers of today exist within a technological autocracy - they are governed by their online existence and forget to literally touch grass. I think there has been a huge cultural shift in the Gen Z stratosphere which has made children (and yes, I do mean children) grow up too fast. Everyone from the ages of 10 to 18 wants to be an adult. This desire to exist outside their childhood has impacted vital childhood experiences. I worry about this pandemic as it creates a population of vulnerability. Children’s maturity levels have shifted into their own vision and version of adulthood and it is alarming to witness as they lose the years which allow them the full ability to “fuck up,” to be frank. 

I raise this issue as I was watching my comfort films which tend to centre around adolescence, because now, at 20 years old, those are the years I yearn to go back to, not specifically my own experiences of them, but the fantasy of it. I think it is fascinating how adults wish to be children again whilst children yearn to be adults - but in both realities neither is seeing the truth. It is this very nostalgia which I think has impacted the experience of life as a whole. 

Wild Child (2008) and Angus, Thongs and the Perfect Snogging (2008) are my go to escapes to feel that tenderness of adolescence. Their depictions of teenage girlhood are so reverent to how I wished life could be sometimes: innocent, non-consequential and exciting. The possibilities felt endless within those very short years. In contrast, the awkward charm of teenagehood has been replaced by the imitations of adulthood; 12-year-olds today, are going to Sephora and being extremely rude to adult workers and buying make-up and skin care worth £££. These experiences of the same life stages are viscerally at odds with one another. I cannot solely blame technology as I was born in 2005, I grew up as the Internet did; I had screens and played video games, but my life as these children know it, did not exist solely online. 

A lot of my counterparts, funnily enough, via TikTok, have spoken about the lack of “tween” media for today's tweens. This fundamental difference in our experiences of childhood is my concern. When we, 2000-2007 babies, were growing up, we had Disney Channel, Nickelodeon, Disney Junior even, which had some of our favorite child actors in them. Zendaya was in Shake it Up, Selena Gomez in Wizards of Waverly Place; we had High School Musical with Zac Efron. We had people, our own ages, to look up to, to aspire to be, and to relate to. Nowadays, tweens have TikTok and Instagram accounts in order to follow people who are… adults! Their desire to be like us is not the once-adoring characteristic it used to be, it is harmful for their development to insist on maturing to levels they physically and mentally cannot reach.  

I posit that children or “tweens” are nostalgic for a life they have not lived yet, for experiences they have not lived and for a world they are not ready to enter. Dopamine addiction is a huge factor in this as well. Yes, as “tweens,” we had screentime, but not to the levels that these children have. They are “doom scrollers” and social media addicts in a way that costs them their chances of developing. Parks are almost ghost towns because parents and children don't exist in a way we did. Millennial parents have discarded their adolescent experiences and forgone that legacy. 

When dissecting this issue it is easy to demonise but of course there is nuance - some parents and “tweens” do have the experiences they should have, but that comes with privilege, especially financial. In order to now experience life as most of us did as “tweens,” you need to have money, time and access; an increasingly difficult challenge when the world exists within a capitalist system. Funding for community spaces has decreased and most green space is being bought off by private construction companies to build housing. The politics of space have influenced the relationship that young people have with technology as their life experiences are not seen as necessary meaning parents then rely on tech to help manage the parenting load. The reality of this is truly saddening. It is then easier to parent when the child becomes sedated through dopamine. What I find increasingly hard to have sympathy for is when that sedation becomes a choice. Buying your 11-year-old child an iPhone can have significant consequences on their psychological and social development. When I was 10, I did not have a phone - my first iPhone was a hand me down iPhone 4 at the age of 13, and it was primarily used for calling. The digital ecosystem of today is insanity, but a necessity when, again, we are under capitalism. 

My own personal nostalgia, like any, exists under rose-tinted glasses. But the weight of it does not refute the fact that what I speak about isn’t a real issue. Bring back tween media! Children need to be told that it is okay to be children, they need to see it because they are in fact, not. Their escapism from the very real adolescent experience of not wanting to be seen as a child has manifested into a very distressing image of actually becoming adults. The age of innocence has dissipated which breeds vulnerability. The internet is a dangerous place and has been known as a way for predators to potentially groom children. Just recently, Roblox had a scandal where predators were using the game and simulating sexual and inappropriate scenarios with real child players. With the rise of technology and the advancement of AI, children are not safe. Parental blocks become looser and children are exposed to sinister things. 

As adults with the pressures of the real adult world, it is easy to become consumed by our ever-growing nostalgia for “the good ol’ days.” I find that my TikTok shows me nostalgic edits of “Summer in 2016” with Lean On by DJ Snake, Major Lazer and MØ, with captions saying “when life was good.” Our desperation to live in the past, to let nostalgia consume every fiber of our being, has caused a rift in our duty of care. We, as people, then exist within a vacuum of nostalgia. Children wishing to be adults, and adults wishing to be children. At what stage do we begin to accept that neither can coexist? Our relationships with each other, as a culture and generation, need to be refocused on what can be done to accept ourselves and that the past really is in the past, and that you cannot rush the future. 

My proposition to tackle this then is to reinstate tween media, allow children to have other children to look up to, without an agenda. Relationships depend on this movement as children have increasingly lost their social skills, their literacy skills and their existence within reality. None of us are innocent in this nostalgic shift, but we are all responsible for its need to collapse. 

---

Edited by Hannah Tang, Co-Editor of Film & TV