The kids are not alright.
The ages between 8 and 12 used to constitute cheetah print, reversible sequins and “Good Luck Charlie.” Now, Justice clothing only retails in Walmart or online, and Disney Channel viewership has declined from 2 million in 2014 to 132,000 in 2023.
Whatever happened to the tween?
In the early 20th century, adolescence wasn’t so much of an identity as it was a commercial invention. Then, by the 1950s, recognition of youth spending power brought the teenager into wider cultural consciousness, and the “subteen” followed suit.
Over the course of the next decades, entertainment provided natural developmental bookendings. In the early aughts, shows like “Wizards of Waverly Place” and “Hannah Montana” served as stepping stones from childhood to the melodrama of junior high. Now, the 8- to 12-year-old crowd is in a major media drought. Those age-graded and intentionally transitional programs are relics of the past.
With the death of cable TV, the Walt Disney Company launched streaming service Disney+ in 2019. Since then, its offerings have majorly diversified. Disney+ now features ESPN, ABC News and dramas with mature ratings. This October, Disney+ took full ownership of Hulu, offering a unified streaming experience but alienating the demographic it originally aimed to serve.
If after-school options range from “Bluey” to “The Bear,” what are intermediate viewers left with? And, if the answer is Disney Channel’s early 2000s backlog, with a world of adult content at their fingertips, what incentivizes an 11-year-old to watch “Hannah Montana?” Mergers like these only accelerate the near-extinction of tween-centric spaces.
“YouTube is their primary platform of choice,” Alexia Raven, former Warner Bros. Discovery research vice president, told Business Insider. “It meets them where they are and meets their passions in nuanced ways. It really has shifted the entertainment landscape.”
An October study by the Pew Research Center indicated that 54% of kids ages 5 to 12 watch YouTube daily. A February study in Academic Pediatrics found that despite the minimum age requirement being 13, 68.2% of adolescent respondents ages 11 to 12 reported having TikTok accounts. Having access to platforms where they can consume a college student’s get-ready-with-me or a pilates instructor’s what-I-eat-in-a-day fulfills pre-teens’ ultimate desire to model adulthood.
Commerce is failing tweens just the same. With the closure of retailers like Claire’s, gone are the days of Coca-Cola flavored Lip Smackers and in are those of the Rhode Beauty Peptide Lip Treatment. This August, Claire’s filed for bankruptcy for the second time in seven years, with plans to close 235 locations across the U.S. as well as 56 of its Icing sister stores, which are targeted toward 18- to 34-year-olds.
Suburban shopping mall staples like Claire’s and Justice used to function as stepping stones in the same way that networks like Disney Channel did: precursors to entry into the teenage world. Claire’s offers ear piercing services — a quintessential tween rite of passage — as well as pre-teen accessories and toy collectibles. Justice sold unabashedly tween apparel, with emoticons, bright colors and bold patterns.
Now, social media marketing is fast-tracking adolescence and absorbing tweens into adult spaces. Data from Nielsen IQ indicated that U.S. households with tweens spent $2.4 billion on skincare in 2023, up 27.2% from previous years. Lifestyle influencers have given rise to “Sephora kids,” characterized by their premature use of Drunk Elephant facial creams and aspirational consumption of high-end beauty brands.
For 8- to 12-year-olds, adulthood used to be speculative at best. Now, as big-name brands find age-stratified campaigns to be less and less profitable, tweens are steadily consuming the same content and commodities as twentysomethings.
“Commercially, advertising dollars are shifting from traditional media to social media,” psychiatrist Grant Brenner told Newsweek. “There is less incentive to create content for specific demographic groups.”
Coming of age in a marketplace that sidelines the tween consumer, Generation Alpha is a part of a “vast, uncontrolled social experiment,” Brenner warned.
Is it too late to re-draw the line between 12 and 22?
