All of us have watched a scene similar to the one the author of this piece opens with. A restless kid at a wedding, or a couple of hours into a long drive, is handed a phone, and almost immediately goes quiet, eyes locked on the screen. Something bright is happening. A character in green snatches a toy, the character in pink bursts into cartoon tears, an apology arrives, the tears vanish, a smile appears, and before anyone can tell whether the show is even in the same language, the scene has cut to two characters rowing a boat to a song. The child is “still, but his attention is being hurried from cue to cue ”. That scene, watched at an airport gate, is where the academic Natalia Kucirkova begins her essay on what she calls the pace of children’s media.
Kucirkova, who studies children and screens, argues that we have long judged children’s media by the wrong things. We ask how many minutes were watched, and whether the content was educational, age-appropriate and safe. These matter, she says, but they miss a design feature we have overlooked that may be just as consequential: “the time a medium gives a child to make meaning.” A programme can be full of good lessons and still move too fast for any of them to settle.
Her point is not that fast is bad and slow is good. She is explicit that some lively shows are excellent and some slow ones are dull. The question is whether the pace suits the experience the story claims to offer. Does it give a child time to follow a plot, grasp an idea, or notice that a character feels something? When media moves too quickly, she writes, the layers of experience collapse into one another. A child may laugh at someone slipping on a banana peel while missing the anticipation and reversal that make it a joke; a character may comfort a friend, but if the scene races on, the child has no time to register the repair, let alone imagine doing the same. Empathy, she notes, begins with noticing that another person feels something different, and “that small act of crossing over takes time.”
The culprit, in her telling, is that “the screen has inherited the adult logic of media design” – the logic of the attention economy, which she says “overwhelms and overshouts” to keep steering the viewer. She lists the small features built to shorten time: the like button that is quicker than a comment, the progress bar, and now the AI that appears beside a long document offering, in a voice that sounds helpful, “this text is long; would you like a quick summary?” A few features push the other way, she allows – the delayed-send, the “Are you sure you want to delete this?” prompt – returning a moment of judgment to the user. But speed is the default.
Popular children’s shows run on the same fuel. In Paw Patrol a rescue is clear and reassuring, but the run from problem to rescue to resolution is so efficient that the child is swept along by urgency rather than left to dwell on responsibility or care for the other. The app game Hot Wheels Unlimited gestures at creativity, but its real rhythm, she writes, is “boost, race, crash, win, unlock, repeat.” Even a genuinely rich series such as ‘Ask the StoryBots’ packs strong material – why the sky is blue, how eyes work, where planets come from – into such rapid jokes and scene changes that a child has no time to sit with any single idea before the next burst arrives.
For anyone who thinks about incentives, the sharpest section is on measurement. Clocking screen time, Kucirkova argues, is too crude: two children can each watch twenty minutes and live entirely different encounters with time, one moved through a coherent story with pauses and beats, the other pulled through ten clips, thirty characters and rewards that arrive before thought has formed. “The clock records the same duration but the child does not live the same time.” Worse, the industry’s favourite yardstick misleads. “A child can look intensely engaged while being given very little time to think,” she writes, which is why the adult language of engagement is such a poor guide to whether a child is actually learning. It is the familiar trap of managing to a legible metric – watch time, engagement, completion – while the thing you actually care about quietly erodes underneath it. We saw a version of this in the Lego story we featured last year, where a toymaker bet that unhurried, hands-on play was worth defending precisely because screens had won the contest for attention.
When, in March 2026, the UK’s Department for Education advised parents of under-fives to choose “slow-paced, age-appropriate” content without saying what slow meant, Kucirkova’s Kids’ Slow Media Project set out to make the term concrete. It rates shows not by content but by how they organise time: whether the story is coherent enough to follow, whether the design builds in stopping points where a scene can be digested, whether it allows meaningful repetition, and whether it creates openings for a child and an adult, or two children, to notice something together. The shows that score well leave room around the action and treat, in her phrase, “attention as a relationship” : Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, In the Night Garden, Bluey, The Adventures of Paddington, Daniel Tiger’s Neighbourhood, where a greeting, a song or a familiar face forms a frame within which new ideas can be introduced and repeated, almost as ritual. The lowest scores go to media that keeps attention in motion with the next tune, the next bright image, the next loop of reward.
Beneath the ratings sits a larger claim about the child’s own agency. The real distinction, she writes, is whether a medium leaves room for a child’s own attention or continually redirects it. When every pause is filled and every uncertainty instantly resolved, waiting and reflection start to feel intolerable, and the child learns to reach for the next stimulus before the last has had time to settle. Slow media, by contrast, says: “you may arrive at your own pace.” She anticipates the charge that this is nostalgia, or a luxury of parents with quiet rooms and full bookshelves, and refuses it: “The attention economy has trained us to treat a child’s pause as a problem, a wandering gaze as lost engagement and an unfilled moment as wasted time.”
Her closing image is the one to keep. Fast media, she writes, is “like energy drinks”: it promises more capacity than the child actually has, and the bargain is unsustainable, so that what looks like support becomes dependency and “what promises engagement and learning is actually compulsion.” The answer, she insists, is not to pull children away from screens but to build better ones. “The aim is not to withdraw children from the digital world,” she ends, “but to make that world more worthy of them.”
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