TV Kids Festival Spotlights Social-Emotional Learning

The best approaches to delivering social-emotional learning in content were debated by Atlantyca Entertainment’s Claudia Mazzucco, Acamar Films’ Mikael Shields, Lion Forge Entertainment’s Koyalee Chanda and MIAM! distribution’s Mélanie Errea at the TV Kids Festival.

You can watch the session moderated by TV Kids’ Jamie Stalcup with Mazzucco, CEO of Atlantyca Entertainment; Shields, CEO and co-founder of Acamar Films; Chanda, senior VP of animation at Lion Forge Entertainment; and Errea, head of sales and acquisitions at MIAM! distribution, here.

Chanda said she’s witnessed an increased interest from parents and caregivers in “content that is more socio-emotional, rather than more hard curriculum like ABCs and STEM and numbers and math. It corresponded with some of this global polarization that’s happening in our political world. There’s also the rise of bullying and anti-bullying initiatives. Parents want content to grow great humans, as opposed to being more traditional school-based curriculum.”

“Parents need help,” Mazzucco added. “Children are more exposed than ever to a constant and very accessible flow of audiovisual content that is not so well controlled. More than ever, children have to find a way to enhance their [self-esteem]. Our role as a content provider for children is to give them inspiration.”

“In the last decade, we’ve all seen this reduction in the influence of the big legacy platforms, broadcasters particularly,” Shields said. “We’ve seen the shift over to an on-demand model. And so the audience also has become more empowered. Instead of grown-up programmers making decisions about what to schedule, the audience makes the decision. I agree that social-emotional programming is very sanctioned by grown-ups. But at the end of the day, the impulse for this story comes from young children, and they know what they like and they’re a very discerning audience. As you’ve shifted more power toward the audience with on-demand, whether it’s AVOD or SVOD or mobile, the audience has chosen emotional narratives they can relate to to a greater extent.”

Chanda concurred, adding, “With kids’ ability to navigate, they must be engaged by the storylines and great socio-emotional storylines that actually connect to their real life, to their every day, that make them laugh. That’s ultimately what is keeping them from swiping away. So, it’s in all of our best interests to make sure that this content connects at a very basic level, which means great characters and strong emotional connections to not only the stories but what the characters are going through.”

The panelists then highlighted the ways in which social-emotional learning can be incorporated into content. Chanda observed that in preschool, almost every project contains social-emotional themes because they “show how kids interact with each other or how to be a good friend or to understand someone else’s perspective. That is baked into the stories because of how simple and ‘gettable’ the stories need to be for that young audience. That bucket of socio-emotional is so massive. It’s kindness, it’s empathy. It’s emotional intelligence. It’s gratitude. It’s being shy. It’s embracing differences. There are so many human traits that fall into that bucket. So, there’s an argument to be made that all stories are socio-emotional, at least the good ones.”

Shields quoted the American educator Julia Cameron, noting that “‘stories are equipment for life.’ Feelings are supercharged in importance in 2-, 3-, 4-year-olds, before their cognition kicks in and gets them to where they can calculate reality. So, telling stories to do with loss, jealousy, anger, frustration, impatience, that are at the right pace, using the right language for their age range, they’re really equipping them. And if you’re equipping them with stories that are giving them a hinterland beyond their lived experience, you’re just giving them equipment. You’re nourishing them in a way that nothing else can.”

Atlantyca’s book-based shows skew older, targeting kids 6 to 12. “We have always aimed to balance not only education and entertainment, but also the social-emotional aspect into storytelling,” Mazzucco said. “The emotions very often are the triggers of the narrative development.”

The MIAM! slate covers multiple demos, Errea noted. “We are really concerned about how our shows can make a positive impact on the audience. We want to entertain kids, but give them some keys to live better together and build a better world. Social-emotional learning is part of this. How do you behave in a group? How do you live better in the community? I think social-emotional learning can be integrated through two mediums. The first one is through relatable characters and strong personalities, but also through stories, like what are the situations our heroes will experience, and how will they have conflict resolution?”

Stalcup then asked the panelists to weigh in on the importance of using consultants. “You can get quite granular in terms of how specific you are with your curriculum and who that educational consultant is in their particular expertise,” Chanda said. “I prefer working with people who are more generalist and know the audience, especially with social-emotional learning. If the story itself and the characters in the way they behave don’t resonate with the audience, then the messages will fall flat or won’t land.”

“For broadcasters, it’s very important to know what kind of consultants worked on the show to have authentic stories and relatable characters,” Errea added.

Regarding Atlantyca’s book-based content, Mazzucco said, “The consultant comes into the process at the very beginning of the content, before the books are written.”

The discussion then moved to rollout strategies and the benefits of linear broadcasters and streaming platforms when it comes to building brands.

“It’s definitely true that terrestrial platforms across the world have lost audience share,” Shields said. “Most of them are under similar kinds of economic pressures too, so they’ve lost budgets. More recently, they’ve lost some talent. I think that’s an issue for us as professionals in this industry because they historically have been great centers of excellence for training and for building craft skills among young people in our industry. There was a period of really painful, marshy ground, where there was a religious divide, where within all of these big organizations, half of the teams were arguing for exclusivity and they wanted their rights and they wanted only their rights. And another group was arguing for rights to be spread across all the new platforms, a more ubiquity model, so that the audience could get access to them. As producers, very often we’re right in the middle of that discussion. Is it an either/or between legacy channels and on-demand channels? In an ideal world, no, it’s both. We’re looking for a constellation strategy, where there are many points of light, and we have an emotional scheduling approach to the audience, which is it might be Sunday morning on the big TV in the family room, but Wednesday evening it might be on dad’s iPad or their own tablet. They might be visiting their cousins and are on mum’s phone. We want to make sure that our storytelling and our characters are available wherever they want to view us.”

Chanda added: “The terrestrial platforms are also more in a position to market their material than the streamers have been able to, so there is just some very basic value there that the streamers have not been able to capture. If you launch all the episodes at once, the kids can just burn through it. And then it tends to be a little harder to find after you’ve seen it. It’s not built to tee up what kids have already watched. It’s built to tee up new content, which for a young kid audience, doesn’t necessarily foster that franchise build. That binge-and-purge model is harder to create any kind of long-term connection with your audience.”