With an audience of young children in low income homes, PBS has a great array of free developmental focused content parents can offer their children to further their learning. The PBS Kids for Parents website is a strong foundation of activities and articles parents can utilize when teaching their children.
I proposed the guidebook be based on the individual child’s day by day viewing habits. Parents can receive links to activity pages, coloring pages, recipes, and fact sheets based on what the child consumed. This initiative requires activities to be developed based on the actions character do in specific episodes. Luckily PBS has tons on TV Show and Character based game applications for children to utilize, but hands on learning is just as important for brain development.
Final Proposal
Slide 1: PBS Kids prides itself on engaging children to age-appropriate content on the PBS Kids broadcast and social networks. So how can the PBS Kids team further help parents engage with their children in a technology driven society? After completing extensive research on the PBS Kids’ brand and initiatives, I am proposing a daily individualized guide for parents, based on the series of PBS Kid episodes their children consumed that day.
Slide 2: Wall Street Journal K-12 Education Reporter, Matt Barnum details the decrease in kindergarten student math and reading skills upon arrival, before and after the 2021 Corona Pandemic. With math and reading test scores lower than they were pre-pandemic teachers are struggling to catch their students up. Emily Baumgaertner, a New York Times writer found research that states every minute of screen time is associated with children being less conversational.
Slide 3: Currently PBS Kids has a subscription-based parent email newsletter that can be utilized more frequently. According to the 2023 Nielsen Marketing Report, marketers have 53% confidence in the return on investment (ROI) from email marketing.
I conducted a survey for parents and guardians of children between the ages of 2 and 8 years old to learn about views on children’s media consumption and participation in individualized physical and digital activities. 89% of respondents say they are likely to talk to their child about the media they consumed. 96% of those same respondents indicated they would very likely read a summary of the content their child consumed, if it was provided to them.
Slide 4: I propose the guidebook be based on the individual child’s day by day viewing habits. Parents can receive links to activity pages, coloring pages, recipes, and fact sheets based on the activities and problems their child’s favorite characters did in an episode. Parents will have summaries and conversation starters for the times they were using the PBS Kids application as a distraction from themselves. Parents can subscribe to receive the guidebook as an email, a message in the PBS Parents Play and Learn App or a physical book.
According to my survey 59% of parents and guardians would subscribe to a physical and personalized booklet of learning activities for their child and 4.5% said it would depend on the cost.
Slide 5: The key to learning is the combination of parents and educators talking to kids about the material they watched. I believe if these guides are implemented into the PBS Kids parent resources it will strengthen the connection of PBS Kids learning objectives, children and parents.
Maeve Catherine 