Watching Like a Kid: Connections between Kidults and Children’s Media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is currently tension concerning American adults’ relationship to children’s media. While many adults are deeply invested in children’s media, many Americans have a very real disdain for such adults. This article theorizes how children’s media work to navigate this tension by reimagining the connections between such media and American adults. I argue that the kidult became relatively mainstream because children are being treated more like adults and because adults today often do not adhere to an adulthood defined by an economic situation that no longer exists, leading to adults who exist between the two spaces. These kidults have not lived the childhoods or adulthoods sold to them by various kinds of media, so they reimagine what it means to exist between the two non-existent images, bringing their childhood desires into their adulthoods. Children’s media then encourage people to continue engaging with media from their childhoods long into their adulthoods, marketing to and benefitting from this new figure of adults with childlike tastes. I argue that American kidulthood can only be understood through its relationship to children’s media as both media audience configurations and cultural constructions of age shift toward blurred boundaries between childhood and adulthood.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".