Raising Kids in the 21st Century

Presenter: Marcia E. Williams, Nickelodeon, New York

This session is presented in separate parts. Use the buttons at the end of the transcription to navigate between each part.

Part One

MARCIA WILLIAMS: Good morning. I’m going to go ahead and started. Thank you very much for coming. When I first saw my time slot I thought, Sunday at 8 a.m. I thought, what am I competing against? Maybe mass. Sleep for the West Coasters. I thought I’d have a room full of East Coasters. I don’t know who’s here, but I appreciate your coming.

I’m going to presenting, there are some interactive slides here. Maybe there’ll be an opportunity for you guys to do some thinking and sharing over the next 90 minutes. I’m assuming everyone can hear me because I’m completely wired.

I am in charge of lifestyle and attitudinal research at Nickelodeon, and it’s the first time Nickelodeon has had a presence at the ASCD Conference, and we have a presence en masse. I think there are three sessions, which will include Linda Ellerby, so it’s quite a thrill.

I’m going to be sharing with you some research that we did at Nickelodeon, and, of course, in service expertise about kids and the development of our brand, something that I’m sure is forefront on your mind. I’m going to downplay the brand implications part of it, and I want us all to think about what the implications might be for educators.

I’ll review the goals and objectives of the project as they were articulated when we did the research. I’ll share with you how we collected the data and then share some of the findings with you. Very short section on television, so don’t worry about me giving you a big song and dance about Nickelodeon and how great we are. Or, if you expecting to see “Spongebob,” you’re not going to see “Spongebob.” And then conclusions and implications for educators, and that’s when I really will talk to you, hopefully having given you a lot of insight about kids and what the generation of kids in school might look like over the next three to five years, have you talk back.

A quick slide on how we know what we know. Believe it or not, we do a lot of research at Nickelodeon. I would say a ton, but I think that might be a little bit of an exaggeration. Aside from things like desk research, which is available essentially to the general public or anyone who wants to put money on the table to buy it, access to things like census data, Neilsen Media research, which tracks media usage, we do a lot of quantitative research — telephone surveys, mall intercept interviews. Yes, we are one of those companies that hire those telephone surveyors who call you during dinnertime and really get on your nerves. But we find that people are often very willing to share their opinions about things in telephone surveys, so we keep calling. It’s not unusual for us to talk to as many 12,000 people every year — mostly kids. A lot of the time we also talk to parents. We also do a lot of qualitative research, which does not yield numbers per se, but some really interesting insights, and what I’m going to be sharing with you today is a combination of those two.

The Raising Kids research project actually began in 2001. We finished in 2002, and we’ve been sharing those findings throughout 2002 within the company as well as outside of the company. We’ve got quite a little road show going. My group at Nickelodeon, the research and planning group, did a lot of the data collection, a lot of the thinking, a lot of the analysis. We also hired two companies to assist us with that. And then I’m supplementing, on occasion, with some data from additional studies — Nickelodeon Kids study and the Kids Influence study.

I see people writing crazily. If you really don’t want to write, you can give me your address. I will send you a copy of the presentation if that makes it easier for you.

So the reason we did this project was we recognized that Nickelodeon is about 24 years old, and we started to think: You know what, there’s a shift that’s going on that may be affecting our audience. Our target audience is 2- to 11-year-olds. That is, the kids of the Baby Boomers are with whom we developed this brand. And the kids of the Gen Xers, who are now increasing in numbers. So we did this project originally to understand how Baby Boomers and Gen Xers differ as parents, if they differ at all, and what the implications of that might be for our brand. I’ll define those two cohort groups for you in just a minute.

Specifically, we wanted to understand parents’ emotional cords. In other words, we are a kids-first brand. We’ve never made any secret of us. But to the extent that we do need to reach out to parents, how do you do that? What are those issues and themes that really resonate with parents, that will allow us to break through the clutter of all the other messages that they get and really take a moment to listen to what we have to say. What are parents perceptions of Nickelodeon as well the other TV or media brands available to their kids, and where do our opportunities lie?

How do we get all this information? Three phases of research, as I said. The initial was quantitative. We did focus groups. We recruited Gen X moms and dads to come in, in a group, talk to us about what it’s like to raise kids. And Baby Boomer moms and dads. Come in, talk to us, share with each other, share with us. We really wanted to hear them talk about this. And we thought that will help us to ask the right questions when we do our telephone surveys. These groups were fielded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in November 2001. And then we used some of that information to inform the survey. We did a telephone survey in December 2001. We called over 900 households, as you can see — roughly equal numbers of Baby Boomer households and Gen X households. We telephoned, we surveyed either the mom or the dad in those households.

All of the households in our study had to have at least one child age 6 to 14. We made sure that at least 150 Baby Boomer households and 150 Gen X households had 6- to 11-year-olds. That was our attempt to control for something like life stage. So if we really want to look at Baby Boomers versus Gen Xers, and you’ve got Boomers whose kids are 16 to 18 and Gen Xers with kids who are 2 to 5, well guess what? There’s a whole lot that goes on by virtue of being a new parent versus an experienced parent. So we tried to control for that by including a certain number that just had 6 to 11’s in both groups.

This sample is representative based on region, ethnicity, head of household, head of household education, and the number of kids per household. Then the data came back in, and we started pouring through just reams and reams of numbers, which — you might think I’m a geek, but I love that. The data comes, it’s like stop everything, open the boxes, let’s look and see what the numbers say. And there are a lot of interesting things in those numbers, a lot of things that were intuitive, that made sense, and some things that really made us stop and think and scratch our heads.

So we decided to do some additional qualitative. Let’s bring them back in, talk to them. Let’s go and visit them. So we did six additional focus groups after the quantitative data came in. Those focus groups, for reasons that should become obvious as I go along, we did just with moms. We had groups of Gen X moms and groups of Baby Boomer moms in Westchester, New York, and also in Kansas City, Missouri. We also so did some in-home ethnographies, and if you don’t know what that means, we basically went into the home… There are different ways to ethnography. Sometimes you go into people’s homes, you attempt to be wallpaper, to observe natural living. It’s almost impossible for a stranger to be in your house and you not to know them and that person be wallpaper. So we chose not to do that. We went in, we had interviews that we did with the kids alone, with the parents alone, with the family together, and we had them participate in things.

We did six of those, also in the New York area and Kansas City. There were Boomers, three with Xers. Three were with white households, two African American households … By the time we got all this together, our heads were spinning. We spent months — I would probably say two months — trying to synthesis all of this, and before we get to the findings, let me share with you some essential demographic that will be helpful to you.

First of all, if you pick a book, a magazine, or a newspaper article, you might find four or five definitions of Baby Boomers or Generation Xers. There is no one agreed-upon definition. And we recognize that. But since we were interested in how these two groups might differ as parents, we decided to choose a very conservative definition of Baby Boomers and Generation Xers. So we defined Boomers as those born before ’45 and ’60. At the time of the study, they were 41 to 57 years old. Okay, keep in mind, everyone had to have at last one child 6 to 14. We defined Generation Xers as those born between 1964 and 1976. At the time of the study they were 25 to 38. We intentionally eliminated from the study those who were born ’61, ’62, and ’63. It doesn’t mean you didn’t count. It does mean that we didn’t call to bug them during dinnertime to ask any questions by phone. But it also means that we were concerned that because you’re on the cusp, you might look like both of those groups. Or, if you’re the oldest sibling in your family, and you’re a Boomer and everyone else is an Xer, you might look at lot like those Xers, and vice versa. So we eliminated those fringe years from our definition.

Demographically, what do they look like? You can see that the overwhelming majority of both groups are married, but significantly more Boomers were married than Gen Xers were married. Xers were more likely to be single or living with a partner. The overwhelming majority of both groups were employed full time and employed outside of the home. Education level — when you think about it, this makes sense, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to you that more of the Boomers are represented on the left side of the chart. More of the Generation Xers again on the pink bar —high school or less, some college — whereas the Boomers are over-represented on the right. They’re older, they’ve had more of an opportunity to complete graduate education.

Ethnicity — the younger the generation, the greater the ethnic diversity. That’s especially the case for kids, but in this instance it shows us as the difference between the Gen Xers and the Baby Boomers. Significantly more Hispanic origin individuals than the Gen X population, whereas the Boomers are more likely to be non-Hispanic white.

Household income — Boomers are making more money. Again, that shouldn’t come as a surprise either. They’ve been in the workforce longer, they’ve have more of an opportunity to develop a career. You see this cut-off here. This represents below $50,000. That’s for a reason. The median household income of families with kids is roughly $49,600. That was based on Census projections, 1990 Census projecting to 2000. So we put this cut-off at $50,000 here, so you could see percentage of these households above and below the median.

Ages of kids. This was the most critical slide to us at Nickelodeon. This section represents the generation of parents raising kids under six, and you can see, it’s about 2:1. Significantly more Gen X parents raising those preschoolers compared to Baby Boomers. The converse is true of the 6- to 11-year-olds. But you can imagine what this would look like next, the year after that, the year after, as more and more Gen Xers have kids and raising the majority of those kids, certainly in the preschool and elementary age, and then slowly trickling into adolescence.

So what’s important to remember about this section is more and more Generation Xers are and will be raising school-age kids. We, and that’s a collective we, have done this presentation about 20 times I would say, and it’s always been true. We’re not necessarily the typical Boomer or Xer. Usually in academic settings or presenting this to marketers and so on, and by mere virtue of education levels and income levels of your individual households, it suggests that we are not the typical audience. We are not the typical consumer. And that’s important to keep in mind, and I can’t stress this enough internally at Nickelodeon, when you get people stuck in these mindsets. We’re in New York City, and I have to remind them, we’re not programming to ourselves. We’re making this for the rest of the country and they certainly don’t look like the typical New Yorker in my building.

Moving on to key findings, and this is the fun part. One of the first things that we realized as we combed through these numbers was, you know what? These Boomers parents and these Xer parents really don’t look all that different when it comes to raising their kids. So we went from referring to this study informally and formally as the Boomer/Xer study to the Raising Kids Project — because they did look more alike than different, and it wasn’t about this versus this.

However, there were some key ways, some significant differences that did emerge from the study that we thought had particular relevance to our industry. We get locations for us as family-kid marketers, and you might think the same as educators, as you’ll see as we go along. So first I’m going to talk about roles, but before I move to another slide, I’m curious to know if you could just raise your hand if you’re raising kids at home. This is great. Whenever I present this, it’s always great for me to have people who wear two hats. The parent hat, which usually isn’t the one they wear when they come into the conference meeting or the board room, and then they have their employee hat or whatever — I want you to wear both hats. You’ll find it hard to take that parent hat off when you start hearing things about your household and some of the anecdotes and so on. So this will be fun.

Okay, first in terms of roles — we begin every focus group… I do some of these focus groups, by the way, and some of you may have been in a focus group. You’ve got the flip chart, the got the one-way mirror, you know the whole drill. After the introduction, I want you to think about all the different roles you play in your life, and I want to make a list of all the roles. It’s kind of a difficult way to begin a focus group, because if you’re going through a focus group one on one, they always say, start with something concrete, easy to answer. And that’s neither concrete and it may not be easy to answer. But we decided to try it anyway. So think about all the different roles you play in your life. Parents start popping them off like this. They find it very easy. It was not at all unusual to come up with a list of about 25 different roles. They were running with it. They came in with their parent hats on and they were doing a great job. There are a lot of roles that they play in their lives. We put this question in our telephone survey, and we found that, by far, parent was named as the most important role for both Boomers and Xers.

So back to these focus groups. They have this whole list of roles, and another focus group exercise — don’t have them sitting the whole time, have them get up and interact. We give them these red dots in our groups, and said, I want everyone to come up to the flip chart, put a red dot next to the role that’s the most important one, okay? Overwhelming majority would put the red dot next to “parent.” Then they started saying, well, a lot of these other things are part of being a parent, they’re not really separate. Things like referee, maid, and chauffeur. My favorite is warden, that just cracks me up. But they would see all of these things as part of being a parent.

Then we divided the list into two — the parent-oriented roles, which are kind of like this, and then everything else. And everything else was still quite a substantial list. You’ve got spouse/partner, financial provider, church member, uncle, aunt, on and on, on and on. A lot of roles they’re playing.

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