Through the ages of ten to fourteen, my favorite thing to do was sit down, see the light blue Disney Channel logo, and watch all the various episodes of coming-of-age shows that were constantly on replay. Shows such as Liv and Maddie, Dog With a Blog, and Jessie were some of my favorites to see streaming. I was honestly obsessed with these shows and still to this day recollect when I would binge The Suite Life of Zack and Cody at the ripe old age of fifteen and now think of it as “the good ol’ days.”Â
Now, the current tween generation logs into TikTok or Instagram and watches various beauty influencers and expensive shopping hauls or house tours. Now, young thirteen-year-olds are wearing expensive Alo sets and buying Drunk Elephant skincare, while I rocked the mismatched Justice sparkly sweatsuits and pom-pom hair ties. This comparison between the past and the current tweens is becoming more apparent and has raised the question this article strives to answer: where exactly did all the tweens go?
In order to tackle this question, we first need to know the definition of what a tween is. According to Dictionary.com a tween is “a youngster between the ages of 10 and 12 years of age, considered too old to be a child and too young to be a teenager.” This age group is known for being the “awkward” phase of everyone’s life path. Its essentially a rite of passage to be incredibly embarrassing during this time frame. Tweens are often associated with heightened emotions, imbalanced hormones, mismatched clothes which all resorts back to the ultimate reason that they are just trying to figure out who they are. In the past, this age group essentially had their own world. The mass media was trying to appeal to this age group to gain their viewership. This is when shows like Hannah Montana, That’s So Raven and Wizards of Waverly Place took off. These types of – now nostalgic – sitcom shows basically defined the tween era of the past.
Now, we see that Disney Channel has become relatively out of style. They are no longer producing these high-quality, tween-targeted shows. Tweens nowadays (if you can even call them that) are more interested in short-form media like Instagram Reels or TikToks. This shift has not only changed the brain chemistry of these growing individuals but has also culturally changed how we define the years between ten and twelve. In short, this cultural shift defines an epidemic in children and shows a deeper relationship between society and social media, and how it shapes our lives.
Currently, these tweens are consuming content that encourages comparison, overconsumption, and following the “trends.” This comes in the form of TikTok shopping hauls and the emphasis on beauty standards we see through social media. This type of content is damaging these already critical developmental years. The years from ten to twelve are already difficult due to puberty, scattered emotions, and a newfound consciousness of the people around them. According to Souadou Barry from The Vanderbilt Hustler, the “physical changes that happen during puberty are accompanied by a cognitive shift in how we view the world and our relationships with parents and friends.” By adding social media into their everyday lives, already packed full of this confusion and bodily changes, we see the tween era disappearing because rather than finding themselves, they are placing “significant emphasis on what others think of them” (Barry).Â
This cross-section between the tweens and social media reveals that critical developmental stages can be altered just by engagement with social media. Through apps like TikTok and Instagram, children are continuously “growing up” faster, which is changing how childhood as a whole is perceived (Padilla). Tweens are able to consistently view the teenager trends, styles, and overall day-to-day lives and proceed to copy them, which is causing the erasure of the tween era.
Besides the loss of prime Disney Channel, the disappearance of the tweens is revealing deeper things about our social media-dominated society. Not just tweens, but everyone’s perceptions of the world are shifting from personal to impersonal through emphasis on consumption and comparison. The tween era is the first to disappear from society. As technology advances and dominates even younger kids’ lives, we could see the disappearance of childhood as a whole.