This year marks the 12th Wave of our longitudinal study into how media fits into the lives of the 17 children we spend time with, and come back to, year on year.

We have been reporting for years about how commercial most of the content children see is. But this year, they started to explicitly articulate that they viewed social media as more of a commercial space than a social one.

The exception to this is the few children who seem to expect to be constantly connected to others, round the clock. What are the implications of a world in which children are spending less and less time together, physically, outside of school – but who leave WhatsApp calls running with their partners overnight, even while they’re asleep?

The children this year also spoke about meme culture pervading most of the content they see. Charlie Kirk memes were everywhere given the time of fieldwork. But children’s take on this culture of often dark or conceivably cruel memes raises questions about how the rest of us may be interpreting this kind of content.

And perhaps the biggest shift from last year to this has been the adoption of AI. In recent Waves, AI was barely a footnote. This year, all the children were either using AI tools – for anything from help with homework, to health and relationship advice – or seeing AI generated content online. AI is becoming embedded in children’s lives faster than their ability – or really anyone else’s – to know what that means.

To read the full report, follow the link on the left.