The Youth Have Spoken: They Want More Neurodivergence & Platonic Friendship In Their Media
A study of 1,500 teens found they want less romance and more friendship on their screens.
Gen Z this and Gen Alpha that — it’s easy to look at younger generations and judge the things about them we don’t understand. This is especially true when we observe kids’ and teens’ relationships with their devices. But a new study, the Teens and Screens Report from the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA, reveals that younger generations don’t feel much different about technology and the media they consume than we do.
Here’s what talking to 1,500 adolescents about what they want in their entertainment content illuminated for researchers, from AI hesitancy to a desire for more stories centering platonic relationships.
About The Teens & Screens Report
Every year, the Center for Scholars & Storytellers (CSS) at UCLA performs a study to find out what tweens and teens want to see in the TV shows, movies, and media made for and about them. Researchers interviewed more than 1,500 adolescents ages 10-24 “about their perceptions, opinions, and beliefs regarding popular media, including TV shows, movies, video games, AI, and social media,” a press release about the report reads.
The high-level takeaway: While there are more and more ways to consume stories today, teens still want to consume “traditional” media. However, they want more diverse perspectives in their TV show and movie options.
A “story” isn’t just a movie or TV show.
Among Gen Xers and Millennials, a “story” typically means a TV show or a movie. For the surveyed adolescents, YouTube videos, video games, and 30-second videos also count as storytelling platforms.
“YouTube ranked as the top medium for storytelling, with nearly four out of five respondents saying that short-form videos can tell a story. TV shows, movies, and video games followed closely behind. TikTok scored the highest among social media platforms,” the press release reads.
They share our feelings about AI in media.
We tend to think of kids and teens as hapless would-be victims of AI (no one would willingly watch brain rot, right?). But the same optimism and fear adults seem to feel about the technology were also present among the study group. Participants’ ages tended to be the best predictor of how they felt about AI.
Forty-four percent of 10- to 13-year-olds described AI-generated programs as “fascinating,” while only about 10% used the word “doom” in their description (ominous). That split was completely reversed in the 19-year-old group, where doom was the No. 1 feeling participants had about AI (27.4% of them).
Live-action is their preferred medium.
In contrast to last year’s results, live-action content took the top spot this year as the preferred choice for adolescent and young adult audiences compared to animation (58% to 42%). In a world where AI is beginning to touch everything, we’re all craving things we know are real.
Influencers are not everything.
Sure, some kids do have their favorites, but when it comes to quality content and storytelling, the youth are not looking to the Charlie D’Amelios and Salish Matters of the world. They want real actors on their screens (just maybe not A-listers they’ve already seen a thousand times).
Very few participants said they would cast an influencer in a movie or TV show; 40% said they would rather cast an unknown actor over anyone else. Whether this is because they like the idea of young people being given the opportunity to break into the industry or they want fresh faces from more diverse backgrounds, they were loud and clear about this preference.
More (and more accurate) representation, please.
According to the CSS’s report, only 2.8% of speaking or named characters in the top 100 movies of 2025 had a disability. Younger audiences say that’s simply not enough — they “overwhelmingly” want to see more neurodivergent characters in their media, the study found.
“A whopping 55 percent of all adolescents and young adults surveyed feel this way, with that percentage increasing to well into the 70s among youth who identify as LGBTGIA+ or have a disability themselves,” says the report. “Additionally, only 22.7% of respondents believe that current media portrayals of neurodivergence ‘ring true to real life’ most of the time.”
Less romance, more friendship.
Speaking of real-life relatability, for the fourth year of the report in a row, kids and teens have declared they want to see more friendship and less romance in their stories.
Participants were asked this question: “What specific topics would you like to see in the TV shows and/or movies you watch?” The top three responses, in order, were:
- “Hopeful, uplifting stories with people beating the odds”
- “Friendships and social groups”
- “People with lives like mine”
Nearly 58% of participants also said they want to see more representation of platonic friendships in their media, with 52% feeling that romantic relationships are far more central to the lives of fictional characters than they are for real people their age. Those respondents also said they want to see people in different-gender friendships who simply prioritize their platonic relationship rather than it turning into a romantic one.
And in what feels like a win for parents, teens in this age group ranked wanting to see more drugs, alcohol, and drinking dead last.
