The Future of Children's Programming in the "New Normal"

We asked our community to share their thoughts on the "new normal" of children's programming and performances going forward. Our hope was to gain a baseline understanding of where people's heads were at after the major disruptions of the past year. Here are a few infographics explaining the results:

What Does the Future of Children's Programming and Performances Look Like?

When asked about some of the new values that parents, teachers, and administrators alike hoped to teach kids in this "new normal," these were the top 8 words in order of most frequently used: resilience, patience, flexibility, learning, independence, connection, friendship, and confidence.

We asked our community which events they believed would still be held either entirely virtual or mostly virtual in this "new normal." You can see the results here! Not surprisingly, the larger events are more likely to be virtual according to participants.

One of the questions we asked was 'on a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to engage in virtual programming in the new normal?' As you can see the average answer was a 7.

Virtual birthday parties have been a huge part of mainstages over the past year. It's something we never saw ourselves doing, but something we were surprised to find was uniquely suited to our strengths. Since then we've been honored to host virtual birthday parties around the world for so many amazing families. With our "new normal" taking shape, we've been especially curious to discover where birthday parties were headed.

One of the main components of mainstages is children's theater - where adults perform for young audiences. In March 2020, we quickly pivoted to virtual performances rather than live performances. With live theater being one of the most contentious kinds of in-person gatherings, we were especially relieved to see that the majority of our survey-takers see virtual AND in-person performances being popular going forward.