Caitlyn Pecoraro
Senior Advocacy Officer, Older Youth Initiatives
Many young people face barriers to building fulfilling lives with rewarding careers, meaningful educational opportunities, and nourishing families and communities. These challenges are especially acute for youth transitioning out of foster care, or young adults disconnected from school or work, referred to as opportunity youth.
The Hilton Foundation works to ensure that transition age foster youth and opportunity youth have access to the resources and support they need to learn, work, and live a healthy, connected and meaningful life. Our partners at The Center for Scholars & Storytellers (CSS) at UCLA play a unique role in this effort: they’re helping to shift how young people are portrayed on screen.
Youth aged 10-25 spend an average of 8.5 hours daily immersed in media, a dominant force shaping their social norms, perceptions, and behaviors. Despite the media’s potential to foster empathy and development of positive identity, many stories about foster youth or opportunity youth perpetuate stereotypes that often lead to punitive, rather than supportive, interventions.
CSS believes storytelling shaped by insights from adolescent psychology and young people themselves is essential for replacing harmful narratives with inclusive ones that reflect diverse experiences and support resilience, well-being, and hope. They connect entertainment and academia to build a research-informed community of storytellers supporting the well-being of kids, teens and young adults.
Included in their important lineup of research is their annual “Teens and Screens” research report. Based on a nationwide survey of 1,500 tweens, teens, and young adults, the report aims to understand more about what young people care about and want to see in entertainment media.
Some key findings from this year’s Teens and Screens report include:
“This study flips the script on the myth that Gen Z and Gen Alpha don’t care about TV or movies and challenges some of the biggest assumptions about what they want to see,” said Yalda T. Uhls, founder and CEO of CSS, senior author of the study and adjunct professor in UCLA’s psychology department. “From this report, we’re also seeing that relatable stories are the currency of connection for this generation and that these narratives are what truly matter to adolescents today.”
Young people crave stories that demonstrate their full humanity – their talent, leadership, creativity, and potential. When these compelling stories reach broad audiences, they not only shape public attitudes and policy— they also give young people a chance to see themselves reflected with dignity. Further, when the general public consumes these stories, they’re more likely to support the policies that address the real-world challenges young people face.
A single well-crafted film or series has the power to reach millions of hearts, spark conversations at the dinner table, in classrooms, on social media and even in boardrooms. The shows we watch, the stories we absorb, and the characters we relate to influence how entire societies see young people facing a steep climb to adulthood. Entertainment industry leaders and those in the philanthropic sector can start by listening to what young people said they want reflected on their screens: check out the website for the 2025 Teens and Screens report.