What do tweens really want?

Introduction by Eva Wiseman

Interviews and photographs by Sam Deaman

While teenagers were invented in the 1940s, one of the first usages of the word “tween” (meaning children aged between eight to 12 in that vibrating state of “in between”) was in the late 1980s, in an article explaining how to market to girls lingering on the threshold before adolescence. The term was invented as a sales category, but has since evolved as a way to look at development, health, culture and, through that, who we were before we became who we are.

If the teenager is characterised as a rebel, and the adult perhaps as weary and sensible, then the stereotype of the tween is still to play for. No longer a tiny child, a simple extension of the parent, are they grabby capitalists or free souls, are they wild or anxious, or propelled by ambition – have they already seen too much? Or is it foolish to try to categorise them, knowing how much can change in those four years, and how much the experience of a child differs depending on class, race, place, time?

For all that we don’t know, there’s much that we do. The tween period is second only to infancy in terms of the number of developmental changes in the brain. Children begin to think differently at this stage. Until now almost exclusively interested in themselves, they begin to be interested in others, too, looking out rather than in. Gen Alpha (the first to be born entirely in the 21st century) is the most racially diverse generation yet, a shift expected to shape their friendships, levels of empathy and understandings of race, gender and sexual orientation. Studies have hinted at heightened rates of anxiety and depression, due in part to the effects of the pandemic. And this is a generation, of course, that grew up online. Nearly a quarter of five to seven-year-olds in the UK now have their own smartphone, rising to 93% of 12-year-olds. This is increasingly where tweens learn, communicate, play, suffer, flirt and shop.

We gave five tweens £30, and a week later asked, with a little trepidation, what they had bought. The answers are a snapshot of a generation in motion. It wasn’t entirely predictable, which, I guess, we should have predicted. Though the value of the “baby and child skincare market” is booming (expected to reach £282m by 2028), the only beauty product they went for was a perfume. One hell of being a tween is feeling, suddenly, that you should move on from your toys and childish obsessions: toy manufacturers have rushed to accommodate that anxiety. Our group bought video games and crop tops and books, both fiction and non. There’s a small horse and a carnivorous plant.

And there’s the sense, for me anyway, that we are meeting these people at a time of curiosity and experimentation, when they are building new identities from blocks of knowledge and colourful badges and books about reptiles. It feels unfair to pigeonhole them as they are, by definition, in between, swimming slowly towards adolescence. What do tweens want? To dye their hair, to smell like coconut, to accept themselves. To “be a kid”.

“I like to play,” said 10-year-old Emilio. Adults have, sadly, “got other stuff to do.”

Emilio bought a Nintendo Switch video game and a Black history timeline book

I decided to buy a Nintendo Switch video game called Crash Bandicoot N Sane Trilogy from a shop inside Sports Direct. My friend had it and I liked playing it at his house. Me and my friends are all quite different children, but we like very similar things. I don’t play any shooting games and when I play Minecraft, it’s only the building one. I play on my Nintendo Switch and iPad, free online games that you don’t need to be connected to the internet for, but mostly on the weekend, or on a Friday if I have a friend over.

I swim four times a week for a swimming club, and I also practice my trumpet, so I don’t have time to play video games during the week. If I remember to put away my swimming kit every day without prompts, then I get £5 at the end of the week. I also get 20p for practicing my trumpet – I’m trying to get to grade two. I am currently practicing Seven Nation Army and Match of the Day. My dad always says, spend some, save some, invest some, so I spend some of it on things I want and save the rest in my piggy bank.

I also bought a Black history timeline book from New Beacon Books, an independent book shop near where I live. I bought it so I can know loads of different significant Black history figures. My dad was born in England, but his parents and his siblings are from a small country in the Caribbean called Dominica and my mum is from the north of Italy.

We learn a lot about Black history at school, especially in Black History Month, but I know in some schools it’s not always talked about a lot. I really enjoy learning about it and I know about people like Harriet Tubman – she helped a lot of slaves escape from where she was born in Maryland. Barack Obama, who was a president in America. Nelson Mandela, who was the first Black president in South Africa, and Desmond Tutu who helped Nelson Mandela with a lot of things.

I had to dress up as someone significant at school, so I decided to dress up as Garrett Morgan who was the man who invented traffic lights, which are quite helpful. I made a traffic light out of a toilet roll tube and tissue box, and wore a fairly elegant suit. I like most things about being a kid. I like to play. I’m not saying adults can’t play, but they’ve got other stuff to do.

Dot bought a black frilly skirt from Camden Market, Converse boots from Vinted online and a cherry top

Most of my clothes are too small for me, or from when I had not found my style, so I needed a wardrobe refresh. I bought a black frilly skirt, from Camden Market and some Converse boots from Vinted and a cropped top. I like shopping secondhand, because it feels like I haven’t wasted something and normally the more vintage, older styles are more appealing, because it means no one else has it.

A lot of my friends wear black, but one of my other friends dresses more preppy, wearing hot pink, brighter colours, like beach vibes? I think my style is probably inspired by my interest in video games and music. I’m not into Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter – I love Alex G and TV Girl. I’m also a big fan of Hatsune Miku, who is a vocaloid singer. She’s an animation with really long, turquoise hair and wears a blue and grey skirt and white top. Her voice is taken from a vocal synthesis software, like AI. So kind of like Siri, but it can sing. It’s Japanese, but you can listen to it with an English translation.

I get £40 a month pocket money and then I also have side hustles like Vinted and chores. I try to save, but it doesn’t always turn out that well. If I’m not buying clothes, I like spending money on video games. When I went to Comic Con, I’d actually saved quite a bit of money, because I knew I’d want to have money to spend there. I cosplayed a character from a Minecraft series – his name’s Scott Major, but I went as his Minecraft skin. My friendship group was a demon from hell, a sentient robot and a person in a death game, which was me.

I don’t know what my style will become when I get older. I quite like the idea of dying my hair, and makeup, but I’m not the biggest fan of just adding a load of random chemicals to my face. My school is quite strict. No jewellery, no hair dye, no acrylic nails – I think there’s not enough personalisation. Me and my friends wear pins and badges on our uniforms. When I first started school, they had a no-pin rule, but they’ve changed that now so you can have eight.

People personalise their uniforms according to friendship groups. In the year sevens’ courtyard there are four corners, one for each group. You have my corner where we wear our pins and someone might randomly bring in plushies. Then you’ve got the claw clips, who are the rule abiders, then the people who defy but don’t really defy? The claw clips slick their hair back with gel. One of my friends used flammable hair gel in a science class when we were using Bunsen burners? I don’t get it.

I buy clothes for myself. I don’t really care what other people think of me. If anyone fights me, I’m just going to tell the teacher. I mean, they’re not going to murder me.

Luna bought a digital pet, a toy pony, a Sylvanian family figure, a sheep and a book about adolescence

I went to Smyths toyshop and bought a digital pet, a pony, a tiny little cute baby Sylvanian family figure and a sheep. I’ve called the sheep Cedric, because my favourite YouTuber adopted a dog that was being treated poorly and named it Cedric. I thought that this sheep was treated poorly in the shop and didn’t have an owner, so I called it Cedric, too. I picked the horse because it reminds me of a holiday memory, where I rode a horse in Malaga in Spain with my cousin. Exact colours and everything.

I don’t have a pet at the moment, which is why I bought the digital pet toy. Hopefully, if I can take care of this toy, I’ll be able to convince my mum to get me a real pet. Animals can keep you company and help with stress. And my family has always loved to help animals. So I think that’s one of my genes.

Football makes me feel like I’m a royal king, because I’m eight years old and I play on a team that’s five years older than me. I want to be a footballer when I’m older, but also a cancer doctor, a mental health doctor, I want to help in a dog shelter, be a YouTuber, a boxer and a rapper.

One day, I was scared of growing up: thinking, what’s going to happen to me? And what if I’m not prepared for it? So I bought What’s Happening to Me by my favourite book writer, Jacqueline Wilson. For five years of my life, I’ve been wanting to be a boy a lot, so I’ve had a lot of stress issues. I bought that book because I want to look like a boy, but be a girl. I want to be a cool girl. When I realised I was going to start changing and looking a lot more like a girl, it kind of got me a little scared, because I didn’t really want to do that. The book made me feel a bit better. In the past, I had very bad stress issues where I just couldn’t accept myself. I hated the body I walked in. I wish I was never me and wanted to be like anyone else, but I feel better about it now, because I have a very brilliant family environment around me, and a very brilliant school.

I don’t really like growing up. I like staying as a kid and being childish. I don’t really have that many responsibilities, and I can just rely on my parents; I don’t have to do cleaning, washing up, all the boring stuff. I like being unique.

(Luna’s grandfather died the week we went to press and left them his dog. The family will collect Daisy next week.)

Alina bought a Ralph Lauren perfume

I bought this Ralph Lauren woman’s perfume from a Designer Outlet in Swindon, near where I live. I think it’s called Ralph Lauren Big Pony or something like that. My older cousin got the same perfume for her birthday, and I really liked the smell, so when I got the £30 it was one of the first things I thought to buy. For summer, I love coconut scents and floral scents like this one. I think that maybe it could change when I get older, but definitely now, those are, like, my top two.

When I messaged my friends to tell them I’d bought it, a lot of them were like, “Oh, I like that perfume”, or “I have it, too.” I just want to smell nice for myself, because I really like beauty, makeup and perfume. It’s a way of presenting myself and making myself feel confident.

I order most things I buy online, just because it’s so easy, but we also go out to the shops sometimes. I think I prefer going out, because then you get to see it and try it in person. I follow a lot of beauty influencers on Instagram and TikTok, but I know you have to be careful with who recommends things, like truly or not. A lot of influencers are paid by brands to recommend products, so it can be fake a lot of the time.

Ralph Lauren is a brand that a lot of people know, it’s popular with my friends and family and feels special, but is still quite well-priced, I think. It’s a brand that is known for being quite sporty and I am really into my football, so I think it fits both sides of my personality well.

There are some big footballers, like Leah Williamson, who definitely inspire me to like makeup and fashion whilst also being into sports. I love putting on makeup and wearing skirts with jewellery, that’s a big part of me. But at the same time, there are also a lot of things I really like about sports. It keeps your fitness up. It’s also really great when I get to make new friends and get good relationships from it. Some of the girls I play with are from different schools and different places, like London, so they obviously don’t live close to me. But we see each other at training and at matches and I feel really close to them. Not everyone on the team likes the same things as me, but that’s OK.

Blake bought a Venus flytrap plant, kids fiction books and an animal encylopaedia

At the garden centre I actually intended to buy a swift nesting box, but they were £70. I saw some Venus flytraps and I thought they looked cool. I’ve been having some quite annoying flies in my room, so I thought I’d like one of these. It releases a smell like rotting meat and then flies come and slip down the walls into the plant and sink into its digestive juices.

When I’m older I’m going to be an inventor, but one that circulates around biodiversity and natural history. My dad thinks if you look at nature, you can get the answer to everything and I think that’s probably true. I bought the animal encyclopaedia at a school fête and it was all donations, so I paid 20p. It’s a big encyclopaedia of animals with different sections. There’s an introduction for fish, mammals, reptiles, invertebrates, vertebrates. There’s lots of different sections with diagrams that show you everything. My top three animals would be an osprey, octopus and praying mantis.

The other two books [Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Old School by Jeff Kinney and Absolutely Fantastic (At Some Things) by Tom Gates] are from the Oxfam bookshop. I like these books because they’re funny. They’re both based around one male character and their daily life, but with really funny twists. I have always liked books like this, but my most favourite books have dragons in them.

I put the last £5 of the money in the Oxfam charity box at the till. It was a little pot with a sort of slit in the top saying “Please donate”, so I did.

The other two things I bought are Bakugan, which are small creatures you roll over a magnetic plate and then they unfurl. They also come with cards for trading. I don’t have anyone to trade with yet, but that sounds quite fun. I don’t have a phone, so I don’t buy anything online. I mean, I sometimes go on the computer to practise homework and I’ve seen someone going on YouTube before and I sort of regretted it. There were some unsettling things on there.