Let's Cancel the Trauma Template: How Games, Film & Stories Default to Trauma | Kelly Tutors x SURF Incubator x Sound Startup
Let's Cancel the Trauma Template: How Games, Film & Even AI-Generated Stories Default to Trauma (And What Empowering Media Could Look Like Instead)
Why do we normalize trauma in kids' media from the very beginning, then act shocked when kids grow into anxious, disconnected adults?
Look at almost any story built for children and you'll find the same pattern: dead parents, abandonment, violence dressed up as a life lesson. It's so common we stopped questioning it. Meanwhile, adult entertainment runs the same playbook in reverse (Grand Theft Auto is one of the best-selling games of all time, and something like 99% of what you do inside it is illegal. Steal the car. Rob the store. Run from the cops). We call it entertainment. We hand it to teenagers. Nobody blinks!!
This isn't an accident of storytelling. It's a template - and confusing, because it encourages behavior we don't typically want to see (or legally allow) in real life. It shows up in games, film, and now increasingly in AI-generated stories, because AI learns from everything that came before it, trauma included. If the training data glamorizes crime and grief as the default plot engine, the outputs will too, unless someone actively builds something different.
This talk is about naming that pattern out loud, asking what psychological cost we've normalized without ever agreeing to it, and imagining what empowering, non-traumatic media could actually look like for kids and for everyone still carrying what they absorbed as one.
2:00–2:30 — Arrival, networking
2:30–3:00 — The talk
3:00–3:30 — Discussion + networking
Open to women in tech and the people who support them — allies, mentors, and community members welcome.
About Your Host:
Kelly Kirk is the founder of Kelly Tutors, a Seattle-based company teaching entrepreneurship, financial literacy, AI literacy, and public speaking to students ages 5–18. She's taught 10,000+ students over 12+ years and holds a 4.9-star rating on Outschool. She currently manages a team of interns on rolling terms, screening applicants at scale and building hands-on mentorship into the process. She is working to build a media edutainment company to inspire generations of today and beyond. She's worked internationally as an on-camera educator for major EdTech platforms serving 35M+ users, submitted a proposal to the White House's AI Education for Youth Challenge, was nominated for Women in Toys' 2023 Rising Leader award, and won "Best Documentary" at the 2017 Shanghai Short Film Festival — for a mockumentary.