In 2024, disability representation in children’s television reached a record high. It was a promising development, but the latest data suggest it may have been an exception rather than the beginning of a lasting change.

The Geena Davis Institute’s 2026 Report on Children’s TV Representation finds that disabled characters remain significantly underrepresented in both new and popular children’s TV programming. Across eight years of research, representation has generally remained at around 1-2% of all characters. In 2025, disabled characters accounted for just 1% of characters in new programming and 1.3% in popular programming.

With 28.7% of adults in the United States having a disability, according to the CDC, the representation found in children’s TV programming does not come anywhere close to representing reality.

What the Research Tells Us

The Geena Davis Institute’s annual report examines representation in children’s television and provides a way to track how it changes over time. Its 2026 report looks at programming from 2025, covering both new shows and popular shows.

New programming includes television programming actively being made for children in the United States, according to the trade database Luminate, by Variety. Popular programming comprises the scripted shows most watched by children ages 2 to 11 in the U.S., according to Nielsen metrics, across broadcast, cable, and streaming.

The research includes a range of disabilities. As the Geena Davis Institute explains: “This research is inclusive of mental health issues, physical, cognitive, and communication disabilities. Disabilities that are not visible are coded only when confirmed through dialogue or visual contexts (e.g., a character visiting a support group).”

Together, the findings show that disability representation remains low, even as the industry makes some progress in who gets to lead a story.

New Children’s Programming: Little Change Over Eight Years

Although 2025 shows a record share of disabled lead characters in new programming, the overall share of disabled characters decreased. That data shows no meaningful upward trend in disability representation across eight consecutive years.

In new children’s programming in 2025, just 1.0% of all characters were disabled, down from 1.8% in 2024. The figure is only slightly higher than the 0.8% recorded when the study began tracking new programming in 2018.

Representation also varied by gender. Among characters in new programming, 1.3% of male characters and 0.5% of female characters were disabled.

There was a small improvement among lead characters: 2.1% of leads were disabled, compared with 1.7% in 2024. Lead characters typically receive more screen time and have greater opportunities for narrative development, giving storytellers more room to portray different aspects of their lives, including disability.

The report also examines how disabled characters are portrayed at work. It reports that 22.2% of disabled characters in new programming were depicted as employed, 11.1% in STEM, and 11.1% in a leadership role. These job statistics are not different from those of non-disabled characters in new programming. This is important because it signals that people with and without disabilities are equally likely to have a job. Disabled characters are five times as likely as non-disabled characters to be depicted in STEM.

Popular Children’s Programming: A Drop From 2024

The figures for popular children’s programming in 2025 were slightly higher than those for new programming, but representation still fell well short of reflecting the disability community.

Just 1.3% of characters in popular programming were disabled — a sharp decrease from 2.9% in 2024. Over the longer term, representation has increased only slightly, from 0.8% in 2019 to 1.3% in 2025. That change does not amount to a meaningful upward trend.

Looking at the intersection of gender and disability, 0.9% of male characters and 1.9% of female characters were disabled.

Among lead characters, 2.9% were disabled, down from 4.1% in 2024. While this is higher than new programming disabled leads, this is a decrease from 2024, when 4.1% of leading roles went to disabled characters.

Why Disability Representation Matter in AI-Generated Stories

The report also considers how artificial intelligence (AI) could reproduce existing representation gaps in children’s storytelling. It notes that AI-generated children’s stories featuring animal protagonists can reproduce gender imbalances and recommends that studios audit AI tools for representation gaps as they adopt them in development and writing.

The report states: “As studios adopt AI tools earlier in development and writing, we recommend proactively auditing these tools for the same gender, racial, and other representation gaps identified throughout this report, so that AI-assisted production does not re-entrench patterns the industry is otherwise working to correct.”

The same concern applies to disability representation. AI systems learn from existing material, which may not reflect the diversity of people in the world today. If the stories used to train or guide these systems rarely include disabled characters, AI-assisted production could continue that pattern, especially in animated content.

Per the report, “90.2% of characters in new programming and 64.2% in popular programming from 2025 were animated.” Many animated characters are non-human, including animals, monsters, aliens, or anthropomorphized objects. These characters can still reflect disability. For example, a car may have three wheels, or an animal might be deaf. Animation offers opportunities to represent disability in creative ways, without limiting those stories to human characters.

What Can the Industry Do Next?

The Geena Davis Institute’s report offers practical recommendations for improving representation across television, including disability representation. Once recommendation is for development teams to “set a specific, trackable target for disabled characters in leading and notable supporting roles each season.”

Those characters should reflect the range of disabilities that exist in real life, including both apparent and less apparent disabilities. The report identifies examples such as “blindness, deafness, ADHD, dyslexia, limb differences, cerebral palsy, autism, Downs syndrome, dyspraxia, stuttering, dwarfism, Tourette’s [sic], and more.”

Setting clear targets would give studios a way to measure progress and work toward a sustained increase in representation, rather than relying on occasional improvements.

Representation on screen also depends on who gets to create the stories. Hiring disabled creatives across all areas of production, including key roles behind the camera, is essential to building more authentic, varied, and accurate portrayals of disability.

At Disability Belongs®, we are working not only to shed light on the lack of representation of the disability community in children’s television, but also to address it head-on through talent pipeline programs and studio consulting services.

“Increasing the number of disabled characters on screen starts with hiring disabled talent behind the camera,” said Lauren Appelbaum, Senior Vice President of Advocacy of Disability Belongs®. “That’s one of the reasons we founded our annual Entertainment Lab for disabled writers, producers, directors, and other behind-the-camera entertainment professionals. We connect studios to our more than 250 Lab alumni and broader network of disabled talent so they can be hired in all aspects of the storytelling process.”

When disabled people help shape stories from the beginning, they bring lived experience and perspectives that can make characters and their experiences more authentic. Hiring people with disabilities to work in children’s programming is crucial to expand representation and ensure that disabled characters are portrayed with depth and care.

It also makes business sense. With an estimated one in six people globally living with a significant disability, the lack of disabled characters means that children’s media is losing out on an important audience.

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