It doesn't need to look kiddie. Children aren't demanding that iPads have animals stuck on them, they don't care about that. The Vita simply needs games aimed at children if it wants to do well in North America. They need hot properties and titles that children are interested in. Unfortunately, western developers aren't going to develop for handheld consoles so it's up to Sony and they haven't taken that step.
That disappointing thing is that I believe Sony is actually well positioned to work on cross-media projects because of their presence in the film industry. Television or movie tie-ins could be big if they had a well-designed game to go along with them.
They simply dropped the ball with Vita support relative to what it needed to succeed in North America.
