I will never forget the joy I felt spending the day with my Grandmothers. Since I didn’t go to daycare until I was about 4 or 5, I spent most of my day at their house while my parents were at work.
One of my grandmothers was very intentional about how much time I spent watching TV. Since I was home during the middle of the day, we were very much a PBS Kids household, from “Sesame Street” to “Super Why” to “Wordgirl.” I loved every second of it and I can’t even imagine what my childhood would’ve looked like without it.
Even as I got older and transitioned into my love for Disney Channel, Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, this love of PBS persisted. The shows I watched as a kid made me who I am today, and a ton of other people all over the world could say the same. Yet unfortunately, I think these shows might’ve been the last of their kind.
Flash forward about 12 years and I’m working as a camp counselor over the summer. When it comes to working with young kids, I try to keep myself pretty educated on what things they like. I’ve educated myself on “Paw Patrol” and Jojo Siwa’s discography and I obviously know every Disney princess to ever exist.
Over the summer, I was sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office and they were playing episodes of “Bluey” on the TV screen. It’s safe to say that in the 45 minutes I was sitting in that waiting room, I fell completely in love with “Bluey.” I couldn’t believe the joy this show brought me despite the fact that it was for kids, but maybe that was the point. A good story is universal. Learning is universal. So, why wouldn’t kids understand that?
But over time, I started to notice a decline in the quality of the content these kids were watching. Before I knew it, they went from being obsessed with “Descendants” and “Star Wars” to being infatuated with some random gaming YouTuber I had never heard of.
At the time, I thought, “Wow, maybe I really am old. Is this how my parents felt when I would talk endlessly about One Direction?” At the time, I would laugh it off, but in hindsight, I think it might have been a symptom of a bigger problem.
In December, The Hollywood Reporter announced that Warner Brothers-Discovery decided not to renew their distribution deal with “Sesame Street.” So although the current season would continue to air on Max and the episodes would still be available for streaming until 2027, the future of the show’s distribution is up in the air.
Warner Brothers-Discovery has been making massive cuts to its programming as a way to shift its brand strategy and prioritize adult viewers, but it has come at the expense of children’s programming.
It’s so sad to see a show that was at the forefront of accessible educational programming – a show that not only gave to children, but adults alike – be mishandled in this way.
I always found putting a once publicly accessible show behind a paywall to be quite dystopian, but I understand that the puppeteers and creative teams needed to be paid for their work.
This show means so much to me and is probably one of the first pieces of media I ever got attached to. My very first word was “Elmo”. The show can talk about everything from the alphabet to foster care to managing grief. “Sesame Street” is such a labor of love and you can tell the team behind really cares about the kids who watch it. But, this announcement seems to be yet another example of children’s programming declining.
Further, Disney Channel has started to fall in popularity, with the LA Times reporting that “Over the last decade, Disney Channel’s viewership has plummeted from an audience of 2 million in 2014 to a mere 132,000 in 2023”.
The traditional television medium has been going out of style for a while and that was bound to happen once we became a streaming-heavy world, but there must be a good alternative for children’s programming that is both accessible to young children and high quality. Kids are way smarter than people and these large media companies assume they are.
This leads me to “Cocomelon” and the “Brainrot” elephant in the room.
“Cocomelon” is one of those things that really made me feel like I was headed straight for the retirement home.
I understood the appeal of Jojo Siwa, “Roblox” and even “Descendants,” but I could never figure out what in the world the appeal of “Cocomelon” was. It was bright and loud and very eye-catching, but not much else.
Maybe I was just beyond the target demographic and that was OK. But, then I really thought about it. When I was younger, I watched a ton of shows and movies that were aimed at my age range, but they weren’t just eye-catching distractions. Obviously, there were more educational shows like “Sesame Street” and “Wonder Pets”, but there were also just plain fun shows like “Good Luck Charlie” and “Shake it Up.”
These shows might’ve been a bit silly in hindsight, but they never talked down to their young audience. We got to learn the valuable lessons of friendship, forgiveness and trust, as well as things like geography and writing.
Kids are so much more than just an audience to distract, they are active learners, even from a young age. So, why should these shows be treated as if they are incapable of such a thing?
Even with some of the animated films released for kids in the past few years, studios such as Disney, Pixar, and Dreamworks put out films that serve as a way to distract kids for two hours instead of opening their minds to new concepts and ideas through such an interesting medium. I cannot wait for the day I get to show my future kids “Lilo and Stitch” or “The Princess and the Frog” for the first time because those films truly opened my mind to the concepts of friendship, love and trust even at a young age.
It’s pretty easy to declare that technology is fully to blame, and I’m guilty of this myself, but I think there’s a bit of nuance there.
When I was 6, my grandmother got me an iPad. However, my parents were incredibly intentional about setting boundaries about when and how long I could be on it each day. I wasn’t given free reign YouTube and Instagram was not in my life just yet.
I had a mix of games and shows available to me from “Stack the States” to “Minecraft” and my parents downloaded different kids shows for me to watch. So, I was technically an iPad kid, but not in the negative connotation we normally see now. I think technology and iPads are OK for a kid, but in moderation, similar to TV time.
Now, I don’t claim to know everything about parenting (unless a dog counts), but it seems like so many parents rely on putting an iPad in front as a form of babysitting, sometimes not even really monitoring what their kids might be watching.
We are currently witnessing the first generation of iPad kids grow up before our very eyes. As someone who has worked with kids and has younger cousins in my life, I’m a bit concerned. They grew up with technology as almost a third parent and now we’re really getting to see the long-term effects of it.
As much as everyone and their mother has discussed it, it’s disheartening to see young girls buying $40 retinol cream at Sephora because they saw it on TikTok or YouTube or watching so many young boys fall down the trap of the alt-right pipeline so young and so quickly.
A part of me wishes kids could just still be kids. Of course, childhood looks different for everyone, but it’s so weird to me to watch this next generation be in such a rush to be older and hit the standard of desirability they see online. Also, the rampant consumerism pushed at these kids through avenues like $200 Sephora Hauls and Logan Paul Energy Drink plugs all over their screens,who is that benefiting? I’ll give you a hint. It’s definitely not benefiting the kids’ wallets, or more likely their parents’.
I’m not advocating for censorship, but to me, there is a clear difference between programming that is beneficial for kids and just pure lazy entertainment.
I think there are two things that could be done to remedy this epidemic.
I think parents should start really paying attention to what their kids are watching and consuming daily and setting parameters around access to apps like YouTube, as the library on this site is so vast and very hard to predict algorithm-wise.
Luckily, there seem to be a lot of different creators on YouTube who are taking the time to make good quality programming for kids. I recently watched a few of Ms. Rachel’s TikToks and they were pretty easy to follow, which is great for younger kids, but also incredibly informative and high quality – much respect to her.
But, it can’t be fully on the parents to do all of the vetting. Media companies have a responsibility to do right by children’s programming and create well-made and high-quality shows for kids, not just bright brainrot babble that can be looped for hours.
I know my camp counseling days are far behind me, although babysitting might still be on the table, but I hope that there’s a future out there, especially in such a bleak time like this one, where kids feel the same joy as I once did while watching Elmo sing his theme song and teach me about the power of friendship. The memories of watching those shows with my parents and grandmothers are lessons and moments I’ll never forget and this next generation deserves to have those too.