I'd rather a million Elmo-centric Sesame Street episodes than even one episode of Barney or Caillou.
That said, every kid needs some old-school, Elmo-free Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. (No, "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood" is not the same; it's insipid and dumb by comparison.)
Also, back in the day, Square One TV had a police-procedural parody called Mathnet that was still loads better than network TV's attempt at a mathematical-cop show for adults (Numb3rs).
It literally couldn't get any better for a kid than PBS in the 70s or 80s.
My two kids enjoyed "The Backyardigans", and with my own interest in musical expression, I found it mostly quite entertaining. Episodes about space, art, math, earth science, cultural beliefs... And a few clever spoofs of some grown-up faves. It was a fun show, and each episode had a genre-specific set of musical arrangements. Zydeco, country, folk... Very cleverly done.
I have a soft spot for that show beyond its lack of Dora-level annoyance: my son is on the autism spectrum, and for some time, his only speech was echolalic. He was most fond of using phrases uttered by one of the Backyardigans, Austin, who himself didn't speak much. He always used the echoed speech in contextually appropriate ways - one time he saw snow falling outside, and said, "it's..it's..it's snowing," with the exact prosody of Austin's utterance of that line in "The Secret of Snow". That was very illuminating for me as the father of a developmentally delayed child. I didn't know how to predict his ability to function as he got older, or really his understanding of language at all...But that day, the sight of gently falling snow never seemed so amazing to me.
When it was on, I often watched it with them; I didn't want to lob a bowling ball at my television, which Caillou made me consider doing. And don't even get me started on Kai-Lan...
> "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood" is not the same; it's insipid and dumb by comparison.)
Funny, because DTN is a award winning show with excellent writers and a body of research and consulting experts backing up their approach. It's only "insipid" if you try to analyze it as an adult. For kids, its engaging and important.
Compare and contrast to other popular shows like Pororo that, while charming and well executed, really don't have nearly so much science behind them.
Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood is an astoundingly well envisioned show, and I'm really disappointed that the top comment here speaks ill of it. It expands upon the core of what Rogers was trying to teach and I find it to be a wonderfully fitting, modern successor. One of the joys I've experienced as a parent is in observing how well crafted and thoughtful DTN (and some other notable shows on PBS) have become, and how my daughter incorporates lessons learned from them in her daily life.
Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood (and early Sesame Street) surely deserve massive amounts of praise, but they were not formed perfectly, from whole cloth, as perfect educational programs. As with any other field, our knowledge of child psychology and early development is continuing to evolve, and there are brilliant people doing amazing work in this area.
I don't think DTN is necessarily bad on its own merits at all. Certainly there is much worse: Dora, Barney, Caillou, to name three. But compared to its predecessor it pales, significantly.
While I remember MRN fondly, it was as complete mess compared to what we have now. We need to accept that there was almost no actual rigor put into the creation of our kids shows, at their genesis.
I remember them fondly and praise them regularly, but I try to keep this in mind. Modern kids shows are optimized for kids. Even Dora is specifically optimized for very young children. It appears insipid because it's repetitive to us. But to a child, it's carefully tuned.
It's a little disturbing to hear all of this praise of a model of children's television that's A/B tested to hell and back and engineered for children.
Then again, I grew up watching (and loving) Loony Tunes. There's a depth there that this modern-day pap doesn't possess. The Teletubies never did Wagner or the Barber of Seville; Bugs Bunny did.
"Engineered for children" is a good thing if it means that the show producers have incorporated recent research into early childhood development when designing the show. This is true of shows like Daniel Tiger, Dora, and (although not mentioned in this thread) Blue's Clues.
The brains of little kids do not work the same way that adult brains do, so shows really do need to be constructed differently. Mr. Rogers knew this--it was a big part of the success of his show--but both research and TV technology have come a long way since he started his show.
It would be bad if a show was simply A/B tested for stickyness, but that's not the story with the shows I mentioned above.
Loony Tunes were made partially for adult consumption before the main feature or between double features in a theater which is why they have more sophisticated themes, particularly the censored ones that aren't PC today.
Children under two aren't even supposed to watch television.
> Television and other entertainment media should be avoided for infants and children under age 2. A child's brain develops rapidly during these first years, and young children learn best by interacting with people, not screens.
And as a parent who has held back normal bodily functions for an entire day while they did all the "right" things for their kids, sometimes the safest and best thing for everyone involved is to sit the kids in front of TV and know they will stay put for 15 minutes, so you can go to the toilet and then cook their dinner.
Also, the other day our 4 year old told me he wanted to be a paleontologist so he can find bones and coprolite. He didn't learn those words from me.
The summary box at the very top of your link says "children learn better and more efficiently from play and interaction
in the “real,” three-dimensional (3-D) world with parents, caregivers, and peers" and that there is "no research showing that when children younger than 2 years old use these devices independently it enhances
their development" and implies that the only reason for having > 0 screentime is simply because there's so many screens you might as well give up.
Sounds pretty much the same as the AAP advice, just more cynical.
It looks from elsewhere in this thread you're taking this as a criticism of your parenting skills. Yes, it is easier just to turn the TV on to distract your kids for 15 minutes. When all is said and done we don't know what the effects are and even if they aren't great, there's millions of other kids doing the same thing so it'll probably be OK. But that doesn't mean that other people might find it in their interests to find a way to eliminate that tool for distraction. Maybe you can too - suppose the kids helped you with dinner? Even very young children can be taught to contribute with basic tasks.
> Sounds pretty much the same as the AAP advice, just more cynical.
The fundamental difference is the inclusion of "guided" vs "unguided." There is this implicit assumption that "screen time" means "without continuous parent interaction" because our conversation is colored by the early 90s and television. The AAP advice doesn't differentiate. There's also a strong scent of "excluded middle" in your argument. Two 30 minute sessions of screen time, guided by parents, with programming specifically and scientifically designed for that age bracket is a hell of a lot different than parking your child in front of a television for 2 hours while you answer emails.
But even if we ignore that, 24/7 parenting presence is the province of the ultra rich, and often even then the province of women delegated to full primary caregiver status. So smug it up, friend. It's simply not economically possible for many people. You're still just another maybe-parent judging people on the internet.
I'll listen to my pediatrician and consults, thanks.
> The research is clear: Children learn better and more efficiently from play and interaction in the “real,” three-dimensional (3-D) world with parents, caregivers, and peers.
> This resource provides guidelines for parents and
caregivers of children younger than 3 years on how to use screens in ways that minimize the potential negative effects and maximize learning.
> Although the body of research on the effect of screen media
(beyond TV viewing) is still relatively limited, it clearly points to the following implications for parents and other caregivers: • Be thoughtful about how you use media with
young children. Set limits on screen time to be sure that children have plenty of time exploring the real, 3-D world
with family and friends. ( ... )
Though the guide doesn't explicitly say it, 0 screen time still seems like the optimal satisfaction of the presented guidelines.
The message is, "Your TV is not a good substitute for a babysitter or any substitute for parenting."
There is absolutely no doubt that real world interactions are what toddler minds are optimized for. Most importantly, children without autism spectrum disorder learn from social interactions. There isn't much of any evidence that you sharing teaching tool with your child that is from a tablet is detrimental.
My family limits my daughter's unguided screen time pretty strictly. She gets 1 episode of sesame street in the morning and one episode of Daniel Tiger at another point in the day. If she is sick or has a supersleep day, we'll get 1 episode of something else she likes to help keep her calm.
But there is tablet and phone time where we focus on interaction. At her age, a camera is fascinating. She takes me to someplace (usually someplace she played earlier) and we take a picture, she then looks a the picture. As per the guidelines, we don't focus on technical features but rather on the social and real world interactions. I feel absolutely no concern about this. I can see her working out how toe camera works and experimenting, and it's amazing. She's fascinated by beaing able to see things from multiple angles at once, and I think this is healthy.
But 0 screen time is just so totally unrealistic in a world of smartphones. What's more, it's not how MANY of us grew up. I was using text consoles, unguided, within a year of learning to read.
I look at people who say all screen time is detrimental with the same dim view as people who say vaccines cause autism. It's often cause driven.
My kids had virtually zero screentime before the age of 6. I really think all parents need to try to do this. Limited media is fine for older kids though.
I think you give Dora to much credit. Yes, the show has educational advisors, but I've always viewed that as a mechanism to gain parents trust to leave their children infront of the Dora marketing machine for 30mins a day.
For example the repetitive sing songs are not educations theory, simply an animation trick to fit the show to the timeslot available. Ie. Script ended 10seconds short, no problem just loop "I'm a map" 3 more times.
Dora is kind of good for little kids. They learn some problem solving, get introduced to Spanish.
But for goodness sake, all of the programmes talked about here are ENTERTAINMENT.
While I certainly enjoyed the shows I saw as a kid, the current crop seem more suitable for kids to me (ie, more balanced in terms of gender issues, racism and violence). I would rather my kids watched what is available now, than what I watched 30 years ago.
As a parent I dislike DTN because of the heavily auto-tuned singing and horrible music. It makes the entire show feel very manufactured and hard to watch.
"The story you're about to hear is a fib, but it's short. The names are made up but the problems are real."
Honestly surprised I remember that gag since it's been ages since I watched that show but I did love those segments. It was like the Square One answer to 3-2-1 Contact's "Bloodhound Gang".
Speaking of Mathnet they had another segment on there called Mathman. I got so into it when I was younger that I really rooted for Mathman to not lose to Glitch. They did a good job of gamifiying math for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Yd3tA4wMPI.
> It literally couldn't get any better for a kid than PBS in the 70s or 80s.
As a kid in the 60s, we spent most of our time unsupervised roaming the countryside. The 60s Superman comics were the best, and for TV we had Bugs Bunny on Saturday mornings. Chemistry sets weren't yet emasculated.
But statistically speaking less of you learned to read, and those that did learned to read less well. The effects of Sesame Street were studied very thoroughly.
> It literally couldn't get any better for a kid than PBS in the 70s or 80s.
Don't forget such gems as "The Electric Company", "3-2-1 Contact", "Reading Rainbow", "Mr. Wizard", "Bill Nye" and others.
It seemed for a while that TV producers really wanted to pursue the mission of Television as an educational medium. I honestly don't know anything about the quality of today's material, but the material I grew up with was really well done on so many facets. It wasn't just about learning basic reading or arithmetic, but also about how to socialize well, diversity training, problem solving, emotional growth and more. It was multi-faceted and didn't pander to children or just spend 30 minutes entertaining them with vapid songs. I feel like there was a real earnest effort by very smart educators to use the medium to its fullest and I grew up enjoying those shows more than afternoon cartoons and other 30 minute commercials.
By comparison Barney, Teletubbies, and those late 90s, early 2000s "educational shows" are pure garbage. I can still sit down as an adult and find enjoyment in classic Sesame Street. And I think that's part of the difference, the modern shows were basically entertainment and electronic babysitters for busy parents, SST, Mr. R and classic children's shows taught on multiple levels and parents weren't bored out of their minds to sit with their own kids and help reinforce the lessons.
(Mathnet was one of my favorite segments of its parent show, It was funny and entertaining, but introduced basic math skills as well as critical thinking skills. It also introduced me to this kind of slightly archaic story-style which helped give me a life-long love of classic radio dramas and comedies)
Was that the show where they said "My name is Wednesday... it was a Tuesday?", might have been on right after 3-2-1 Contact? That show was awesome, now I'm going to have to find a few episodes for my kids! Thanks for the reminder.
3rded. I ctrl+f'd to see if anyone else had mentioned it.
I often sing the "we solved the problem" song when I fix something at work.
I'm pretty sure that my 2 year old daughter feeds off my enjoyment of the show; its the only show she'll start doing a little happy dance to when the opening jingle comes on.
For those who didn't grow up with Mister Rogers, I encourage you to watch this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA, to get a sense of how effective he was as a speaker.
He must be rolling in his grave with the way violence has waxed and mentionable, manageable feelings have waned. I haven't watched any cartoons recently but it seems the trend is toward rejection and denial of feelings rather than acceptance and understanding.
He even brought up mental health (this being the late 60s) which is remarkable as there hasn't been much focus on mental health until very recently (and still not enough).
I wish I had grown up with his show, I don't remember if we just didn't get it or if I just always missed it but it seems he had a good thing going on.
I also thought it was incredibly surprising he even uttered the words "mental health" given how it was looked at back then. It comes across as brave and with much foresight. A very smart man indeed!
Actually cartoons have definitely moved towards acceptance and understanding of feelings in the past few years. Shows like Adventure Time, Steven Universe, and Gravity Falls come to mind.
As an adult, it is really tough appreciate shows that I have enjoyed as a child when a remake of it appears. Just don't seem to get the same sense of excitement when watching it.
Fred Rogers did something that the producers of DTN haven't; he drew strict boundary lines between realism and make-believe, opening each Neighborhood of Make Believe segment with "Let's pretend..." This emphasis on exposing fiction as not real tightened as the show went on: Picture-Picture would eventually lose its "magical" properties, and in one episode Fred actually walked off set and introduced the kids to the cameramen, boom operators, and so forth.
DTN kind of Inceptions this concept -- Daniel often has "lets pretend" events, where he says "let's make believe" and wags his ears while sparkles shine.
That said, every kid needs some old-school, Elmo-free Sesame Street and Mister Rogers. (No, "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood" is not the same; it's insipid and dumb by comparison.)
Also, back in the day, Square One TV had a police-procedural parody called Mathnet that was still loads better than network TV's attempt at a mathematical-cop show for adults (Numb3rs).
It literally couldn't get any better for a kid than PBS in the 70s or 80s.