Are the early seasons of Sesame Street appropriate for toddlers?

Yes

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by Gail Kavanagh

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When my kids were young, Sesame Street was the most politically correct children's programme on TV - or so we thought. Kermit sang the virtues of learning to love yourself, the whole show radiated tolerance and universal understanding like a giant lighthouse, and kids started school already knowing how to read, count and live with their emotions.

But now, it seems, we were wrong to put so much faith in its clean scrubbed goodness. Sesame Street is not what we thought, it is riddled with incorrect thinking, inappropriate behaviour, and every character exhibits behavioural disorders that should have been corrected with medication.

Virginia Heffernan, of the New York Times, reports that reissues of the early videos of Sesame Street come with Adults Only warnings - "These early Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today's preschool child."

You can read the article online and if you google the subject, you can read the many horrified responses. But a surprising number of comments agree that Sesame Street just isn't suitable for children. One of the major sticking points is a segment in which a little girl is befriended by an older man and taken home to meet his wife, who gives the child milk and cookies. Life was so much safer and simpler in the 70s that parents never bothered to warn their kids about stranger danger, apparently. So Sesame Street, by airing this little fantasy, could corrupt them and place them in harm's way.

For Pete's sake, do they think we were idiots? Do they think our children were idiots? Do they think that the kids, and us, their parents, couldn't tell the difference between the safe, happy, rosy world of Sesame Street and the real world outside our front doors? How did we cope without constant TV campaigns about our responsibilities? Oh yes, of course, we didn't have to worry because it was a 'simpler, safer, more innocent time". Rubbish!

But, oh yes, I remember now - back in those days we were were expected to raise our children ourselves, to teach them manners, respect and safety. And, what do you know, our children actually listened to us and not a TV show. We didn't get our parenting advice from the TV either, or from child `experts' but from people who had been through parenthood themselves.

But times change - again. What we thought so avant garde is now regarded as just more evidence of our hopeless inadequacy as parents.

So instead of Sesame Street, which cruelly taught our kids to eat cookies, smoke pipes and obsessively count everything, we have Sponge Bob Squarepants and other ugly assorted programing which teaches our kids what an awful world it really is and how they can never hope to do anything to change it - let alone educate themselves.

Even sadder, to me, are the complaints that Sesame Street is too `slow paced' for today's kids. In fact, it was founded on the knowledge that children have short attention spans, and responded better to `sound bites' of information. But while it assumed that children get bored quickly, it didn't assume they were stupid.

We are in a time when everything is a disorder, and everyone a victim. It isn't normal to feel sad or angry, to question people who speak rubbish, or to make up our own minds about anything. My kids were not raised that way - and, appropriate or not, they remember Sesame Street with real affection. They enjoyed their childhood, and now they try to raise their own kids the same way. In fact, they've already been showing their kids old episodes on You Tube - the little uns love it, of course.

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