I was ushered into a conference room, where I spent the next five hours being pleasantly precision-targeted by a choreographed series of presentations and interviews. The chief creative officer at Moonbug, Richard Hickey, previously worked as a director in both children’s television and advertising. He and Andy Yeatman, the company’s managing director for the Americas and a former Netflix Kids executive, spoke like pitch decks. Moonbug’s mission, they said, was to “empower kids all over the world with essential life skills.” The company did this by acquiring I.P. with “reach and audience” which displayed core values of “compassion, empathy, and resilience.” CoComelon’s “creative value was very high,” they said, because its creators “love this I.P., love the characters, love the world, and are very intentional with everything we create about it.”
We were joined by two creative executives, Meghan Sheridan and Jasmine Johnson, and I peppered them with questions. How old is JJ supposed to be? The kids’ ages “stretch” to reflect both the reality and the aspiration of their audience’s lives, they said. I asked about JJ’s parents, his teacher, the town where CoComelon is set. There were answers to many of my questions in the roughly hundred-page show bible—a guide, for the staff, to CoComelon lore—but the information was mostly proprietary.
I wondered aloud about how the company handled the nuances of being in the business of children’s attention. For a profit-driven enterprise in the streaming era, all-day binges were probably the ideal mode of consumption. “We want kids to watch it for a little while, but the rest of the day should be filled up with exercise and interaction,” Hickey said. It was up to caregivers and parents to regulate screen time, he added; Moonbug’s job was to create a safe place on that screen. “If your kid is watching our content for half an hour, or fifteen minutes, or however long it might be, you know that nothing bad is going to happen—that they’ll be exposed to a very warm world,” he said.
I’d read an article in the Times in which researchers at Moonbug observed a young child who’d been placed in front of two screens. One screen played a Moonbug show and the other, called the Distractatron, played footage of everyday adult life. Each time the child looked away from the Moonbug screen toward the Distractatron, the researcher made a note—time to tweak the episode. Did the company really design its shows so that kids would never look away? Hickey and Yeatman said that the Distractatron was the work of a third-party research company, and that neither of them had even heard that word before the article was published. Such attentional calculations were not part of their process, Hickey told me, adding, “We use data in creative retrospectively.”
The conception of a CoComelon episode, as Hickey described it, involved joyful brainstorming sessions with a “story trust” that includes animation directors, creative executives, and writers. People would bring in their favorite childhood stuffed animals or stories about how hard it is to zip up a child’s p.j.’s in the middle of the night. Then, Sheridan told me, they’d identify a “learning takeaway,” such as recognizing letters, cultivating empathy, or brushing your teeth. Johnson mentioned an episode called “Hair Wash Day,” in which a Black mother washes and styles her son’s hair. She said it was particularly meaningful to her that an episode authentically depicted bath-time routines for a Black family. Later, Natascha Crandall, an educational consultant, told me that she and others reviewed early versions of episodes and suggested careful improvements. If a scene showed a kid juggling apples, she’d scratch that—it might impart the accidental takeaway that food was meant to be played with. Also, it wouldn’t be appropriate, she said, given that some in the show’s audience might be food-insecure.
After lunch, a few members of the music team arrived. An appealingly earnest crew of Berklee graduates, they were led by Eric Kalver, a thirtysomething who comes from a family of children’s entertainers. (“My father’s a magician, and my mother was a clown,” he said.) Someone put an electronic keyboard on the marimba setting and played the CoComelon theme song; I let out an involuntary squeal. The team workshopped a new song, about kids playing with pots and pans, in front of me, adjusting chord structures on the fly, adding flourishes on the ukulele and on the drums. Kalver said that they would probably sample forks and knives as percussion, and add them to the usual xylophones, marimbas, glockenspiels, woodwinds, and laughter. The learning takeaway of this episode was clear: Moonbug was a spontaneous, creative place, telling stories with passion and love.
A few months before my visit, the company had laid off about thirty people, including most of the CoComelon writers and much of its in-house animation team. Bloomberg reported that Moonbug planned to experiment with artificial intelligence. I asked Hickey about this. He told me that Moonbug would continue to “look at what the technology is and where the benefit is, for raising the bar creatively,” but that there was “zero” A.I. at work in CoComelon currently. “As you’ll see, it’s very much flesh and bones all the way through the process,” he said. “It’s human.”
Some of the fears regarding CoComelon and its ilk are not new. Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, asks, “Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?” Mass media made exposure to tales seem less controllable than ever; in 1935, one parenting expert lamented the radio, saying, “No locks will keep this intruder out, nor can parents shut their children in away from it.” “Sesame Street” arrived at the end of the sixties, and though it was hailed as a benchmark in quality programming, some observers speculated that its fast pace would leave kids overstimulated and malcontent. (The version of the show that they saw is Tarkovsky compared with what’s on YouTube.) By the end of the eighties, preschool-age children were already watching TV about as much as they currently watch screens, around thirty hours per week.
But CoComelon’s core viewership is not preschool-age—it’s pre-preschool-age. “I’ve been in kids’ TV for a super, super long time,” Susan Kim, a writer in the industry, told me. “It used to be that there were certain things you couldn’t say, or you’d be rebuked in the room.” Kim, who’s written for “CoComelon Lane,” worked on “Square One,” in the nineteen-eighties; “Thomas & Friends,” in the nineties; and “Arthur,” in the two-thousands, among many other programs. “For one, you weren’t allowed to say that anything was for one-to-two-year-olds,” she said. “I think everyone had the sense, whether or not they’d actually read the white papers on it, that children that young should not be planted in front of video and left alone.”
Cartoon by Michael Maslin
That began to change in the late nineties. “Teletubbies,” the psychedelic British kids’ show featuring colorful alien-baby creatures, began airing in 1997; PBS imported it and marketed it toward children as young as one. Around the same time, the company Baby Einstein started producing videos of puppets and patterns set to classical music. (Disney bought the company in 2001, for a reported twenty-five million dollars.) A few years later, HBO produced “Classical Baby,” a soothing, Peabody-winning anthology series featuring a cartoon baby who conducts an all-animal orchestra that plays Aaron Copland and Erik Satie; it has been a staple of my life with young children. These shows inspired controversy in their time, but they were gentle and calm, with the vibes of a peaceful, edifying, possibly stoned afternoon. Even so, when the American Academy of Pediatrics issued its first screen-time guidelines, in 1999, it recommended that kids under two avoid TV altogether.
These guidelines were revised in 2016. The A.A.P. now holds that children under eighteen months can benefit from video chatting, and that kids aged two to four can learn from high-quality educational shows; it suggests that they avoid nursery-rhyme channels, fast-paced shows, and YouTube on Autoplay. Research has repeatedly documented connections between early prolonged exposure to television and worse outcomes later in life—language delays, problems with attention and self-regulation. But many of these relationships are likely to be correlational or interactive, not causal. Parents who have less money and fewer enrichment opportunities, or who are racially marginalized, or who struggle with their mental health—frequently overlapping factors—tend to have kids who watch more television. If you can’t afford child care or a lot of toys, screen time is always available as a babysitter and a treat. (Although programs such as “Sesame Street” are associated with improvements in children’s language and executive functioning, it’s hard to know whether this is because of the content or because of the sorts of parents who choose to put it on.)
