‘Sesame Street’ looking for kindness in an unkind world
47th season will teach empathy, for kids’ sake
Just in time on Sesame Street this season: kindness rules.
The show — its 47th season premieres Sunday on HBO — focuses this year on kindness in all its permutations. The move follows a spate of recent research, including a wide-ranging Sesame Workshop survey of parents and teachers last October, that found more than two-thirds of parents often worry that the world is “an unkind place for my child.” Among teachers, the figure was 86%.
About half of teachers said being kind “is not a priority” to most people.
Buried in the findings was an indicator that suggested parents might unintentionally contribute to the kindness crisis. Researchers asked a series of either/or questions, including this one: “Which is more important, having manners or having empathy?”
Manners won in a landslide: 58% of parents said manners were more important, while 41% rated empathy higher (1% said they didn’t know).
The new season comes as part of a larger bid to bring kindness front and center — and to be intentional about it, says Rosemarie Truglio, who oversees content and curriculum for the show.
“Our world is a very complicated world, and we know that kindness is in all of us,” she says. “But for really young children, I think we have to model it.”
Key to the lessons will be putting characters in one another’s shoes. “That’s hard for kids,” Truglio says. “They don’t have the cognitive abilities to do that.”
Recent research has shown “self-regulation” and other “prosocial” behaviors, when displayed in children, are good predictors of health, financial stability and educational achievement later in life. But kids need not only adults to model the behaviors, Sesame researchers say — they need ample time to practice them.
Kindness is one of the three bedrock principles of Sesame Workshop, the New York-based educational non-profit behind the show. Its mission statement is to help children grow “smarter, stronger and kinder.” But until now, the show has never called out kindness specifically.
The new season will not only model kind behaviors — it’ll explicitly label kindness when it happens, employing a kind of instant replay and color commentary during moments when characters are kind to one another. Episodes also will feature a “kindness cam” in which kids imitate behaviors from the show.
The new season debuts as Americans’ attitudes about selfimprovement shift a bit. After a raucous presidential election season, the No. 1 New Year’s resolution in 2017 isn’t “losing weight” or “exercising more,” a new Marist poll finds. It’s “being a better person.”
Brown Johnson, the show’s creative director, points out that planning for the new season began more than 18 months ago, well before last fall’s fraught election kicked into gear. But world events have been forcing us to look at things differently, she says.
She notes that many of the news stories of refugees from such places as Syria have focused on children and their perilous path to safety. “Not to be political,” Johnson says, “but we all could stand to see life from somebody else’s point of view.”
The new season will not only model kind behaviors — it’ll explicitly label kindness when it happens.