Building Your Healthy Media Diet
Finding high-quality shows can take some effort because what we’re looking to do is essentially create our own “healthy media diet,” complete with lots of fresh, whole ingredients. We want to feed our kids high-quality programs and apps that spark their creativity and passion and enable them to learn as opposed to media that’s nothing more than processed content with empty promises. So, how do we do that? Think of it as a screen time version of a healthy green smoothie. With a green smoothie, you’ve got the greens, the protein, and the sweets. With a high-quality preschool show, you’ve got education (the greens), interaction (the protein), and engagement (the sweets).
1. Education (the greens): Just because a show says it’s educational doesn’t mean it is. As smart consumers, we need to dig deeper and ask questions to uncover a show’s curriculum, teaching approach, and more.
2. Interaction (the protein): We want a show that allows children to participate, think, have a voice; that speaks to them with respect and sparks an interest or ignites a passion.
3. Engagement (the sweets): Effective, healthy media needs to be engaging and entertaining so kids will want to watch. No matter how good something is, if no one watches, no one will learn anything. Period.
Sure, there is no equivalent of a nutritional wrapper on the shows your children are watching. (Wouldn’t it be great if there were?) But being a savvy media consumer doesn’t have to be hard if you know what to look for and understand how to measure the “nutritional” value in your kids’ media.
What follows is a detailed look at these three key ingredients for healthy media so you can create your own personal “Yes” list of media that is satisfying, nutritious, and beneficial all at the same time.
Choosing good, quality programming is the foundation of a Healthy Media Diet. Don’t worry—you don’t have to have a PhD in educational psychology to discern what’s really going on in the programs your kids are drawn to. But as smart consumers, we need to dig deeper and ask important questions. And, as the AAP said, we need to be able to distinguish between the shows that say they’re educational but are lacking and the ones that really are.
I define good, quality educational media as media with the intent to teach. A quality show will marry a strong educational curriculum with the understanding of the visual medium of television, tell a preschool-appropriate story, and immerse viewers into the world to enhance mastery and spark change.
Here’s a closer look at criteria worth exploring when determining a show’s educational value.
A top-tier creator will have a vision built around a certain “need,” a specific point of view and approach to address this need, and a sense of urgency about sharing it with the world. As parents, we’re looking for strong visionary creators who respect our kids, don’t talk down to them, understand their level of development, and want to spark their interest, whether it be math, science, imagination, or life lessons.
VISIONARY CREATORS IN PRESCHOOL MEDIA
It should be no surprise that in my book the best example of a visionary creator is Fred Rogers. As an example of his strong vision, Fred Rogers spoke to the United States Senate in 1969 to defend educational programming and to ensure funding for PBS. As the creator of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he said, “I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, ‘You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.’ And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger—much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. I’m constantly concerned about what our children are seeing [on television], and for fifteen years I have tried in this country and Canada, to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care.” And that’s when PBS got its first $20 million in funding.
Joan Ganz Cooney, a documentary producer, had a vision to change the world for children in poverty. She believed that “poor children were truly powerless, they are an absolutely mute minority.” She wanted to create a show for preschoolers that would change their lives. She wanted her show to present “cognitive skills that children could learn while watching: letters, numbers, and reasoning skills.” She submitted her idea to the federal government, the Ford Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation, all of which agreed to fund her project. And in 1969, Sesame Street went on the air and has been positively impacting the lives of children ever since.1
Good, quality educational media starts with the curriculum—a well thought out approach to how the learning will be conveyed. Without a curriculum, a show has no spine. A visionary creator needs her manifesto—her show “bible” that outlines the message and the approach to that message for writers, producers, and animators to follow to support her vision. According to renowned media researcher and authority Dr. Dan Anderson, calling something educational comes down to the merits of a curriculum as its foundation.
A show curriculum is a document created by or with a research professional that has broken down a show’s educational goals and objectives into actionable steps that can then be brought into a writers’ room and incorporated into each script. Different shows focus on different curricular areas, depending on the theme.
Of course, it’s not enough to just have a curriculum. The approach to the curriculum is just as important—to extend the food metaphor, it’s what takes a show from the television equivalent of fast food to a healthy meal composed of whole foods. All shows maintain different levels of these educational aspects in their scripts. Sesame Street began this groundbreaking approach in 1969 not only by having a strong curriculum but by also smartly incorporating it into every aspect of creating the show. Sesame’s process to have curriculum advisors in the room with producers and writers is assurance that the curriculum is an important element in the show. The advisors have a seat at the table, literally.
In addition to having their curriculum advisors or researchers in the throes of the production process, the best educational shows also have episodes written with the curriculum as its spine. “Having the curriculum on the through-line” means that everything we do in an episode revolves around the curriculum (as opposed to just telling a story with a moral at the end). Though it’s not a preschool show, a great example of a solid curriculum can be found in the Broadway smash Hamilton. The entire show is spelled out in the first lyric of the first song: “How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean by providence impoverished, in squalor, grow up to be a hero and a scholar?” The curriculum is clear from the start: US history with a focus on Alexander Hamilton’s impact on America. The curricular approach is immersing the audience in his time while revealing its relevance in our lives today.
As examples, here is a look at the different types of curriculums featured in each of my preschool shows:
Blue’s Clues (Nick Jr.)
• Curriculum: Kindergarten Readiness Skills (Dr. Alice Wilder and Angela C. Santomero)
• Vision and Approach: Introducing everything preschoolers need to know before they enter kindergarten; approached through interactive games that are scaffolded (deliberately repeated) in levels of difficulty throughout the program.
Super Why! (PBS Kids)
• Curriculum: Reading Skills (Dr. Alice Wilder and Angela C. Santomero)
• Vision and Approach: Giving preschoolers the clues and skills to learn to read and love to read while using books as a resource for life. The curriculum is founded on skills the National Reading Panel deems critical for learning to read, and the approach is through scaffolded interactive games that focus on letter identification, word decoding, word encoding, and fluency.
Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood (PBS Kids)
• Curriculum: Socio Emotional Skills (The Fred Rogers Company; based on the work of Fred Rogers)
• Vision and Approach: Giving preschoolers and parents vocabulary to label their feelings and to provide actionable clues in the form of singable songs when dealing with life lessons such as disappointment, anger, sadness, making new friends, among others.
• Curriculum: The Arts (Dr. Alice Wilder)
• Vision and Approach: Giving preschoolers an understanding of how to solve problems by thinking outside the box and tapping into the power of art and creativity, while also introducing and fostering an appreciation for different art methods and the prominent art masters who used them.
Wishenpoof (Amazon Kids)
• Curriculum: Executive Functioning Skills (Dr. Alice Wilder; based on the work of Ellen Galinsky in her book The Mind in the Making: 7 Essential Skills)
• Vision and Approach: Giving preschoolers a strong role model in lead character Bianca, who uses her gift of making wishes come true to help others and spread joy. In the process, she works to strengthen her own fledgling life skills and brings viewers along for the learning.
To learn more about the curricular foundation of your child’s favorite shows, visit the websites for the network or channel it airs on, such as PBSkids.org, grownups.pbskids.org, or check out Common Sense Media, which offers age-based reviews and commentary on all types of media. Interviews with the creators will also shed some insight.
To label something as truly educational, we want to ensure that kids master the concepts in the program—to internalize the learning, make connections to their own world, and take the learning from the show to another level. We’re not looking for them to parrot what they see on that specific episode or in that particular book. We’re looking for that spark . . . that light-switch moment.
On our very first episode of Blue’s Clues, we had preschoolers helping Steve put away groceries. Blue had knocked over the grocery bag and fruit had spilled out onto the counter. The kids at home were asked to help by looking at different foods, identifying the shapes, and labeling them. A simple shape game, we had a slice of cheese as a square, a graham cracker as a rectangle, and a bunch of grapes as a triangle. After Steve asked the question and Paused, kids at home were prompted to point to the shape he asked for. The shapes got progressively harder, as grapes are not necessarily thought of as a triangle. We scaffolded this game purposefully so we could have kids thinking more deeply about the task and start to master the concept behind it.
When screening this episode with a preschool class, one four-year-old girl jumped up after the show had ended, pointed to a light switch, and proclaimed, “That’s a rectangle!” She then started a little preschool movement, and the entire class began to march around the room pointing to different objects and labeling their shapes. That little girl was sparked. Blue’s Clues had helped her master the concept of shape recognition rather than just memory-based learning.
A good educational program will be drenched in research to ensure that the goals of the creator are met. Nothing makes me more incensed than having someone pitch a kids’ show that’s going to “change the world” and offer no proof. I’ve been working in kids’ television long enough to tell you that not all shows are researched, even when they say they are. So as parents, we need to see who is behind the shows our little ones are watching and get clear on how much research is actually involved. I know your time is limited and you likely don’t need more added to your plate, but when you consider the amount of time your child spends with their favorite shows and the characters in them, it only makes sense that you’d want to get to know them better so you can feel confident that the “relationship” is going to be a positive one for your child.
Research usually falls in one or more of the following categories:
Shows with a “foundation” in research are those where the creators themselves have a background in children and television research, have studied and immersed themselves in the research of their show, or have created their program with a curriculum in tow or a statement of purpose created by a researcher. It could also mean they are working in tandem with an educational advisor in the development of the program. For example, Joan Ganz Cooney conducted a formal study on using television as a medium to teach preschoolers before she created Sesame Street. During production, she did something that had never been done before in kids’ TV—she gathered prominent educational researchers, writers, and producers and together they created an educational curriculum and guide for what Sesame Street would become.
Formative Research
Formative research is a phased process for ensuring each aspect of a program is meeting the needs as set forth by the creator and curriculum. For example, as we were developing Blue’s Clues, I used my research chops to ensure my team and I, led by educational psychologist Dr. Alice Wilder, one of the key thinkers behind developing our groundbreaking research process, would paper-test each show, which meant bringing the script in a “storybook format” into schools to read to preschoolers. This method has become known as the first step of the formative research process in much of today’s preschool television world. While Sesame Street brought episodes to preschoolers after the show was created, we stepped it up by testing shows through this formative research process. Then throughout the development of the pilot and the series, we would similarly test the show in various forms—paper and drawings, simple video storyboards, rough animation—and take children through the story and play the games with them. Our goal was and still is to see if it was interesting, if they were engaged, and, most important, how far we could push the educational content for them developmentally. At each stage, the researchers provide us with a data-filled memo of where and how we could develop the show to make it even more effective in these areas. This was groundbreaking in the world of children’s television research as it had never been done before at this level. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell cites this as one of the reasons that Blue’s Clues is so “sticky.”2 I say that it’s our secret sauce.
Summative and Longitudinal Research
While formative research is about ensuring the success and resonance of a show—or in our case, of each episode—summative and longitudinal research is conducted to confirm a program’s effectiveness with a statistically significant sample of preschoolers. In the case of Blue’s Clues, we use this type of research to determine the true learning and impact of our show in the lives of viewers.
The second important ingredient of good, quality media for kids is the inclusion of some form of active participation or interactivity, meaning the show or app asks the home viewer to interact, participate, think, or has a call to action. We know that preschoolers want to be involved. They want to play. They want to help. They want to be asked questions. With the goal of educating kids through mastery, we want to see kids being immersed into our shows, fully engaged, and actively participating.
Some researchers have described watching television as a passive experience, labeling TV-viewing kids as “couch potatoes” who sit passively and watch whatever is on. Dr. Dan Anderson couldn’t disagree more. Through his research we know that kids are active listeners, they are absorbing everything, and they are always learning.
There are many ways a preschool show can be interactive, but here are some clues for the kinds of things to look for when considering how your child is interacting with the shows they watch:
The Preschool Home Viewer Is a Main Character
I’ve always believed in including preschoolers in my scripts as actual characters in the series. Depending on the show, the “interactive” approach varies, but what’s always the same is that the show assumes the preschooler is watching. We know, and acknowledge, they are there. This changes the way we script our shows, the way we storyboard the scenes, and the way we animate. Our characters address the viewers with the sole intention of eliciting a reaction. In the case of Blue’s Clues, this interaction is “game show-esque” in nature as preschoolers are being asked direct questions. As a result, preschoolers aren’t only watching the educational curriculum—they’re practicing kindergarten readiness skills by playing along. In Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, the interactive nature is more of an emotional bond, as Daniel talks directly to the home viewer to share his feelings, ask for help, and invite viewers to sing along with him. This emotional bond with Daniel fits right into the through-line of the social-emotional curriculum of the show and ensures kids at home feel for Daniel and want to learn the new strategy to help him, thus learning it for themselves as well.
Breaking the Fourth Wall
When choosing engaging, interactive content, look for a show that’s designed to invite your preschooler into its world with curricular intent and purpose. One of the key ways to be interactive is when a character breaks the fourth wall by leaning in, looking directly at the camera, and talking to the viewer at home. The character is acknowledging the presence of the home viewer and respectfully communicating, actively listening, and seeming to affirm what they have to say. This interactive format is the key to preschoolers mastering the curriculum. Just as a hands-on science experiment leads to a deeper understanding of the science, using media as an interactive tool leads to a deeper understanding to maximize a preschooler’s learning.
Fred Rogers was the first person to break the fourth wall and talk directly to the kids at home. He did this to impart his social and emotional curriculum and, as a result, kids felt as if Mister Rogers were a confidant and friend. In my shows, we break this fourth wall to help preschoolers learn how to think, not what to think, emotionally invest in and bond with our characters, and learn and practice life strategies.
Sparked to Play
To be high quality, a program doesn’t have to overtly ask your preschooler to play along. It could also offer ways to extend the learning and play after the show is over. For instance, some shows include calls to action like suggesting viewers go outside to find objects in nature they can use to make a craft, as on Creative Galaxy, or the main character in Tumble Leaf suggesting kids go out and play. Shows can also spark kids to engage in other ways; for example, wanting to read the Curious George books after watching the series on TV or playing out a show dressed up as their favorite character.
Engaging content is what makes a show sticky, relevant, funny, exciting, surprising, and different from anything else out there. The engagement tenet of a high-quality show will not only ensure the program remains memorable for a long time to come, but it will result in an enjoyable, connected, and positive experience. To identify shows that know how to engage your preschooler, look for programs that cause your child to lean in, get curious, and want to play. Here are some telltale signs of shows that incorporate this key ingredient:
Preschool-Relatable Storylines
It’s important to understand whether or not a program, app, or movie is appropriate and relevant for where our child is socially, emotionally, and cognitively. In fact, even when a show is specifically marketed to preschoolers, it’s still our job to understand whether or not it meets its mark and is truly age appropriate. While this is important for a number of reasons, from an educational perspective, when a program or story resonates with its target audience, the level of mastery will increase.
An example of a preschool-relatable storyline is an episode of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood we created to explore the issue of separation anxiety. In the storyline, Daniel Tiger was feeling ambivalent about leaving his dad when it was time to be dropped off at preschool. Since our curriculum, based in Fred Rogers’ work on social-emotional development, is to give preschoolers active strategies to help them with preschool-appropriate situations, we had Dad sing to Daniel “Grown-ups come back” as he gave him a hug. Daniel, on the verge of tears, sang it back to Dad, and we can see him visibly become calmer. He has this new nugget of information that helps him remember that it’s going to be okay, because grown-ups come back.
Before we finalized the episode, we did in-house formative research led by Rachel Kalban, M.A., and tested it with a classroom of preschoolers, who, coincidentally, had just been dropped off by their parents and caregivers. And I’ll never forget it—those preschoolers were mesmerized. They leaned into the TV. They looked at each other. Some even had tears in their eyes. And suddenly I was worried we were going to make a room full of three-year-olds cry (not a goal of mine!). But then I saw them smile as Daniel smiled and repeated the strategy. They interacted with Daniel Tiger for the rest of the episode, and we were later told they had sung the strategy throughout the day as they waited for their own grown-ups to come back. This response and high level of engagement showed us that we’d written a preschool age-appropriate story, and as a result, our educational message was more likely to be heard and mastered.
On the flip side, there is indisputable research showing a correlation between young children viewing certain media intended for older audiences and negative side effects. Putting our preschoolers in front of media not intended for them is akin to asking them to ride a bike before they’re ready—it may lead to harm. One study conducted by Lillard and Peterson of the University of Virginia randomly assigned 60 four-year-olds to one of three groups: one that watched nine fast-paced minutes of a popular fantastical cartoon aimed at six- to eleven-year-olds; one that watched nine minutes of a slower-paced program featuring a typical preschool-aged boy; and a third group that was asked to draw for nine minutes with markers and crayons. Kids were then tested for executive functions, which are important skills related to planning, organizing, memory, and self-regulation. The preschoolers who watched nine minutes of the fantastical cartoon aimed at six- to eleven-year-olds scored significantly worse than the other preschoolers on skills including attention, working memory, problem solving, and delay of gratification, all skills that are associated with success in school.3 Choosing appropriate shows for our preschoolers can make a huge difference in their development.
In addition to featuring preschool-related storylines, a high-quality, engaging show is also funny, interesting, and participatory. We know we can’t preach to an empty church. An audience has to want to watch a program in order to learn something, and the smart use of preschool-appropriate humor is a great way to achieve this. In fact, when a show is funny, interesting, and surprising, we know the stories and learning will stay with an audience that much longer.
As Dorothea Gillim, creator of vocabulary curriculum program WordGirl on PBS Kids, says, “Part of my mission is to make kids’ television smart and funny. I feel as though we’ve lost some ground there, in an effort to make it more accessible. WordGirl’s focus is on great stories, characters, and animation. If all those elements are working, then you can hook a child who may come looking for laughs, but leave a little smarter.”4
AFTER THE SHOW IS OVER
Figure out or notice what about the show sparked your preschooler and offer an activity to extend the learning. What the activity is will depend on the show, but each of these types of activities will take the learning to new heights:
• Re-create a craft activity from the show or come up with your own.
• Draw the characters from the show.
• “Write” a new ending to the show.
• Bring out dress-up clothes to role-play and act out the stories.
• Find related books based on aspects of the show they found particularly funny or interesting.
Here are three simple ways to practice involved viewing and design your own personal Healthy Media “Yes” List of shows and apps you feel good about feeding your kids. (Don’t worry—I’ll explain how to do that later in the book.)
• Be Involved: Research which shows are a match for your child’s nature and developmental needs, have values you believe in as a family, and are good, quality shows. Watch at least one episode to understand the premise of the program. Read the reviews online. Make a conscious decision about whether you deem the show appropriate for your kids to watch.
• Ask the Questions: “What did Daniel Tiger do today?” “How did that make you feel?” “Has that ever happened to you?” Ask questions about the characters in the show the same way you would about your kids’ friends at school. If your child wants to share, have them sing their favorite funny song or share an interesting game they just learned.
• See the Spark: In the same way that you notice your child’s love of jumping and take him to a playground with a mini-trampoline so he can jump to his heart’s content, watch to see what sparks your child about the shows he or she is watching and find creative ways to extend the learning. Stay tuned for plenty of suggestions on how to do this in the Clue chapters.