Not an entertaining show to a parent, but Wonderoos is another kids show that has had a positive impact on my 2 children. In each episode a wonderoo identifies a choice has to be made, makes the choice that leads to a worse outcome, and then rewinds to make the right choice. While making the choice they always say, "let's chalk it out", and I've heard my kids say this and then state two choices in their own activities. There is also an episode where a lonely wonderoo at the playground decides between trying to make friends with the other kids or just waiting to see what happens. First they wait, and nothing happens, and then they rewind and go introduce themselves and become friends. One day at the park my shy 4 year old asked me to help her introduce herself to another kiddo. Def she got that from the show!
I don't know about how that show is made, but my guess is that it is more like cocomelon, scientifically tested for efficacy, but with the right intentions set by child development experts.
I’m not a parent, but after watching one episode, I do wish more educational content embraced “chain of thought” and “inversion” as ways of systems thinking. My mind was blown at how succinctly they conveyed these two concepts over to toddlers.
When I was a kid my favourite show was Mr Rogers. I get the sense that Bluey is the closest we have to that level of energy in a kids show these days. I don’t have children yet but I look after my niece after school and we watch Bluey now and again. Even Bluey completely absorbs her. I can wave my hands in front of her face and she doesn’t notice. I’d like to think that that wasn’t the case with me and Mr Rogers but who knows…
This morning my daughter walked into the living room and started telling me about something that happened to her. She stopped talking mid-sentence when her eye fell on the television that I had forgotten to turn off.
Only after calling her name three times and considerably raising my voice I got her attention again.
The show that was on was... the cooking channel! So the bar for television completely absorbing a child's attention seems quite low :-)
I've seen grown adults behave this way with their phones. Totally zonked out and unaware of anything happening in the real world. Don't think it's an age thing.
I have a weird quirk that when talking to someone, if they start using their phone, I stop talking until they're done. It has made me painfully aware how true your comment is. Many times people don't even notice that I stopped talking (and why event try to talk to someone that isn't listening?)
I don't know how society managed to normalize playing with your phone during a face to face conversation. Like, imagine going back to 1990 and getting into a conversation with your friend over coffee, and in the middle of him talking, you whip out a newspaper and start reading it. He would instantly say "WTF are you doing, man?" But today, the same thing happens with the phone, and it's just kind of...accepted?
when I was growing up my father tried to get the attention of my sister watching saturday morning cartoons. After the third attempt, he just threw away the TV, and so I grew up most of my childhood with no TV
Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood [0] is directly based on the character by the same name from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.'
Daniel Tiger is one of the very, very few TV shows we let our daughter watch, and it teaches emotional regulation so incredibly well and has plenty of tunes that I've caught her singing to herself, such as "it's okay to feel sad sometimes, little by little, you'll feel better again"
I'm in Australia and never grew up watching Mr Rogers, but after seeing the "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" movie I recognised the tunes and then spent an inordinate amount of time looking into the origins.
I had a similar revelation after watching a few episodes with my daughter! Wait a minute, that intro song sounds familiar... and the names of the characters sound kind of familiar...
I have heard many stories of being a Sesame Street zombie once upon a time, so I doubt you were much more resistant to Mr Rogers gentle charms =).
There's a definitely a big gulf between the Mr Rogers / Daniel Tiger / Bluey energy and almost every other show. It's crazy now noticeable it is. Even modern Sesame Street is much more frenetic and lively than old episodes from the 80s and 90s. Which is not to say it's empty junk food like Cocomelon, it's just that those shows have raised the required addictiveness bar overall.
No screens is the best way, because any screen is just too absorbing for a kid. The tough thing is you have to do it for yourself, too, or they will very quickly figure out the hypocrisy.
FYI, the Mr Rogers website [0] cycles shows from the back catalog (5 shows at a time, on a bi-weekly cycle). It's a regular in my kid's rotation (with Bluey and Sesame Street).
Glad you drew this comparison. I have a 4yo who (TLDR) we didn't really push TV on and started reading on his own when he was two.
Before he was born I put a lot of thought into what he would watch before he was born assuming it would be a huge necessity to address. I torrented Mr Rodgers and Reading Rainbow and Eureka (amazing old science cartoon if anyone's encountered it) and I even started writing a script that would randomly select from these and automatically turn off after 1-3 episodes.
Basically I am shocked at how wrong I was. He had no natural interest in TV beyond a few minutes, even if we were watching something. We didn't have a reason to push it, when he did see newer kids media like Bluey / Cocomelon etc he would zombie out exactly as you described and then have noticeably crappier behavior for a while after we would have to have a minor battle to turn it off. Felt like microwaving his brain and we had no reason to push it on him so we didn't. After a few days he would never miss it. We let him watch stuff at friend's houses and still pop on old stuff that I downloaded once every week or two. Same basic behavior / problems. We always back off for the same reasons.
I grew up on TV and I don't judge parents who legitimately love watching TV with their kids or need it as a babysitter because of demanding schedules or absent child care assistance. It is an incredible tool in a culture that often separates extended families and discourages grandparents from playing active daily supportive roles.
But yeah for whatever reason our kid started reading independently when he was two, got really interested in languages, got his basic operators down while he was 2-3 and has never had any serious behavioral or developmental problems and other parents are always asking us what we did to accelerate his development and make him such a genius.
We didn't do anything unnatural, we just didn't intentionally push him to watch a lot of TV. He still watches stuff, we still watch stuff. It's just on a laptop and ends when he starts turning into a zombie.
With that said Bluey seems fine to me, my kids the one with the weird zombie reaction. And disclaimers all kids are different, I'm incredibly lucky to work from home on a schedule where I get to hang out with him all the time and I'm pretty sure regardless of zombie Cocomelon watching his generations problems are not going to be rooted in them zonking out on TV but who knows.
I never liked tv as a kid either. But youtube actually would destroy my life. Be careful with YouTube once they start seeking things. I also didn't really like to read but i just built things from the lego bin or my magnets. My family would watch a movie and I'd just go upstairs and dump out some bin of some things and start messing around. I did watch things from social pressure eventually and like i said, youtube will kill me someday, but it also has taught me so much. Anyways, fellow no-tv kid here
My just turned 4yo - similar I guess. Zero screen time until he was 2. Knew his abcs by 1.5, but reading on his own around 3 and a bit. Now He gets 1 episode of something in the morning. 1 ep in the evening and that's it. Maybe a movie on the weekends. He can entertain himself well. Love books. Today I took him to the doctor, we had to wait and he just chilled and looked at a book. I've never given him my phone to watch something.
I don't know if it's him or genetics or the strictenss around screentime, but he is a pretty easy kid to deal with these days.
TV isn't all bad. Octonauts is cool. He knows so many sea creatures from that show. Creature Cases is another good one.
I've seen that zombie behavior too when my kids watch too long. I think there's definitely value in some shows, and some of them are actually very educational. I think there's a lot more variety these days than when I was a kid.
As a rule we don't allow Blippy because the man creeps me out, and something about his childish behavior rubs me the wrong way. OTOH the other day my 5yo kid asked me if I knew why the sky was blue. I genuinely wasn't sure and he somewhat explained what he learned on TV from a show about sunlight and particles in the air.
100% agree on Blippy, the vibe is very off for me. Especially once I learned about his history as a shock youtuber[0], I'm glad that he says he's grown past that and regrets making the content he made but his content is tainted (pun intended) forever for me and I'm not interested in exposing my kid(s) to that.
I grew up in front of a TV, I don't want that for my kid. Sometimes we can't avoid it and we're not avoiding it altogether with our kid, but I can definitely notice the negative effects.
If it's not too personal, I'm curious to know how a child that young acquires an interest in languages. Do they have a friend from a different background or something like that?
Bluey is easily the best children's TV. I mean I'd barely class it as children's TV; it's good by adult standards.
It's a bit annoying really because there isn't anything else like it at all. I would say the closest things are Pixar films which manage to appeal to adults and children. I'm not aware of any TV like that though. Apart from Bluey we're stuck with trash like Paw Patrol, Bing, Blippi, etc.
There are a small number that are not extremely annoying, but you still wouldn't actually want to watch them: Gabby's Dollhouse, Puffin Island, maybe Hey Duggee.
I'm not sure there's ever been more options for good shows that a parent can watch and genuinely enjoy with their kids. Try Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Hilda, Sarah & Duck, Adventure Time, Miraculous, The Dragon Prince, MLP Friendship is Magic, She-Ra and the Princess of Power, Samurai Jack, Gravity Falls, Ducktales (the new one, but the old one isn't bad either), Cleopatra in Space, Amphibia, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Owl House, Craig of the Creek, Steven Universe, LEGO Elves, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Over the Garden Wall, Infinity Train, and the Disney Fairies movies.
I'd also recommend getting your hands on the cartoons you enjoyed as a kid. Odds are good your kids will like them for the same reasons you did, although you may find that they don't all hold up for you.
> I'd also recommend getting your hands on the cartoons you enjoyed as a kid.
I grew up with WB Loony Tunes (and Tex Avery and Superchicken and Wacky Racers and...), and that style of animation looks positively ancient in comparison to the modern animation style - whatever you call it - rendered as sort-of-3D. For example, Paw Patrol.
This actually worries me because I want my kid (currently 5yo) to have the benefit of the utter anarchy of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Roadrunner.
Put on some Loony Toons! Don't worry that it's old. Kids that young don't have enough sense of the timeline to know just how ancient any animation style is, but Loony Toons will stand out for sure. 3D garbage-tier animation is everywhere in kids shows because it's fast and cheap. 3D animation is often much less expressive and dynamic though. The more variety in animation you expose a kid too, the sooner they'll be able to notice bad animation when they see it.
In my limited sample size, the new Roadrunner 3D cartoons get significantly fewer laughs than the hand drawn ones. The style is irrelevant to the humour, however there does seem to be a correlation between quantity of TNT and enjoyment - new ones have none.
Some are for sure, but a lot of those shows hold up well for all ages. I don't put much faith in marketers to decide which shows are for what demographics. Better to see what lands for yourself. It helps when you're watching and discussing the shows with your kids too.
Some of them, Adventure time being a great example, can appeal to very young kids but they'll find new meaning in those episodes as they get older.
I think shows like Infinity Train, Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Steven Universe, and Samurai Jack will be better after a kid is old enough that Cocomelon wouldn't hold any appeal, but even at that age Sarah & Duck, Hilda, MLP, Craig of the Creek, etc could still be good. Just about anything that holds their attention and isn't Cocomelon is a huge win. If you'll enjoy it, all the better.
Phineas and Ferb was actually NOT written with kids directly in mind, and as a comfortable pop culture medium between the tame-over-time Simpsons and raunchier Family Guy and South Park. A mostly wholesome, wacky and chaotic series where the good guys always win and usually spectacularly. Phineas and Ferb never really learn anything but the other characters do.
I would say Gravity Falls much more so than Phineas and Ferb. The latter doesn't have much of a series-long story arc, whereas the former very much does have one.
Craig of the Creek was also pretty good, though I don't think it has a wider arc (I am not entirely certain though.)
PBS Kids has excellent shows for little kids and is free. There is a website, Apple TV app, etc. I’m surprised by how little it seems to be known compared to commercial options like Netflix or Nick Jr.
Old episodes of Blues Clues are also great for little kids.
Bluey is next-level. S-tier television. It’s wholesome, calm, and entertaining. Episodes like Camping, Baby Race, Cricket, and Onesies are all emotional sucker-punches to the adults watching. (My pet theory, which my wife first suggested: Camping is essentially the Star Trek TNG episode Darmok.)
So many little things for parents. Your list is good. I was also struck by "early baby", for example, for subtext children will only get when they re-watch in 20 years.
I moved across country and left all my friends behind at the age of 9, The Sign was a hard watch. I was those kids. I can still remember my reaction to being told we were moving (I would have been about 8).
Bluey is a certified work of perfection. My kids have stopped watching it now. I'm tempted to watch them all from the start by myself.
Bluey is much more wholesome than Miraculous. Not a judgement thing, my eldest watches Miraculous too and I don't really have a problem with it. It's just not on the same level as Bluey. A huge plus for parents is also that Bluey is WAY more engaging for adults. Far and away my favourite program to watch with my kids. Some episodes really pull at the heart strings.
Personally, I'm convinced Bluey is covertly a wholesome show for parents, dressed up as a kids' show, but ultimately still for the sake of children by way of 1) encouraging watching together, 2) improving parents' mental health and well-being, which has positive outcomes for their kids, 3) getting parents to be more engaged and imaginative.
It's truly, actually a family show, not just a show for kids that parents can tolerate enough to sit through.
Pretty much any episode that has the girls learning a lesson is also teaching a lesson to any of the parents watching. Or "adults," I should say -- I don't even have kids and I feel like a better person for having watched!
I feel no shame admitting that Sleepytime makes me cry without fail every time I see it.
I feel like most cartoon parents are either completely hapless morons (Papa Pig in Peppa Pig) or 100% perfect all the time robots (I love you Mr. and Mrs. Tiger but you're paragons, hard to relate to as parents). Bandit and Chili are incredible parents who also make mistakes and have real emotions and reactions to things. They absolutely make me want to be a better parent in a way that is actually achievable.
Miraculous changes a lot in the later seasons. I'm saying this because while our kids were very much into the first 2 seasons, it was me and my wife who got hooked for the other 3 seasons.
The first 2 seasons are also full of fillers if you want, I don't shy away from skipping them when I'm alone, but we did watch it all with our kids.
We had a good time with it. Not sure if you watched it all, I'm looking forward the next season to see how the plot unravels.
But I'll definitely check Bluey :)
That being said, I wish there was a genre tagged as "engaging for adults, fun for kids": there are a bunch of movies and shows along these lines, but they aren't tagged in any other way.
Another genre that exists but I can't find is "boring for kids but child-friendly", basically any tv show that says stuff they can't properly follow, doesn't have action scenes, but has a convoluted plot for adults. On the top of my mind I can think of Shrinking (my kids still don't understand cursing in english, only italian, so this is great), but I remember there was an even better one that I can't think of right now.
Usually creative work and the arts are judged by their ability to move something inside of us to which you can say that crying is a proxy for that. It's effectively saying it's good art.
All emotional reactions are "manipulated" - we choose to expose ourselves to situations wherein we might feel emotional reactions of various sorts. Why is art, "negative" reactions or not, any different?
As another commenter points out, it's a good way of learning - about yourself, how you feel, about other perspectives. It's also, hopefully, a chance to grow - reflect on your past, your mistakes, how you've treated others.
I lost my mom some years ago. It definitely just hit me, and I was kind of in an odd place in life at the time. I don't think I really processed it all well at the time.
Years later, when I watch a good movie that results in someone losing a parent figure, I'll often have quite a deep emotional reaction to it. But in the end I like these experiences. They help me look into those situations again and help me analyze the connection to losing my mom. Being in that state of emotion again helps me process it now that I'm in a very different stage in life.
I didn't believe "ugly crying" is about negativity. Rather, the "ugly" bit is about the abandonment with which one cries. One is so invested in the emotions (whatever those may be--it's not even a continuum of good/bad but rather a huge, high dimension vector space) that one abandons propriety and self-respect and just cries. It's about investment due to the exceedingly high emotional resonance with the subject matter.
This is my understanding. Caveat: I am not a person who cries much, if at all.
I understand your question, and it is hard to describe. Our brains are pattern generators, and it "feels good" to resonate with patterns we've already experienced. Neural circuits create patterns by strengthening connections upon our experience. This is particularly true as we get older and our brains become less plastic. Lesser used patterns become harder to access as they are no longer reinforced as frequently. However, this feels less good for our brains, and we value novelty.
So in the same way that riding a bike after a long time is much harder than it is to ride one when you use it every day, you can generalize this to something like emotions. It is bad to only experience one type of feeling all the time, and variety is good. Having a controlled, relatable medium lead you to experience a less commonly-felt emotion feels good. I don't know if I can explain why--maybe we have mechanisms in our brain for encouraging this novelty--but this is likely why we seek out these emotional experiences.
Because art can be seen as manipulation, or it can be seen as tapping on the deeply fundamental hooks that make us human. Feeling affects from an artistic representation tells us something about the human experience that goes beyond our intellect. Its closer to something spiritual rather than something analytic.
Plus, it's not JUST about the crying. I'm order to get to the point where the tears are actually falling, you have to go through all the build up that makes you care very deeply about the characters and situation. When that works well enough to get you to cry over a cartoon? It's fucking MAGICAL. =)
I understand it's very ingrained in our culture at this point that this is a thing people do. But, if I decontextualize enough mentally, it starts to feel quite strange: manipulating one's brain into having a negative emotional reaction.
You’re not being well understood here, but I do this too, and have done — with everything — all my life.
The answer is ultimately that if you deconstruct and logically analyse any particular human activity it either ruins the fun and/or makes you realise how primitive and dark most forms of entertainment are. People like being emotional, for whatever reason.
I like the explanation that says it’s about learning, though. Learning somehow feels intrinsically good.
It's not negative to be moved to tears. And it's not manipulative to watch a tv show. I don't think you're decontextualizing as much as you're trying to adopt some alien contrarian viewpoint.
It might help to compare it with going to the gym or for a run. In some sense this produces an immediate negative reaction: our muscles get sore and stiff, and we get out of breath. But we still do it perhaps because we feel better afterwards, or because it helps our long term physical health.
Likewise, deliberately experiencing sad (or otherwise) emotional states has both short term and long term positive outcomes. In the short term we feel a sense of catharsis, and perhaps reassured that our feelings are relatable. In the long term we feel more in touch and less overwhelmed by our emotions.
It just means that you cry so hard your face is all twisted up and you go red and and your mouth is hanging open and there's snot dripping out of your nose, as opposed to simply shedding a couple tears. It's not really disparaging.
I’d say Miraculous is very French, in a good way. In that it doesn’t try to shield children from difficult adult subjects like death and grief and difficult parental relationships. We only do an hour or two of screen time a week right now (including for me and my wife), but Miraculous was a request for last week’s “movie night”.
Then we watch Severance when the kids go to bed and that’s it. Just like there’s junk shows for kids we’ve got junk shows for adults, and it’s hard to deny it to children when we don’t deny it for ourselves. The kids complain way less too when we’re like “well we’re all giving this stuff up”, because they have an innate sense of fairness.
Great article. Insane that this kind of anti-social kid-numbing garbage production line is not only allowed to exist in our society but also very well rewarded. This is another symptom of our deeply sick world, in which financial success is completely decorrelated from having any kind of positive impact on the world.
Other than cuts every 2-3 seconds to keep engaged in Cocomelon, also notice that CAMERA NEVER STOPS, ever. Every scene you see it's moving. It could be a slight movement or exaggerated one, but it's never stationary.
Cocomelon just phones it in. Almost all of their songs have some similar catchy intro leading into the song. Sometimes the intro is the same across different songs. Recently, my kid got into the song "Bicycle Built for Two (Daisy Bell)". I grew up listening to Disney Children's Favorites sung by Larry Groce, who sings it expressively and dynamically. Cocomelon's interpretation is just flat and conservative, as if it's a chore to get through.
So far we've managed to keep our 2 and a bit year old's tv diet to Bluey, Hey Duggee (a bit crack-y but he loves it and it is still crafted and quite tounge-cheek-funny), Trash Truck (a very calm, sedate one on Netflix, useful if you're travelling and can't get CBeebies) and Down on the Farm (a Cbeebies show where kids do stuff on a farm). Occasionally Kiri and Lou too. And some sports sometimes (football, rugby, cycling, F1). I love the sports as it's distracting but he also doesn't care that much and loses interest. Can be enough to get a break but he won't binge like Duggee or Bluey.
Yes, lucky we're in the UK so have CBeebies available, but there's no reason to not screen and curate your kids media diet. I don't understand people who just let their toddlers consume crap on YT.
Hey Duggee is lovely. The imagery is on the vivid and trippy side, but the voice acting is top-notch with creative stories. Most importantly, it lacks the deliberate tweaking for engagement Cocomelon does.
At six my son currently has one Bluey episode (in English, simply to emerse him in another language he will pick up in any case later on) and one Shaun the Sheep after school (that's a combined twenty minutes or so). Shaun hits the exact spot in terms of humour for six year olds, and is brilliant with none of the characters actually speaking.
Cocomelon rightfully gets criticism, but this is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Bluey is a scripted animated show intended for older toddlers with parents as a secondary audience. Cocomelon is animated songs for younger toddlers with simple, conflict-free situations that do not provide examples of bad behavior. For a relevant comparison to Cocomelon, see the Ms. Rachel or Spanish-language Luli Pampin videos that provide similar content but without the negative aspects of targeting engagement metrics.
Blueys great, my kid loses his shit when the shows on. Its also interesting seeing a female character marketed to kids as a segment rather than just young girls which isnt that common.
My son is still under 2, so he prefers other low intensity shows like Mini Kids and Night Garden. The way he gets into Mini Kids is insane, I havent seen cocomelon but I am betting he would get drawn too far into that. Mini Kids sounds like the antidote to cocomelon, no fast cuts, slow music, and mostly just toddlers interacting with toys and each other on television.
Childrens shows absolutely. But if I go to the kids clothing aisle at the shops, they aren't selling my son Peppa Pig shirts or Veda the Vet shoes. Its sonic/mario/dinosaurs/cars and bluey at the moment.
The Rain episode is pretty cool too. It has almost no words apart from the goodbye at start. The good thing about bluey is that it teaches kids to do mischievous things and gives you ideas to do fun activities with kids.
this is the one where my wife came in while I was watching Bluey in the morning with the kids and she's like hey did something happen you're crying a lot
My wife and I have a daughter in the demographic of these shows, though she's a little young for Bluey. There's a YouTube (and now Netflix) show called Ms. Rachel for a younger audience that I'd put in the same positive category as Bluey.
We probably watch one or two hours of Ms. Rachel videos a day with our daughter. We've got several family friends with a household rule of "no screens at all for kids" who would scoff at that but their rule seems both draconian and technophobic to me. Our daughter has picked up many words and concepts from the show and we've learned a lot of the songs as a family and sing them when the context comes up (ex: "baby put your pants on..."). Ms. Rachel has been a hugely positive parenting tool for us.
Every once in a while, though, YouTube will try to autoplay some Cocomelon after a Ms. Rachel video and wow it's just absolute garbage. I think this article captures it well: it feels like slop engineered to keep young eyeballs glued to the screen with no higher purpose than increasing the number of engaged minutes.
Instead of "no screens," the more granular "you can choose from this menu of approved content on your screen for a reasonable amount of time per day" is the better parenting move for our family.
Our son has profound hearing loss and he wears Cochlear implants, and I remember very fondly the time we were hooked on Ms Rachel.
She is great and lots of her videos are a blessing for parents with children with hearing impairment as she uses lots of techniques that our Speech and Language therapist used to teach us.
And signing! I've noticed she signs along with most of what she says. I think it's an inclusivity thing, but it also meant that our daughter could communicate simple ideas long before she could talk.
I don’t have kids yet, but 100% agree with your last paragraph. Controlled, carefully selected content is much much better than no screens approach. When picked carefully, those shows are actually educational, helping with growth.
As a father of two daughters, I'm convinced the writers of Bluey have cameras in my house /s. There are so many times we have had a similar experience to one of the episodes. As my kids are now older than Bluey and Bingo, they still get excited when a new episode is released. We love Bluey in our house.
The first episode I ever saw was "Takeaway" (dad and kids are waiting 5 minutes outside the Chinese takeaway restaurant). It so perfectly hit on not only the actual experiences from my life but how it _felt_ in the moment that I think I laughed until I cried. Then immediately made my wife watch it.
The episode referenced in the article ("Whale Watching" about the parents being hungover) is another that, while not my favourite or anything, is certainly one of those experiences you probably have as a parent that nobody's really talking about or making media about. Bluey's managing to be entertaining and wholesome for kids while hitting on a mostly untapped niche of "relatable parenting experiences".
With how much "junk food" TV is out there, Bluey's a real gem. For kids and parents alike.
The show’s popularity has led to some people buying Blue Heelers as a pet for their kids… which will probably backfire because they aren’t meant to be house dogs
(Blue Heelers need an insane amount of exercise and can be pretty aggressive)
Heelers will demand four hours of an aerodynamic throwing stick tossed the length of a football field and back and then want a 5km run to the beach to cool down.
Failure to deliver can result in the destruction of everything you love.
My 3 legged heeler can still run laps around me. But if you can keep them busy, they are very loyal and can understand a crazy amount of words/signs. My previous heeler went deaf and still obeyed perfectly by watching signs and body language. Incredible dogs.
Yeah, owned one for 12 years and she was potentially nippy to anyone she didn't know from puppyhood. Was ball-obsessed, broke a lot of stuff and hated anyone wearing hi-vis.
Her destructiveness though was nothing on a German Shepherd.
I gave that a test viewing when my child was at that show's age bracket, but I instantly hated it. Over the top slapstick humour, where destroying someone else's things is seen as OK. Not Cocomelon bad, but nothing much to redeem it either.
While I find Bluey fun and so does my child, in many of the episodes the children are loud and frantic. I've also noticed my kid whining in the same way Bluey and Bingo do.
In trying to find calmer shows, two I like are Tumble Leaf and Guess How Much I Love You. Tumble Leaf has a stop-motion look and every episodes involves finding and object and using it to solve a problem. Guess How Much I Love You has a watercolor look and is about a rabbit family and pretty calm. I don't enjoy those as much as Bluey, but I enjoy how my kid behaves after watching them.
I'd like to find more like those two if anybody knows any.
I have a 10 month old daughter and she mostly loves Bluey for the theme song. However when she watched Sleepytime (an episode of Bluey) with me for the first time she was absolutely glued to the screen. Bluey is the only show I let her watch along with Ms. Rachel every once in awhile.
Bandit (the Dad in the show) has inspired me to be a better Dad and a better husband. I’ve heard people complain that his character sets unrealistic expectations, but if you shift your mindset a little I believe it is totally possible.
One of, if not the greatest kids and parents shows I’ve seen.
They even make a joke about this in the Ghostbasket episode. Bandit is pretending to be a realtor and Chilli remarks that the house is a bit small, to which he replies "it's bigger on the inside"
I've been in the bluey house. It is approximately 8600ft (800m sq). The work-life balance that the family has doesn't seem particularly odd when it comes to Australian households.
I think you need to look at it as parents spending 8-10 minute periods of time with their kids. In fact there is an episode where the Dad has to go to work and he spends a short amount of time playing with them before he has to go.
I've noticed nearly every Bluey episode has parallel stories. I think this is part of what makes it so entertaining for adults- kids are excited by the obvious message, while parents who need more to keep them stimulated enjoy watching the threads interweave. The writing is simply the best.
As a morning parent of a toddler, part of the morning routine is playing a toddler exercise video. It's funny, my initial thinking was to burn some of the toddler's energy before sitting down to breakfast, but at this point it's definitely more for me. Sometimes the toddler even complains but I've come to really enjoy doing some stretches in the morning.
I think it's made for both, which creates a fantastic opportunity to join your kids on the couch and genuinely enjoy what they are enjoying. Kids love Bluey, but they love watching their parents love Bluey.
My favorite thing about the Cocomelon phenomenon is how outraged we get as adults, while simultaneously failing to realise how TV has been doing the same to us for the longest time. When I moved out of my parents' house I got an apartment with no TV, and I hate watching shows on the smartphone or on desktop, so I ended up dropping the habit.
Now every time I go back to my folks' place I'm shocked by how zombied they get in front of the TV, and how normalized it is between adults in 2025 to waste away whole days bingeing shows on Netflix. If you know what to look for you can see these "long format TV" shows use similar patterns to zombifying kid's media
I'll add to the chorus of praise for Bluey here. I've never seen a show before so close to my actual life. There's one episode where Bandit pretends to be a crane game, and it blew me away because I had done exactly the same thing with my own daughter just a few weeks before! It captures being a kid and being a parent in a way that is so real. Most kids content doesn't have the courage to be realistic in that way, they just want to sell toys or ad impressions. My daughter is five now and on the verge of outgrowing it, and I wish we had started watching this show together sooner.
The worst part for me is I used to live next to a house that was much like the one on the show, and it eventually sold for ~2.1 million dollars or so.
So while I idolise the show, I also sit around trying to identify the families net worth, which is likely quite a lot.
Its sad that we get this amazing tv show but the lifestyle in the show (having a huge brisbane adjacent queenslander with a lovely tree in the backyard and hours and hours of free time to spend with your kids) is out of reach for so many.
> (OJ obviously did it and the other memory I had of that period was this wild Tim Meadows SNL opening bit about the trial).
This is from further down the page, but it reminded me: when the not guilty news broke, Norm MacDonald, who hosted SNL's fake news bit at the time, and had been constantly making OJ jokes about how obviously guilty he was, opened with the line, "Murder is legal in the state of California."[0] Perfect.
The refusal of white Americans - especially then, but even now - to understand how the OJ trial was a reflection of the un-reckoned-with circumstances that had most recently rocked the land with the Rodney King incident, trial, riots, etc has always bothered me. Of course murder was "legal" in the state of California - what were the people beating King to within an inch of his life expecting to happen to that dude after they were done with him? He survived, of course, but in spite of their intent. The line's only a successful bit if you didn't consider it murder when cops gun someone down.
I think the greatest social failure of that day isn't that he walked, it's that half the country didn't have the self-awareness to take stock - to understand both the legal and social system that we'd set up that lead to that outcome, to see how we'd been manipulated by the media - and to maybe have the grace to let it go. (The last time someone brought it up to me, in person, was a scant 3 years ago, in a context so ridiculous that I don't know that I should relate it.)
"I won’t pretend like I haven’t stuck an iPad in front of my son and let him watch Cocomelon or Blippi so I could get some work done. Guilty as charged.„
I like Bluey but couldn't get my young one to sit through it for a nebulizer. Cocomelon did the trick and I'm very thankful for them for that. Honestly, I don't think it's as garbage as everyone makes it out to be. It's hard trying to find video-form nursery rhymes that aren't weird out there. They have that done well. I really like Bluey but I feel like it's for a much older crowd.
Lots of folks praising Bluey and poo-pooing Cocomelon, and I am in the same boat.
One similar show to Bluey I didn’t see mentioned is Puffin Rock. Very chill and wholesome. Probably appropriate for a bit before Bluey in terms of what a child will understand.
The way I see it Cocomelon is for babies and young toddlers, Bluey is for older toddlers and up. Surely there aren’t many kids over the age of 2 watching Cocomelon?
I’ve never let my kids watch cocomelon (or much screen time at all).
But we do listen to cocomelon. It has some legitimately well done music IMO. For example “over the river and through the woods”.
Bluey and Peppa Pig are so effective my children have started speaking with foreign accents D:
It’s deeply disappointing the US can’t come up with anything comparable. Sesame Street is a shadow of what it once was — the kids won’t sit down for it at all. Daniel Tiger tests slightly better, but christ is the tone patronizing.
> Bluey is created by an auteur with a unique and hilarious point of view on the world. Conversely, Cocomelon — which started on YouTube — is algorithmic slop that has been called “crack for kids” and is probably as educational as taping strobe lights to your child’s eyeballs.
This line knocks it out of the park. I'm so glad that my kids never like Cocomelon, and still to this day, at age 7 and 10, like to watch Bluey. The worst part of them watching Bluey is that Dad sets unrealistic expectations for the rest of us! (a common topic on /r/daddit)
It's mostly in the comments. People saying that their kids expect them to be ready to play at any time because Bluey's dad is ready to play at any time. And then not being able to live up to those expectations.
I found Ezra Klein's chat with Jia Tolentino about Cocomelon and Bluey ... and parenting, zen, hallucinogens, attention and more ... one of the most deeply interesting things I have heard in the last year.
As our daughter has grown older we've had to pair down entire streaming catalogues to avoid Cocomelon like slop. Amazon Prime and Netflix being the primary offenders. While both have some good stuff or the PBS back catalog (Arthur, Pete the Cat, Gabby's Dollhouse, Busytown) they are chocked full of completely awful garbage. Shows that are obviously chasing after that Cocomelon money. If your kid ever wants to watch "Cry Babies Magic Tears", just throw your TV out the window instead.
we're in for a rough ride when current overstimulated generation grows up. kids from 12 months watching youtube because parents need them to sit still? damn thats scary. even two year olds in my opinion is too young.
"Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers" talks about this that screen time is replacing connection (bond) between kids and parents. and bond is of most importance for raising children. which if you missed the train cant be created later (only mended)
our family was going that path (media consumption), but made a change (couple weeks of tantrums) and now it reflects quite positively. So i guess the main issue is to not overuse. even if the show is "really good"
The old generation always says similar things about the new generation. At one point it was TV. Before that it was radios. There are many quotes from far older times, too. It’s always "different now."
I've noticed that the best shows usually have two layers, allowing two otherwise incompatible audiences to share the same experience. This is also why old South Park episodes were so fun: it was fart and poop jokes, but it was also some societal commentary.
why bluey or cocomelon? mister rogers is chronically untalked about for kids content in 2025.
its an incredible show and deeply enriching for both me and my little one. we’ve given our two year old very limited screen time with mister rogers and, since, they’ve taken up great fondness to making believe, we talk about characters and situations on the show regularly, and they naturally separate themselves from the screen after a while.
I’ve been very strict about exposure and screen time but mister rogers has been a blessing and provided me great relief for an hour a day.
The jazz aspect of the show
completely flew over my head when i was a child but it’s brilliance shines now that i listen as an adult. No two shows are played the same. Costa and his band are constantly riffing. The show is honestly a f-ing incredible work of art.
I think the author chose these two shows as a comparison because they were created in roughly the same time period, so they're more directly comparable. Mister Rogers was created in a different era, with different media environment, funding and monetization strategy, and functionally in a different medium.
Daniel Tiger (Mr Rogers spinoff/remake/???) is really quite good as well. They did well at preserving the idea of the original in a very different format.
Bluey is excellence, but I’ve always said Bluey is a kids show for parents.
It’s representation of how the parents behave around, and communicate with, their kids, and the numerous examples of ideas for how to play with your children make the show invaluable to parents.
The fact that kids love it too only reinforces its clever brilliance.
It’s designed by a parent, specifically a dad, and it shows in so many subtle ways.
The way each episode tells you the name of the episode, for example. My kids can name the episode they want by name, which I can search. For other shows, you get a toddler’s description that can itself be a puzzle to interpret.
They’re also short enough that they don’t have to add filler.
While I agree to an extent, I also just think it's also documenting life as we all know it as both parents and children. Albeit in it's own clever storytelling and excellent animation way. The fact this is somewhat novel should probably be odd, but just points to the fact that adults have been "creating children shows" instead of just showing them what childhood looks like, stuff they can relate with, stuff parents can related with, it's all relatable because it's so - real. It's basically animated reality TV in a way and we all know how novel that seemed when it started.
When I learned that some of my favorite TV shows of my childhood were only made to sell toys, it was kind of shattering, but then I see it in everything now. Paw Patrol find a dinosaur land - aka - you need to buy your kid 8 new vehicles and the new dino characters, up next, Paw Patrol goes to space! Adults making TV shows always have a weird ulterior motive and the programming tends to reflect it.
It took me awhile to realize but the intro song is also a game you can play with your kids. They're basically doing musical chairs. Then like you mentioned virtually every episode is a non-screen-time game you can play with your kids. Very clever.
I don’t understand the negative talk about Cocomelon. Kids learn a lot through songs. Cocomelon is full of songs. My son enjoys singing many of them. I’m happy with this.
There is no need for explicit, spelled out lessons. Also conflicts can arise externally, and flawless people can solve them. That still can be an example, can't it.
Also Bluey indeed bullies their father. He acts like he hates it every time, but based on how Chilli escapes most of the time, they must really hate it. I don't remember Bluey called out for that, only rewarded.
Once you realize that 70% of the shows are basically “Dad distracts the kids after work so Mom can get dinner ready” or similar, it makes sense. Bandit lays down the law when he needs to, but most of the time he’s just playing.
You’ll notice that he’s much more concerned with how Bluey plays with Bingo than he is with how she plays with him. He’s big, he can take it.
Faceytime is a good example of “kid is naughty and gets in actual trouble”.
Not an entertaining show to a parent, but Wonderoos is another kids show that has had a positive impact on my 2 children. In each episode a wonderoo identifies a choice has to be made, makes the choice that leads to a worse outcome, and then rewinds to make the right choice. While making the choice they always say, "let's chalk it out", and I've heard my kids say this and then state two choices in their own activities. There is also an episode where a lonely wonderoo at the playground decides between trying to make friends with the other kids or just waiting to see what happens. First they wait, and nothing happens, and then they rewind and go introduce themselves and become friends. One day at the park my shy 4 year old asked me to help her introduce herself to another kiddo. Def she got that from the show!
I don't know about how that show is made, but my guess is that it is more like cocomelon, scientifically tested for efficacy, but with the right intentions set by child development experts.
I’m not a parent, but after watching one episode, I do wish more educational content embraced “chain of thought” and “inversion” as ways of systems thinking. My mind was blown at how succinctly they conveyed these two concepts over to toddlers.
This is why I love coming back to HN.
When I was a kid my favourite show was Mr Rogers. I get the sense that Bluey is the closest we have to that level of energy in a kids show these days. I don’t have children yet but I look after my niece after school and we watch Bluey now and again. Even Bluey completely absorbs her. I can wave my hands in front of her face and she doesn’t notice. I’d like to think that that wasn’t the case with me and Mr Rogers but who knows…
This morning my daughter walked into the living room and started telling me about something that happened to her. She stopped talking mid-sentence when her eye fell on the television that I had forgotten to turn off.
Only after calling her name three times and considerably raising my voice I got her attention again.
The show that was on was... the cooking channel! So the bar for television completely absorbing a child's attention seems quite low :-)
I've seen grown adults behave this way with their phones. Totally zonked out and unaware of anything happening in the real world. Don't think it's an age thing.
I have a weird quirk that when talking to someone, if they start using their phone, I stop talking until they're done. It has made me painfully aware how true your comment is. Many times people don't even notice that I stopped talking (and why event try to talk to someone that isn't listening?)
I don't know how society managed to normalize playing with your phone during a face to face conversation. Like, imagine going back to 1990 and getting into a conversation with your friend over coffee, and in the middle of him talking, you whip out a newspaper and start reading it. He would instantly say "WTF are you doing, man?" But today, the same thing happens with the phone, and it's just kind of...accepted?
> Many times people don't even notice that I stopped talking
At that point, might as well consider the next step of getting up and leaving.
I don't think that is weird at all. Uncommon, maybe.
The fun really starts when they get defensive about it and start accusing you of being passive aggressive :)
when I was growing up my father tried to get the attention of my sister watching saturday morning cartoons. After the third attempt, he just threw away the TV, and so I grew up most of my childhood with no TV
Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood [0] is directly based on the character by the same name from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.'
Daniel Tiger is one of the very, very few TV shows we let our daughter watch, and it teaches emotional regulation so incredibly well and has plenty of tunes that I've caught her singing to herself, such as "it's okay to feel sad sometimes, little by little, you'll feel better again"
I'm in Australia and never grew up watching Mr Rogers, but after seeing the "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" movie I recognised the tunes and then spent an inordinate amount of time looking into the origins.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tiger%27s_Neighborhood
I had a similar revelation after watching a few episodes with my daughter! Wait a minute, that intro song sounds familiar... and the names of the characters sound kind of familiar...
Anyway it's her favorite show. Definitely a fan.
I have heard many stories of being a Sesame Street zombie once upon a time, so I doubt you were much more resistant to Mr Rogers gentle charms =).
There's a definitely a big gulf between the Mr Rogers / Daniel Tiger / Bluey energy and almost every other show. It's crazy now noticeable it is. Even modern Sesame Street is much more frenetic and lively than old episodes from the 80s and 90s. Which is not to say it's empty junk food like Cocomelon, it's just that those shows have raised the required addictiveness bar overall.
No screens is the best way, because any screen is just too absorbing for a kid. The tough thing is you have to do it for yourself, too, or they will very quickly figure out the hypocrisy.
FYI, the Mr Rogers website [0] cycles shows from the back catalog (5 shows at a time, on a bi-weekly cycle). It's a regular in my kid's rotation (with Bluey and Sesame Street).
[0] https://www.misterrogers.org/
Glad you drew this comparison. I have a 4yo who (TLDR) we didn't really push TV on and started reading on his own when he was two.
Before he was born I put a lot of thought into what he would watch before he was born assuming it would be a huge necessity to address. I torrented Mr Rodgers and Reading Rainbow and Eureka (amazing old science cartoon if anyone's encountered it) and I even started writing a script that would randomly select from these and automatically turn off after 1-3 episodes.
Basically I am shocked at how wrong I was. He had no natural interest in TV beyond a few minutes, even if we were watching something. We didn't have a reason to push it, when he did see newer kids media like Bluey / Cocomelon etc he would zombie out exactly as you described and then have noticeably crappier behavior for a while after we would have to have a minor battle to turn it off. Felt like microwaving his brain and we had no reason to push it on him so we didn't. After a few days he would never miss it. We let him watch stuff at friend's houses and still pop on old stuff that I downloaded once every week or two. Same basic behavior / problems. We always back off for the same reasons.
I grew up on TV and I don't judge parents who legitimately love watching TV with their kids or need it as a babysitter because of demanding schedules or absent child care assistance. It is an incredible tool in a culture that often separates extended families and discourages grandparents from playing active daily supportive roles.
But yeah for whatever reason our kid started reading independently when he was two, got really interested in languages, got his basic operators down while he was 2-3 and has never had any serious behavioral or developmental problems and other parents are always asking us what we did to accelerate his development and make him such a genius.
We didn't do anything unnatural, we just didn't intentionally push him to watch a lot of TV. He still watches stuff, we still watch stuff. It's just on a laptop and ends when he starts turning into a zombie.
With that said Bluey seems fine to me, my kids the one with the weird zombie reaction. And disclaimers all kids are different, I'm incredibly lucky to work from home on a schedule where I get to hang out with him all the time and I'm pretty sure regardless of zombie Cocomelon watching his generations problems are not going to be rooted in them zonking out on TV but who knows.
I never liked tv as a kid either. But youtube actually would destroy my life. Be careful with YouTube once they start seeking things. I also didn't really like to read but i just built things from the lego bin or my magnets. My family would watch a movie and I'd just go upstairs and dump out some bin of some things and start messing around. I did watch things from social pressure eventually and like i said, youtube will kill me someday, but it also has taught me so much. Anyways, fellow no-tv kid here
My just turned 4yo - similar I guess. Zero screen time until he was 2. Knew his abcs by 1.5, but reading on his own around 3 and a bit. Now He gets 1 episode of something in the morning. 1 ep in the evening and that's it. Maybe a movie on the weekends. He can entertain himself well. Love books. Today I took him to the doctor, we had to wait and he just chilled and looked at a book. I've never given him my phone to watch something.
I don't know if it's him or genetics or the strictenss around screentime, but he is a pretty easy kid to deal with these days.
TV isn't all bad. Octonauts is cool. He knows so many sea creatures from that show. Creature Cases is another good one.
I've seen that zombie behavior too when my kids watch too long. I think there's definitely value in some shows, and some of them are actually very educational. I think there's a lot more variety these days than when I was a kid.
As a rule we don't allow Blippy because the man creeps me out, and something about his childish behavior rubs me the wrong way. OTOH the other day my 5yo kid asked me if I knew why the sky was blue. I genuinely wasn't sure and he somewhat explained what he learned on TV from a show about sunlight and particles in the air.
If you want a deeper understanding of how rainbows work, this incredible video on the Veritasium channel is a delight!
https://youtu.be/24GfgNtnjXc
100% agree on Blippy, the vibe is very off for me. Especially once I learned about his history as a shock youtuber[0], I'm glad that he says he's grown past that and regrets making the content he made but his content is tainted (pun intended) forever for me and I'm not interested in exposing my kid(s) to that.
0. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/blippi-...
I grew up in front of a TV, I don't want that for my kid. Sometimes we can't avoid it and we're not avoiding it altogether with our kid, but I can definitely notice the negative effects.
If it's not too personal, I'm curious to know how a child that young acquires an interest in languages. Do they have a friend from a different background or something like that?
most modern kids shows are hopelessly fucked, but the oldies are still viable. check out "Once Upon a Hamster" for another cute one
Well, I was horrified the first time I saw the Cocomelon and was unsettled as a dad. This article explains why.
I need to check Bluey, we watched Miraculous, tales of Ladybug with our kids and enjoyed it (the plot is for adults).
There is a whole bunch of "junk food" in both tv and videogames (those were you win no matter what). I'm hoping things get better.
Bluey is easily the best children's TV. I mean I'd barely class it as children's TV; it's good by adult standards.
It's a bit annoying really because there isn't anything else like it at all. I would say the closest things are Pixar films which manage to appeal to adults and children. I'm not aware of any TV like that though. Apart from Bluey we're stuck with trash like Paw Patrol, Bing, Blippi, etc.
There are a small number that are not extremely annoying, but you still wouldn't actually want to watch them: Gabby's Dollhouse, Puffin Island, maybe Hey Duggee.
I'm not sure there's ever been more options for good shows that a parent can watch and genuinely enjoy with their kids. Try Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Hilda, Sarah & Duck, Adventure Time, Miraculous, The Dragon Prince, MLP Friendship is Magic, She-Ra and the Princess of Power, Samurai Jack, Gravity Falls, Ducktales (the new one, but the old one isn't bad either), Cleopatra in Space, Amphibia, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Owl House, Craig of the Creek, Steven Universe, LEGO Elves, Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Over the Garden Wall, Infinity Train, and the Disney Fairies movies.
I'd also recommend getting your hands on the cartoons you enjoyed as a kid. Odds are good your kids will like them for the same reasons you did, although you may find that they don't all hold up for you.
> I'd also recommend getting your hands on the cartoons you enjoyed as a kid.
I grew up with WB Loony Tunes (and Tex Avery and Superchicken and Wacky Racers and...), and that style of animation looks positively ancient in comparison to the modern animation style - whatever you call it - rendered as sort-of-3D. For example, Paw Patrol.
This actually worries me because I want my kid (currently 5yo) to have the benefit of the utter anarchy of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and Roadrunner.
Put on some Loony Toons! Don't worry that it's old. Kids that young don't have enough sense of the timeline to know just how ancient any animation style is, but Loony Toons will stand out for sure. 3D garbage-tier animation is everywhere in kids shows because it's fast and cheap. 3D animation is often much less expressive and dynamic though. The more variety in animation you expose a kid too, the sooner they'll be able to notice bad animation when they see it.
In my limited sample size, the new Roadrunner 3D cartoons get significantly fewer laughs than the hand drawn ones. The style is irrelevant to the humour, however there does seem to be a correlation between quantity of TNT and enjoyment - new ones have none.
I think those are for older kids than the ones I'm talking about.
Some are for sure, but a lot of those shows hold up well for all ages. I don't put much faith in marketers to decide which shows are for what demographics. Better to see what lands for yourself. It helps when you're watching and discussing the shows with your kids too.
Some of them, Adventure time being a great example, can appeal to very young kids but they'll find new meaning in those episodes as they get older.
I think shows like Infinity Train, Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra, Steven Universe, and Samurai Jack will be better after a kid is old enough that Cocomelon wouldn't hold any appeal, but even at that age Sarah & Duck, Hilda, MLP, Craig of the Creek, etc could still be good. Just about anything that holds their attention and isn't Cocomelon is a huge win. If you'll enjoy it, all the better.
Thanks for the list anyway, I'll test some out on them!
When your kids are older there's "Phineas and Ferb" and "Gravity Falls" which are both good enough to be watched without kids.
Phineas and Ferb was actually NOT written with kids directly in mind, and as a comfortable pop culture medium between the tame-over-time Simpsons and raunchier Family Guy and South Park. A mostly wholesome, wacky and chaotic series where the good guys always win and usually spectacularly. Phineas and Ferb never really learn anything but the other characters do.
I would say Gravity Falls much more so than Phineas and Ferb. The latter doesn't have much of a series-long story arc, whereas the former very much does have one.
Craig of the Creek was also pretty good, though I don't think it has a wider arc (I am not entirely certain though.)
PBS Kids has excellent shows for little kids and is free. There is a website, Apple TV app, etc. I’m surprised by how little it seems to be known compared to commercial options like Netflix or Nick Jr.
Old episodes of Blues Clues are also great for little kids.
Moomins - the 90s version especially. Most of the episodes are suitable for toddlers and at least our kids have been enjoying it.
Indeed Pixar movies are the other option when we want to watch them with them.
Bluey is next-level. S-tier television. It’s wholesome, calm, and entertaining. Episodes like Camping, Baby Race, Cricket, and Onesies are all emotional sucker-punches to the adults watching. (My pet theory, which my wife first suggested: Camping is essentially the Star Trek TNG episode Darmok.)
So many little things for parents. Your list is good. I was also struck by "early baby", for example, for subtext children will only get when they re-watch in 20 years.
The newer Bluey episode "The Sign" made me ugly cry.
I moved across country and left all my friends behind at the age of 9, The Sign was a hard watch. I was those kids. I can still remember my reaction to being told we were moving (I would have been about 8).
Bluey is a certified work of perfection. My kids have stopped watching it now. I'm tempted to watch them all from the start by myself.
I felt a lump in my throat as it came to mind while I drove around today with my 4yo son in the back, thinking about how to give him a “good life”.
I never noticed before, but I think you’re right. The French dog is even named Jean-Luc.
Let's not even mention Rug Island, the device in reading on is not nearly waterproof enough for the rain of tears it provokes!
Bluey is much more wholesome than Miraculous. Not a judgement thing, my eldest watches Miraculous too and I don't really have a problem with it. It's just not on the same level as Bluey. A huge plus for parents is also that Bluey is WAY more engaging for adults. Far and away my favourite program to watch with my kids. Some episodes really pull at the heart strings.
Going into parenthood I never thought I'd say it about a kids show but Bluey has damn near made me cry and Bandit makes me strive to be a better dad
Personally, I'm convinced Bluey is covertly a wholesome show for parents, dressed up as a kids' show, but ultimately still for the sake of children by way of 1) encouraging watching together, 2) improving parents' mental health and well-being, which has positive outcomes for their kids, 3) getting parents to be more engaged and imaginative.
It's truly, actually a family show, not just a show for kids that parents can tolerate enough to sit through.
Pretty much any episode that has the girls learning a lesson is also teaching a lesson to any of the parents watching. Or "adults," I should say -- I don't even have kids and I feel like a better person for having watched!
I feel no shame admitting that Sleepytime makes me cry without fail every time I see it.
I feel like most cartoon parents are either completely hapless morons (Papa Pig in Peppa Pig) or 100% perfect all the time robots (I love you Mr. and Mrs. Tiger but you're paragons, hard to relate to as parents). Bandit and Chili are incredible parents who also make mistakes and have real emotions and reactions to things. They absolutely make me want to be a better parent in a way that is actually achievable.
Miraculous changes a lot in the later seasons. I'm saying this because while our kids were very much into the first 2 seasons, it was me and my wife who got hooked for the other 3 seasons. The first 2 seasons are also full of fillers if you want, I don't shy away from skipping them when I'm alone, but we did watch it all with our kids.
We had a good time with it. Not sure if you watched it all, I'm looking forward the next season to see how the plot unravels.
But I'll definitely check Bluey :)
That being said, I wish there was a genre tagged as "engaging for adults, fun for kids": there are a bunch of movies and shows along these lines, but they aren't tagged in any other way.
Another genre that exists but I can't find is "boring for kids but child-friendly", basically any tv show that says stuff they can't properly follow, doesn't have action scenes, but has a convoluted plot for adults. On the top of my mind I can think of Shrinking (my kids still don't understand cursing in english, only italian, so this is great), but I remember there was an even better one that I can't think of right now.
> I wish there was a genre tagged as "engaging for adults, fun for kids"
Rocky & Bullwinkle was here. Loaded with adult-friendly puns and hommages.
There are a few, it's just not highlighted, and the problem is you can determine it only after watching it. That defeats the purpose unfortunately!
I cannot recommend Bluey enough. It’s made me, a 40 year old father of one, ugly cry. And I’m not one to cry from watching a show.
If you hate Cocomelon like me, you’ll love Bluey. It’s like the polar opposite of it.
Can you help me understand why you feel that a show inducing ugly crying is desirable?
Better to point you to the vast corpus out there rather than try to rehash it:
https://www.britannica.com/art/catharsis-criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis https://www.persee.fr/doc/rbph_0035-0818_1965_num_43_1_2556
Usually creative work and the arts are judged by their ability to move something inside of us to which you can say that crying is a proxy for that. It's effectively saying it's good art.
Right, that's a bit circular though. It isn't a law of nature that humans should do anything that is considered "good art".
Why do we want to synthetically manipulate our brains into an emotional reaction, especially in the case of a negative emotion?
All emotional reactions are "manipulated" - we choose to expose ourselves to situations wherein we might feel emotional reactions of various sorts. Why is art, "negative" reactions or not, any different?
As another commenter points out, it's a good way of learning - about yourself, how you feel, about other perspectives. It's also, hopefully, a chance to grow - reflect on your past, your mistakes, how you've treated others.
I lost my mom some years ago. It definitely just hit me, and I was kind of in an odd place in life at the time. I don't think I really processed it all well at the time.
Years later, when I watch a good movie that results in someone losing a parent figure, I'll often have quite a deep emotional reaction to it. But in the end I like these experiences. They help me look into those situations again and help me analyze the connection to losing my mom. Being in that state of emotion again helps me process it now that I'm in a very different stage in life.
I didn't believe "ugly crying" is about negativity. Rather, the "ugly" bit is about the abandonment with which one cries. One is so invested in the emotions (whatever those may be--it's not even a continuum of good/bad but rather a huge, high dimension vector space) that one abandons propriety and self-respect and just cries. It's about investment due to the exceedingly high emotional resonance with the subject matter.
This is my understanding. Caveat: I am not a person who cries much, if at all.
I understand your question, and it is hard to describe. Our brains are pattern generators, and it "feels good" to resonate with patterns we've already experienced. Neural circuits create patterns by strengthening connections upon our experience. This is particularly true as we get older and our brains become less plastic. Lesser used patterns become harder to access as they are no longer reinforced as frequently. However, this feels less good for our brains, and we value novelty.
So in the same way that riding a bike after a long time is much harder than it is to ride one when you use it every day, you can generalize this to something like emotions. It is bad to only experience one type of feeling all the time, and variety is good. Having a controlled, relatable medium lead you to experience a less commonly-felt emotion feels good. I don't know if I can explain why--maybe we have mechanisms in our brain for encouraging this novelty--but this is likely why we seek out these emotional experiences.
there are many things in life which cause crying which are not negative.
crying is absolutely not limited to “a negative emotion.”
if you’re struggling to imagine a crying situation that isn’t negative, i would heavily encourage you to indulge in more art.
Because art can be seen as manipulation, or it can be seen as tapping on the deeply fundamental hooks that make us human. Feeling affects from an artistic representation tells us something about the human experience that goes beyond our intellect. Its closer to something spiritual rather than something analytic.
Because it is a form of learning.
Also ugly crying is not always a negative reaction. It's empathy which is important to our survival (and also wonderful).
there is this quote from Sans Famille (Nobody's Boy) by Hector Malot :
Which Deepl translates as:It's cathartic.
Plus, it's not JUST about the crying. I'm order to get to the point where the tears are actually falling, you have to go through all the build up that makes you care very deeply about the characters and situation. When that works well enough to get you to cry over a cartoon? It's fucking MAGICAL. =)
The appeal is in the strong emotions which it induces. The crying is a side effect of this, not the appealing factor in itself.
Is this a serious question?
Completely serious.
I understand it's very ingrained in our culture at this point that this is a thing people do. But, if I decontextualize enough mentally, it starts to feel quite strange: manipulating one's brain into having a negative emotional reaction.
You’re not being well understood here, but I do this too, and have done — with everything — all my life.
The answer is ultimately that if you deconstruct and logically analyse any particular human activity it either ruins the fun and/or makes you realise how primitive and dark most forms of entertainment are. People like being emotional, for whatever reason.
I like the explanation that says it’s about learning, though. Learning somehow feels intrinsically good.
That’s where the confusion is; it’s not a negative reaction. It’s an intense emotional reaction, sure, but not inherently negative or bad.
It's not negative to be moved to tears. And it's not manipulative to watch a tv show. I don't think you're decontextualizing as much as you're trying to adopt some alien contrarian viewpoint.
It might help to compare it with going to the gym or for a run. In some sense this produces an immediate negative reaction: our muscles get sore and stiff, and we get out of breath. But we still do it perhaps because we feel better afterwards, or because it helps our long term physical health.
Likewise, deliberately experiencing sad (or otherwise) emotional states has both short term and long term positive outcomes. In the short term we feel a sense of catharsis, and perhaps reassured that our feelings are relatable. In the long term we feel more in touch and less overwhelmed by our emotions.
This is the second time I see the phrase "ugly crying" here. Never heard that one before.
For whatever reason, "Bluey made me ugly cry" is a very minor meme among parents on the Internet. I've seen it elsewhere too.
I find it disappointing that a pretty common emotional state for a person is labelled ugly. Its negative so I'd rather people not use it.
It just means that you cry so hard your face is all twisted up and you go red and and your mouth is hanging open and there's snot dripping out of your nose, as opposed to simply shedding a couple tears. It's not really disparaging.
Thank you for being the person that got around to actually describing/defining it !
Along with Bluey, Gabby's Dollhouse is pretty good. It’s not over stimulating and it’s interactive.
If you're in Australia, there's a live Gabby's Dollhouse theatre show on at the moment that's also very good: https://gabbysdollhouselive.com/
Tumble Leaf. Slumberkins.
I’d say Miraculous is very French, in a good way. In that it doesn’t try to shield children from difficult adult subjects like death and grief and difficult parental relationships. We only do an hour or two of screen time a week right now (including for me and my wife), but Miraculous was a request for last week’s “movie night”.
Then we watch Severance when the kids go to bed and that’s it. Just like there’s junk shows for kids we’ve got junk shows for adults, and it’s hard to deny it to children when we don’t deny it for ourselves. The kids complain way less too when we’re like “well we’re all giving this stuff up”, because they have an innate sense of fairness.
Bluey is phenomenally good. Dance mode? Tears.
Great article. Insane that this kind of anti-social kid-numbing garbage production line is not only allowed to exist in our society but also very well rewarded. This is another symptom of our deeply sick world, in which financial success is completely decorrelated from having any kind of positive impact on the world.
Other than cuts every 2-3 seconds to keep engaged in Cocomelon, also notice that CAMERA NEVER STOPS, ever. Every scene you see it's moving. It could be a slight movement or exaggerated one, but it's never stationary.
The 2000's action movie / tv show school of cinematography, starting with the Bourne films. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/JitterCam
Cocomelon just phones it in. Almost all of their songs have some similar catchy intro leading into the song. Sometimes the intro is the same across different songs. Recently, my kid got into the song "Bicycle Built for Two (Daisy Bell)". I grew up listening to Disney Children's Favorites sung by Larry Groce, who sings it expressively and dynamically. Cocomelon's interpretation is just flat and conservative, as if it's a chore to get through.
It's crack for kids.
So far we've managed to keep our 2 and a bit year old's tv diet to Bluey, Hey Duggee (a bit crack-y but he loves it and it is still crafted and quite tounge-cheek-funny), Trash Truck (a very calm, sedate one on Netflix, useful if you're travelling and can't get CBeebies) and Down on the Farm (a Cbeebies show where kids do stuff on a farm). Occasionally Kiri and Lou too. And some sports sometimes (football, rugby, cycling, F1). I love the sports as it's distracting but he also doesn't care that much and loses interest. Can be enough to get a break but he won't binge like Duggee or Bluey.
Yes, lucky we're in the UK so have CBeebies available, but there's no reason to not screen and curate your kids media diet. I don't understand people who just let their toddlers consume crap on YT.
Hey Duggee is lovely. The imagery is on the vivid and trippy side, but the voice acting is top-notch with creative stories. Most importantly, it lacks the deliberate tweaking for engagement Cocomelon does.
At six my son currently has one Bluey episode (in English, simply to emerse him in another language he will pick up in any case later on) and one Shaun the Sheep after school (that's a combined twenty minutes or so). Shaun hits the exact spot in terms of humour for six year olds, and is brilliant with none of the characters actually speaking.
Yeah I love Hey Duggee, but after multiple episodes it can grate, ha.
My son really likes it. Our friends bought us the vinyl record. Act of war imo.
+1 for trash truck
Cocomelon rightfully gets criticism, but this is an apples-to-oranges comparison. Bluey is a scripted animated show intended for older toddlers with parents as a secondary audience. Cocomelon is animated songs for younger toddlers with simple, conflict-free situations that do not provide examples of bad behavior. For a relevant comparison to Cocomelon, see the Ms. Rachel or Spanish-language Luli Pampin videos that provide similar content but without the negative aspects of targeting engagement metrics.
Blueys great, my kid loses his shit when the shows on. Its also interesting seeing a female character marketed to kids as a segment rather than just young girls which isnt that common.
My son is still under 2, so he prefers other low intensity shows like Mini Kids and Night Garden. The way he gets into Mini Kids is insane, I havent seen cocomelon but I am betting he would get drawn too far into that. Mini Kids sounds like the antidote to cocomelon, no fast cuts, slow music, and mostly just toddlers interacting with toys and each other on television.
> Its also interesting seeing a female character marketed to kids as a segment rather than just young girls which isnt that common.
That's most children's shows these days. Male protagonists are getting harder to find.
Childrens shows absolutely. But if I go to the kids clothing aisle at the shops, they aren't selling my son Peppa Pig shirts or Veda the Vet shoes. Its sonic/mario/dinosaurs/cars and bluey at the moment.
Bluey has the advantages of being dogs - Bandit and Bluey are identical except in size.
They’re also short episodes so they don’t feel too involved.
Watching the Cricket episode made me tear up. https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-3/cricket/
The Rain episode is pretty cool too. It has almost no words apart from the goodbye at start. The good thing about bluey is that it teaches kids to do mischievous things and gives you ideas to do fun activities with kids.
https://www.bluey.tv/watch/season-3/rain/
this is the one where my wife came in while I was watching Bluey in the morning with the kids and she's like hey did something happen you're crying a lot
Cricket took out Sleepytime as my favorite.
My wife and I have a daughter in the demographic of these shows, though she's a little young for Bluey. There's a YouTube (and now Netflix) show called Ms. Rachel for a younger audience that I'd put in the same positive category as Bluey.
We probably watch one or two hours of Ms. Rachel videos a day with our daughter. We've got several family friends with a household rule of "no screens at all for kids" who would scoff at that but their rule seems both draconian and technophobic to me. Our daughter has picked up many words and concepts from the show and we've learned a lot of the songs as a family and sing them when the context comes up (ex: "baby put your pants on..."). Ms. Rachel has been a hugely positive parenting tool for us.
Every once in a while, though, YouTube will try to autoplay some Cocomelon after a Ms. Rachel video and wow it's just absolute garbage. I think this article captures it well: it feels like slop engineered to keep young eyeballs glued to the screen with no higher purpose than increasing the number of engaged minutes.
Instead of "no screens," the more granular "you can choose from this menu of approved content on your screen for a reasonable amount of time per day" is the better parenting move for our family.
Our son has profound hearing loss and he wears Cochlear implants, and I remember very fondly the time we were hooked on Ms Rachel.
She is great and lots of her videos are a blessing for parents with children with hearing impairment as she uses lots of techniques that our Speech and Language therapist used to teach us.
And signing! I've noticed she signs along with most of what she says. I think it's an inclusivity thing, but it also meant that our daughter could communicate simple ideas long before she could talk.
I thought this how she got started. She started making the videos for her own son who was having delayed development.
It's pretty wild to be how young babies can start signing compared to speech development.
I don’t have kids yet, but 100% agree with your last paragraph. Controlled, carefully selected content is much much better than no screens approach. When picked carefully, those shows are actually educational, helping with growth.
When your daughter gets a little older I’d recommend checking out Gabby’s Dollhouse.
As a father of two daughters, I'm convinced the writers of Bluey have cameras in my house /s. There are so many times we have had a similar experience to one of the episodes. As my kids are now older than Bluey and Bingo, they still get excited when a new episode is released. We love Bluey in our house.
The first episode I ever saw was "Takeaway" (dad and kids are waiting 5 minutes outside the Chinese takeaway restaurant). It so perfectly hit on not only the actual experiences from my life but how it _felt_ in the moment that I think I laughed until I cried. Then immediately made my wife watch it.
The episode referenced in the article ("Whale Watching" about the parents being hungover) is another that, while not my favourite or anything, is certainly one of those experiences you probably have as a parent that nobody's really talking about or making media about. Bluey's managing to be entertaining and wholesome for kids while hitting on a mostly untapped niche of "relatable parenting experiences".
With how much "junk food" TV is out there, Bluey's a real gem. For kids and parents alike.
Note _Well_
Heelers will demand four hours of an aerodynamic throwing stick tossed the length of a football field and back and then want a 5km run to the beach to cool down.Failure to deliver can result in the destruction of everything you love.
My 3 legged heeler can still run laps around me. But if you can keep them busy, they are very loyal and can understand a crazy amount of words/signs. My previous heeler went deaf and still obeyed perfectly by watching signs and body language. Incredible dogs.
Yeah, owned one for 12 years and she was potentially nippy to anyone she didn't know from puppyhood. Was ball-obsessed, broke a lot of stuff and hated anyone wearing hi-vis.
Her destructiveness though was nothing on a German Shepherd.
I heard awful things about Cocomelon. My 17-months-old doesn't watch TV much, but when she does it's usually old Soviet cartoons lol.
Not exactly Soviet, but Marsha and the Bear is awesome… and wholesome.
I gave that a test viewing when my child was at that show's age bracket, but I instantly hated it. Over the top slapstick humour, where destroying someone else's things is seen as OK. Not Cocomelon bad, but nothing much to redeem it either.
My children both love nupogodi and the animated Hungarian folk tales
Nu Pogodi is exactly what my kiddo watches too!
While I find Bluey fun and so does my child, in many of the episodes the children are loud and frantic. I've also noticed my kid whining in the same way Bluey and Bingo do.
In trying to find calmer shows, two I like are Tumble Leaf and Guess How Much I Love You. Tumble Leaf has a stop-motion look and every episodes involves finding and object and using it to solve a problem. Guess How Much I Love You has a watercolor look and is about a rabbit family and pretty calm. I don't enjoy those as much as Bluey, but I enjoy how my kid behaves after watching them.
I'd like to find more like those two if anybody knows any.
I have a 10 month old daughter and she mostly loves Bluey for the theme song. However when she watched Sleepytime (an episode of Bluey) with me for the first time she was absolutely glued to the screen. Bluey is the only show I let her watch along with Ms. Rachel every once in awhile.
Bandit (the Dad in the show) has inspired me to be a better Dad and a better husband. I’ve heard people complain that his character sets unrealistic expectations, but if you shift your mindset a little I believe it is totally possible.
One of, if not the greatest kids and parents shows I’ve seen.
> Bandit (the Dad in the show) has inspired me to be a better Dad and a better husband.
I had the same experience. I'm tearing up a little in the office thinking about a cartoon for toddlers! Incredible.
He rags on the Distractatron but that’s the exact method that Sesame Street started out using early on (if Malcolm Gladwell is to be believed).
Yes Sesame Street was a blend of care and craftsmanship along with research & testing.
Let's not forget the musical side of Bluey.
And I don't mean just the OST (there are 3 albums), Bluey can also serve to introduction your kids to a wide range of classical music.
https://blueypedia.fandom.com/wiki/Classical_Music_in_Bluey
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3lXnsxg2AOj6QASadNBYcN (Spotify's Bluey classical music playlist.
Burger dog! Bur-Bur-Burger dog! He has Pickles and he has cheese!
Bluey is about a family living in a 8000 ft mansion, with lots of spare time.
I think it is influenced by the Flintstones, a little bit.
The house size seems to be more “tv magic” than an actual defined house of infinite size.
The upstairs hallway is sometimes a normal short one, and other times is long enough to land a space shuttle.
They even make a joke about this in the Ghostbasket episode. Bandit is pretending to be a realtor and Chilli remarks that the house is a bit small, to which he replies "it's bigger on the inside"
There is a replica of the house that was built in real life.
I've been in the bluey house. It is approximately 8600ft (800m sq). The work-life balance that the family has doesn't seem particularly odd when it comes to Australian households.
Australia, you say?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV7JPC2FuNs
There's a real house?
I think you need to look at it as parents spending 8-10 minute periods of time with their kids. In fact there is an episode where the Dad has to go to work and he spends a short amount of time playing with them before he has to go.
This quote:
The 153rd episode is scheduled for April 14 and many believe that it will be the end of the show in its current form (more on this later).
Measurably increased my stress level ... :(
The article is from the past, all three series are available on DVD.
The last episode is great on an almost Pixar level - there’s three separate stories happening and kids will only really pick up on one and a half.
I've noticed nearly every Bluey episode has parallel stories. I think this is part of what makes it so entertaining for adults- kids are excited by the obvious message, while parents who need more to keep them stimulated enjoy watching the threads interweave. The writing is simply the best.
Ah, thanks, then it's not worse than before. :)
And yes, the wedding episode is epic although we pretty much love all of it.
There's a movie in the works, but we'll see how that turns out.
https://blueypedia.fandom.com/wiki/Bluey:_The_Movie
There is a movie planned. And LEGO sets.
As a morning parent of a toddler, part of the morning routine is playing a toddler exercise video. It's funny, my initial thinking was to burn some of the toddler's energy before sitting down to breakfast, but at this point it's definitely more for me. Sometimes the toddler even complains but I've come to really enjoy doing some stretches in the morning.
My kid is really into the Sance freeze videos. She loves it. Any other recommendations ?
https://youtu.be/nEQHiJVH79o?si=9jYbM6ZSDEQ7QHSq
> The confusion stemmed from the fact that Brumm had originally planned to create an R-rated version of Peppa Pig.
I’m scared. Very scared.
I don't think I've seen any horror films inspired by Robert Pickton. Was this going to be the beginning?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoNR2iZarhs
I watched a few episode of Bluey and I feel they are really great for parents. So great that I think they are meant for parents, not children...
Healthy, emotionally secure parents raise good kids. "Put your own mask on before helping others..."
Yeah that's so hard to achieve, especially if one's own parents are not like that.
I think it's made for both, which creates a fantastic opportunity to join your kids on the couch and genuinely enjoy what they are enjoying. Kids love Bluey, but they love watching their parents love Bluey.
My favorite thing about the Cocomelon phenomenon is how outraged we get as adults, while simultaneously failing to realise how TV has been doing the same to us for the longest time. When I moved out of my parents' house I got an apartment with no TV, and I hate watching shows on the smartphone or on desktop, so I ended up dropping the habit. Now every time I go back to my folks' place I'm shocked by how zombied they get in front of the TV, and how normalized it is between adults in 2025 to waste away whole days bingeing shows on Netflix. If you know what to look for you can see these "long format TV" shows use similar patterns to zombifying kid's media
I'll add to the chorus of praise for Bluey here. I've never seen a show before so close to my actual life. There's one episode where Bandit pretends to be a crane game, and it blew me away because I had done exactly the same thing with my own daughter just a few weeks before! It captures being a kid and being a parent in a way that is so real. Most kids content doesn't have the courage to be realistic in that way, they just want to sell toys or ad impressions. My daughter is five now and on the verge of outgrowing it, and I wish we had started watching this show together sooner.
The worst part for me is I used to live next to a house that was much like the one on the show, and it eventually sold for ~2.1 million dollars or so.
So while I idolise the show, I also sit around trying to identify the families net worth, which is likely quite a lot.
Its sad that we get this amazing tv show but the lifestyle in the show (having a huge brisbane adjacent queenslander with a lovely tree in the backyard and hours and hours of free time to spend with your kids) is out of reach for so many.
> (OJ obviously did it and the other memory I had of that period was this wild Tim Meadows SNL opening bit about the trial).
This is from further down the page, but it reminded me: when the not guilty news broke, Norm MacDonald, who hosted SNL's fake news bit at the time, and had been constantly making OJ jokes about how obviously guilty he was, opened with the line, "Murder is legal in the state of California."[0] Perfect.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CR8u-2TKb0
The refusal of white Americans - especially then, but even now - to understand how the OJ trial was a reflection of the un-reckoned-with circumstances that had most recently rocked the land with the Rodney King incident, trial, riots, etc has always bothered me. Of course murder was "legal" in the state of California - what were the people beating King to within an inch of his life expecting to happen to that dude after they were done with him? He survived, of course, but in spite of their intent. The line's only a successful bit if you didn't consider it murder when cops gun someone down.
I think the greatest social failure of that day isn't that he walked, it's that half the country didn't have the self-awareness to take stock - to understand both the legal and social system that we'd set up that lead to that outcome, to see how we'd been manipulated by the media - and to maybe have the grace to let it go. (The last time someone brought it up to me, in person, was a scant 3 years ago, in a context so ridiculous that I don't know that I should relate it.)
Bluey is the West Wing of children's television, a cloying, overbearingly earnest fantasy which nobody shuts up about at dinner parties.
"I won’t pretend like I haven’t stuck an iPad in front of my son and let him watch Cocomelon or Blippi so I could get some work done. Guilty as charged.„
Another one a parent strongly recommended was Numberblocks, entertaining stories around maths, visualizing patterns etc.
I like Bluey but couldn't get my young one to sit through it for a nebulizer. Cocomelon did the trick and I'm very thankful for them for that. Honestly, I don't think it's as garbage as everyone makes it out to be. It's hard trying to find video-form nursery rhymes that aren't weird out there. They have that done well. I really like Bluey but I feel like it's for a much older crowd.
Young children don't sit still naturally. Your observation tells me that Cocomelon is overly stimulating, and I think that's what makes it garbage.
I want to be clear that I'm not blaming you, you needed a tool to get your child to sit still for an important reason, and I've done the same.
Correct. Try Ms Rachel for your younger child instead of Cocomelon. The very young ones tend to love her.
Agree that Ms Rachel has same effect but with the difference that it teaches kids something.
"I couldn't get my young one to sit still so I shot him up with heroin"
[dead]
Lots of folks praising Bluey and poo-pooing Cocomelon, and I am in the same boat.
One similar show to Bluey I didn’t see mentioned is Puffin Rock. Very chill and wholesome. Probably appropriate for a bit before Bluey in terms of what a child will understand.
The way I see it Cocomelon is for babies and young toddlers, Bluey is for older toddlers and up. Surely there aren’t many kids over the age of 2 watching Cocomelon?
I’ve never let my kids watch cocomelon (or much screen time at all). But we do listen to cocomelon. It has some legitimately well done music IMO. For example “over the river and through the woods”.
I recommend the band They Might Be Giant's kids songs (some with great animated videos). Super catchy, fun and vaguely educational.
Especially the albums Here come the 1, 2, 3s and Here Comes Science.
I regularly sing “I Never go to Work” and make new lyrics for to the tune.
My wife and I really enjoyed Caspar Baby Pants and Laurie Berkner for kids music.
Super Simple Songs if you like music only (although they do have video to go with each song).
Yes these are great. The voice in many (all?) is Caitie, whose Youtube channel[1] is really well done. My 5yo really liked Community Helpers.
[1]https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL86-PnO8H7d9uS59c0f6-...
Bluey and Peppa Pig are so effective my children have started speaking with foreign accents D:
It’s deeply disappointing the US can’t come up with anything comparable. Sesame Street is a shadow of what it once was — the kids won’t sit down for it at all. Daniel Tiger tests slightly better, but christ is the tone patronizing.
Elinor Wonders Why and Alma's Way are pretty solid
that means they're listening to the TV show talk more than their parents lol
If you’ve got ways to work more flashlights and butts into everyday conversation, instead of torches and bumshuffles, I’m all ears.
lmfao
> Bluey is created by an auteur with a unique and hilarious point of view on the world. Conversely, Cocomelon — which started on YouTube — is algorithmic slop that has been called “crack for kids” and is probably as educational as taping strobe lights to your child’s eyeballs.
This line knocks it out of the park. I'm so glad that my kids never like Cocomelon, and still to this day, at age 7 and 10, like to watch Bluey. The worst part of them watching Bluey is that Dad sets unrealistic expectations for the rest of us! (a common topic on /r/daddit)
I'm curious about the unrealistic expectations set by Bluey's Dad. I did not find topic on r/daddit with a quick search. Could you expand on this ?
It's mostly in the comments. People saying that their kids expect them to be ready to play at any time because Bluey's dad is ready to play at any time. And then not being able to live up to those expectations.
I found Ezra Klein's chat with Jia Tolentino about Cocomelon and Bluey ... and parenting, zen, hallucinogens, attention and more ... one of the most deeply interesting things I have heard in the last year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
It's available "where you get your podcasts" (though might be old enough now to not be after the NYT added a paywall for old audio material)
As our daughter has grown older we've had to pair down entire streaming catalogues to avoid Cocomelon like slop. Amazon Prime and Netflix being the primary offenders. While both have some good stuff or the PBS back catalog (Arthur, Pete the Cat, Gabby's Dollhouse, Busytown) they are chocked full of completely awful garbage. Shows that are obviously chasing after that Cocomelon money. If your kid ever wants to watch "Cry Babies Magic Tears", just throw your TV out the window instead.
we're in for a rough ride when current overstimulated generation grows up. kids from 12 months watching youtube because parents need them to sit still? damn thats scary. even two year olds in my opinion is too young.
"Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers" talks about this that screen time is replacing connection (bond) between kids and parents. and bond is of most importance for raising children. which if you missed the train cant be created later (only mended)
our family was going that path (media consumption), but made a change (couple weeks of tantrums) and now it reflects quite positively. So i guess the main issue is to not overuse. even if the show is "really good"
The old generation always says similar things about the new generation. At one point it was TV. Before that it was radios. There are many quotes from far older times, too. It’s always "different now."
What if they're all correct?
I've noticed that the best shows usually have two layers, allowing two otherwise incompatible audiences to share the same experience. This is also why old South Park episodes were so fun: it was fart and poop jokes, but it was also some societal commentary.
letting your kids watch Cocomelon is like giving them crack lol ngmi
why bluey or cocomelon? mister rogers is chronically untalked about for kids content in 2025.
its an incredible show and deeply enriching for both me and my little one. we’ve given our two year old very limited screen time with mister rogers and, since, they’ve taken up great fondness to making believe, we talk about characters and situations on the show regularly, and they naturally separate themselves from the screen after a while.
I’ve been very strict about exposure and screen time but mister rogers has been a blessing and provided me great relief for an hour a day.
The jazz aspect of the show completely flew over my head when i was a child but it’s brilliance shines now that i listen as an adult. No two shows are played the same. Costa and his band are constantly riffing. The show is honestly a f-ing incredible work of art.
I think the author chose these two shows as a comparison because they were created in roughly the same time period, so they're more directly comparable. Mister Rogers was created in a different era, with different media environment, funding and monetization strategy, and functionally in a different medium.
Daniel Tiger (Mr Rogers spinoff/remake/???) is really quite good as well. They did well at preserving the idea of the original in a very different format.
Mr Rogers was a different show for sure.
And he had a specific use of language that was incredibly deep and mindful unlike Daniel Tiger.
I had to block this one in my house. Daniel is whiny and my kid started mimicking it, otherwise I think it's good
Nobody is as whiny as Caillou.
Lol, yeah I had been pre-warned about that one and have avoided it entirely for my kid's >6 years
Bluey is excellence, but I’ve always said Bluey is a kids show for parents.
It’s representation of how the parents behave around, and communicate with, their kids, and the numerous examples of ideas for how to play with your children make the show invaluable to parents.
The fact that kids love it too only reinforces its clever brilliance.
It’s designed by a parent, specifically a dad, and it shows in so many subtle ways.
The way each episode tells you the name of the episode, for example. My kids can name the episode they want by name, which I can search. For other shows, you get a toddler’s description that can itself be a puzzle to interpret.
They’re also short enough that they don’t have to add filler.
> The way each episode tells you the name of the episode
"This episode of Bingo is called Bingo."
While I agree to an extent, I also just think it's also documenting life as we all know it as both parents and children. Albeit in it's own clever storytelling and excellent animation way. The fact this is somewhat novel should probably be odd, but just points to the fact that adults have been "creating children shows" instead of just showing them what childhood looks like, stuff they can relate with, stuff parents can related with, it's all relatable because it's so - real. It's basically animated reality TV in a way and we all know how novel that seemed when it started.
When I learned that some of my favorite TV shows of my childhood were only made to sell toys, it was kind of shattering, but then I see it in everything now. Paw Patrol find a dinosaur land - aka - you need to buy your kid 8 new vehicles and the new dino characters, up next, Paw Patrol goes to space! Adults making TV shows always have a weird ulterior motive and the programming tends to reflect it.
It took me awhile to realize but the intro song is also a game you can play with your kids. They're basically doing musical chairs. Then like you mentioned virtually every episode is a non-screen-time game you can play with your kids. Very clever.
cocomelon i like
I don’t understand the negative talk about Cocomelon. Kids learn a lot through songs. Cocomelon is full of songs. My son enjoys singing many of them. I’m happy with this.
Pretty sure that's why the author wrote that blog post
Bluey is a little brat to her parents that is totally unnecessary.
Bluey is flawed and often in the wrong, that is kind of the point of her character.
It’s an OK show for children, but a really good show for parents.
If you want children shows that are actually educational and fun, I usually recommend PBS Kids.
I’d wager you don’t have children, at least not high-energy ones. Or maybe you’re thinking of Muffin.
How do you model the character learning lessons if they’re already perfect?
There is no need for explicit, spelled out lessons. Also conflicts can arise externally, and flawless people can solve them. That still can be an example, can't it.
Also Bluey indeed bullies their father. He acts like he hates it every time, but based on how Chilli escapes most of the time, they must really hate it. I don't remember Bluey called out for that, only rewarded.
Once you realize that 70% of the shows are basically “Dad distracts the kids after work so Mom can get dinner ready” or similar, it makes sense. Bandit lays down the law when he needs to, but most of the time he’s just playing.
You’ll notice that he’s much more concerned with how Bluey plays with Bingo than he is with how she plays with him. He’s big, he can take it.
Faceytime is a good example of “kid is naughty and gets in actual trouble”.
You're getting a lot of downvotes, but you're right, Bluey can be quite cruel when playing with her dad.
The dad is a war vet he can take a few punches.
Examples?
Hospital, Hairdressers, Shaun, Sleepytime... and the list goes on. Seems to me that Bandit is always on the receiving end.
And then there is the Backpackers episode where Bingo takes her turn and punches him repeatedly.