We’re home. My daughter and I collapse into the apartment at the end of a winter Saturday, hauling groceries, boots trailing snowmelt. We have conquered the day; we have ventured out, gone roller-skating, completed our errands. Now it’s dark and I need to throw together some dinner.
My daughter enters the kitchen and stands there listlessly. “What can I do?” she says.
“That’s the whole question of life,” I say, putting water on to boil. It’s my stock answer, and this is my stock dinner, pasta.
She does the seven-year-old’s version of an eye roll, drawing out the word “Mom.” I suggest several activities she loves, but she rejects them all; she has a particular activity in mind. “What can I do?” means “Trance me with a screen.”
Here we are at the familiar crossroads, a place crowded with judgments, temptations, past failures. Though marked by the technologies of our moment, this crossroads, as the scholar Hannah Zeavin reminds us in her fascinating book “Mother Media,” is not a new one. For almost a century, since the dawn of mass screen entertainment, society has passed through waves of panic over media’s effects on children, which have often coincided with panics over the effects of various kinds of mothering. Mother, Zeavin writes, especially since the postwar period, has been understood as a medium herself, a transmitter to her child of wholesome or dangerous impressions, and part of a mother’s job has been to screen her child from “screen time”—a term popularized in the nineties and reflecting that period’s anxiety about the phenomenon of the child being raised by television.
Fair or not, the steady increase in the average child’s screen time over the past fifty years has been associated in the public imagination with women’s increased presence in the workforce, and with the thinly spread single mother. The ideal mother, a figure who continues to haunt us, is “always on,” always fully present and attentive to her child. Her use of screens as a surrogate for herself, to pacify and occupy her child, signals a lapse, and she had better choose her replacement wisely.
I was raised by television in more than one sense. First, like many in my generation, I was stamped so indelibly by screen media in my formative years that even now snippets of dialogue and advertising jingles surface inexplicably in the churn of my consciousness: “Inconceivable!”; “She could be a farmer in those clothes”; “When pizza’s on a bagel you can eat pizza anytime!” Most facts I learned in school have biodegraded into oblivion; these fragments hang around like microplastics.
Second, my mother recently retired after a thirty-seven-year career as one of the writers for “Sesame Street,” regarded by many as the gold standard of children’s television. We were a PBS household—no cable—and my mother’s main requirement for my screen time, while I was still under her jurisdiction in that department, was that the media be non-pandering, ideally speaking to adults as well as to children. A good kids’ show should, in the parlance of the “Sesame Street” writers’ room, “work on two levels.” Watching “Sesame Street” with my sister and me during our toddlerhood, my mother was struck by its deft integration of early childhood curriculum, egalitarian values, A-list guest artists, and sophisticated spoofing of other media. Watching with us was what inspired her to seek employment there.
I wish I felt inspired by the offerings on this streaming service my daughter and I are now staring into. There are so many options, so many shows; they seem to be tumbling into the room from teeming conveyor belts of fine purple pixelation. (Yes, I could plop my kid in front of great cinema. I’m sure many parents do, and aren’t we delighted for them. But there are times when she rejects out of hand anything that was not made for her own generation, like she can smell the demo targeting is past due.)
The C.G.I. of it all is a profound bummer. Even a halfway decent—if not educational—show, Netflix’s “Spirit Riding Free,” about three sweet best friends and their trusty horses saving the day on a comfy, race-blind frontier, is foiled in its occasional charm by the perfect low-poly uniformity of the trees, their cuboid green overstory threatening to engulf us in an element thinner than air. And the eyes. What lasting impressions are our children taking from all these empty eyes staring at them?
Is mere aesthetic shittiness grounds for disqualification? Mere mediocrity? My ex-husband and I, who live apart and share custody of our daughter, occasionally clash in our standards, but mostly we agree. It’s easy to agree, since the bulk of this stuff is real sinister garbage: those gee-whiz police dogs bounding “yip” into the cockpits of clean, new munitions. Even when the ethic of a show is not implicitly authoritarian, it is usually as empty as the eyes. A class of tweens at the “Unicorn Academy” must—what must they do? Be themselves! Be themselves harder!
“Be yourself,” sings a character in “Chunky Chimp,” a vapid kids’ movie to which Bandit Heeler, a dog, has taken his two daughters in the Australian cartoon “Bluey,” a now fully merchandized global phenomenon which as of this writing is the most-streamed show in the U.S., and which, to the dismay of many parents, quit while it was ahead. (“I always said I wouldn’t keep making the show if I thought I couldn’t make any new season as good as the last,” its creator, Joe Brumm, wrote to fans in late 2024, announcing the end of the series.)
Why, Bandit’s daughter Bluey asks him during a bathroom break at the movie theatre, is Chunky being told to “just be yourself”? What does that mean?
“Look,” Bandit says cheerfully, “It’s just monkeys singing songs, mate. Don’t think too hard about it.”
The moment, a wink to parents subjected to so many singing monkeys, is also a mark of how far in its dust “Bluey” leaves the rest of contemporary children’s programming. This show, which still prompts belly laughs from my daughter and me even after countless rewatches, meets and surpasses my mother’s bar. It does more than speak to parents and kids together; it is, in the eyes of many parents, a work of art, moving not only in its content but in its respect for our children’s discernment and integrity. In my house, it has become something like a co-parent.
“Bluey” invites us into one of the coziest television families of all time, the Heelers—Bandit, the father dog; Chilli, the mother dog; and their daughters, six-year-old Bluey and four-year-old Bingo, each of whom proceeds through the world, as we all do, in accordance with their own distinct style of play. Play is “Bluey” ’s organizing principle, and the show’s world bends to the logic of play. If Bluey uses a wand of asparagus to transform her father into a walrus, her father will behave exactly like a walrus until released from the spell. She must really mean the spell, though. The laws of play in “Bluey,” which, it is hinted, are better observed in the Heeler family than in most others, are that it be fun, flexible, and, most important, faithfully committed to. Once you’re playing a game, you must play within the rules, and play must take precedence over everything, including professional responsibilities. In the rare case that Chilli or Bandit begs off playing with their girls because they have work to do, they soon relent; work can wait.
If the Heelers excel at turning domestic life into a form of play, what makes this play possible is their family’s absolute security, its durability against anything life might throw at it. Toughness is a recurrent theme; when Bluey and Bingo balk at their parents kissing despite having gross morning breath, Chilli laughs and says, “If you’re gonna belong to someone, you better toughen up.” In the show’s culminating—and uncharacteristically cheesy—scene, Bandit marshals a great burst of strength to pull a “For Sale” sign from the ground outside the family home, preserving the Heeler hearth. If play is the show’s law, the infallible resilience of family structure is its moral core. We might say that “Bluey” ’s all-encompassing game of make-believe, the premise of all its play, is the fantasy of an unbreakable family, complete with ever-attentive parents. Let’s pretend!
Bandit and Chilli’s symphonic parenting is bittersweet to behold, at least for an unpartnered mother who might heretofore have heartily congratulated herself for simply getting us to the roller rink rather than spending the day toggling distractedly between screens and meals and unfinished art projects at home. Much ink has been spilled on the inferiority complex this pair of married dogs has given mere mortal caregivers—“I’m begging you,” "Kate Allen Fox writes" in McSweeney’s, “on behalf of a beleaguered nation of exhausted parents. Stop”—but what is their effect on younger viewers? Watching my daughter transfixed by and transported into the Heeler home, I wonder if, when the credits roll and she returns to our own familiar dyad, she experiences any sort of withdrawal. In “Bluey” ’s world, the word “divorce” is never uttered, but the show does have a token child of separation: Winton, the class clown and semi-pariah who fits the stereotype of the clingy, maladjusted product of a broken home. Winton’s classmates often avoid him, even run from him, on account of his being what Bluey calls a “space invader”; he’s always getting up in everyone’s grill. At one point he announces that his dad is “lonely all the time.” (At the end of the series, the writers pair Winton’s dad off with the mother of terrier triplets, the only other confirmedly single parent on the show, “fixing” the problem of separation.)
If screens are commonly enlisted to fulfill a care function, becoming a substitute family member, they are also early transmitters in our kids’ lives of what a “family” looks like. I don’t want to suggest that “Bluey” should have engaged in self-conscious demographic box-checking that might have been antithetical to its spirit of play. But choices, however incidental, about what kinds of domestic arrangements are shown and not shown on hugely popular children’s programs must strike their audiences in some kind of way. Is my daughter getting the message that divorce makes for annoyingly needy kids and sad parents? Might “Bluey” ’s traditional-family idyll cause children in any other kinds of circumstances to feel more alone than they might otherwise? What is the responsibility of such shows when it comes to representing marriage, parenting, “the family”?
In the nineteen-fifties, television had been touted by the likes of the parenting luminary Benjamin Spock and the prominent psychoanalyst Erik Erikson as potentially beneficial to children, but by the late nineteen-sixties the bloom was off the rose. TV had by now taken on the aspect of a public-health crisis; in 1972 the Surgeon General issued a report on its dangers not unlike the warning about cigarettes. As always, anxiety about screens was mixed up with judgments about “good enough” maternal presence, with the single mother, the working mother, the poor mother understood as especially reliant on TV to bridge her absences, producing the Gen X trope of the “latchkey kid.” This was a time when kids’ programming largely consisted of Saturday-morning cartoon fare: Road Runner flattening Wile E. Coyote with an anvil, Tom the cat getting a face full of dynamite. Absorptive, addictive, violent (and by then near-universal, with televisions flickering in ninety-five per cent of American homes), TV was officially a bad mom.
“Sesame Street” came onto the scene in 1969 with “a new set of questions,” Zeavin writes in “Mother Media”: “If television could miseducate, could it also be harnessed for good? . . . Could formal education exist on television?” With federal funding from the Head Start program, which aimed to redress inequity in early education, “Sesame Street” brought an unprecedented level of research to its work, engaging consultants like Chester Pierce, a psychiatrist and professor of education best known for coining the term “microaggression.” The father of a three-year-old daughter at the time “Sesame Street” first aired, Pierce was deeply concerned about how Black kids were being affected by media designed for “the universalized white child,” as Zeavin puts it. In 1965 the Moynihan Report had shored up the cultural phantasm of “the white family” by casting Black families as fatally incomplete, dominated by single mothers. “Sesame Street,” Pierce said, had not only an opportunity but a responsibility to counteract racial bias by addressing itself to Black children, depicting Black characters, Black leaders, Black life. When it débuted, “Sesame Street” was celebrated by many for its pioneering diversity—and was initially banned in Mississippi for showing kids of different races playing together.
“Sesame Street” ’s standing as a beloved cultural institution is, to my mind, well earned. Like all great children’s media, the show understood that nothing could be more philosophically serious, socially consequential, or deserving of close study than that ingenious technology for integrating reality we call “child’s play.” The “Sesame Street” Muppets gave millions of children, including me, an emotional education, making uncomfortable feelings—Grover’s crazed fear, Cookie Monster’s raging desire, Elmo’s helpless unknowingness—sites of play, and giving children a chance to be soothers and sources of wisdom to furry, bug-eyed ids. The show also distinguished itself in its willingness to tackle complex social and existential realities. In addition to exploring—both metaphorically and directly—racism, ableism, and other forms of prejudice in many episodes across many decades, “Sesame Street” was one of the earliest kids’ shows in the United States to grapple with mortality. In a famous 1983 episode written by Norman Stiles, the human cast member Gordon comes upon Big Bird walking backward with his head between his knees, looking pleased with this new perspective. “Why are you doing that?” Gordon asks. “Just because,” the Muppet placidly replies, capturing, in two words, the absurdist wisdom of the child at play. Later, Big Bird brings the adult cast members a portrait he has made of the grocery-store owner Mr. Hooper, a beloved original cast member played by Will Lee, who had died of a heart attack some months earlier. Big Bird wants to give Mr. Hooper his drawing; where is he? The show could have recast Mr. Hooper after Lee’s death, or invented a story about his character moving away. Instead, haltingly, some with tears in their eyes, the adults explain that Mr. Hooper is dead, which means he’s gone forever. “Why does it have to be this way?” Big Bird cries. “Give me one good reason!" The adults exchange uncertain looks. Finally Gordon steps forward. “It has to be this way . . . because,” he says, echoing Big Bird’s earlier explanation for doing a funny walk. “Just . . . because.” The most fundamental “Why?” leaves the grownups at a loss, and the reasoning they reach for is the child’s.
But “Sesame Street” also received criticism from some for claiming to speak to all children without reflecting the economic realities of many of their lives. (Zeavin relays an unforgettable take on Oscar the Grouch from the feminist activist Dorothy Pitman Hughes: “That cat who lives in a garbage can . . . should be out demonstrating and turning over every institution, even Sesame Street, to get out of it.”) Urie Bronfenbrenner, the founder of the Head Start program, lamented that the show, in failing to reckon with poverty, “disappeared through a manhole” the actual pain of childhood.
Looking back from our era of so much blankly enthused C.G.I. fizz, it’s striking, and gratifying, to hear someone complain of a kids’ show, even a great one, not being painful enough. To what extent can the nonrepresentation of pain cause pain? And how do we, as parents, decide how much pain to screen out and how much to allow into the frame?
In a 1981 episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Fred Rogers raises the subject of divorce with a delivery man who becomes flustered and leaves. “I guess that’s something he doesn’t like to talk about,” a slow-walking, slow-talking Rogers says to his viewers, but “it is something that people can talk about.” In an intimate closeup, he explains that divorce is not the child’s fault, that divorce is a grown-up thing, that parents who don’t love each other anymore still love their children.
In another episode in that same season, Rogers introduces his friend Jeff, a wheelchair-bound child who explains that when he was a baby, he had a tumor that “broke the nerves to tell my hands and legs what to do.” In what must be the most moving few minutes of children’s television in history, Jeff and Mr. Rogers sing a song together called “It’s You I Like.” “The way you are right now, the way down deep inside you . . . not your fancy chair; that’s just beside you.” The two then discuss what to do when you feel blue. Jeff’s worries, Rogers explains to the camera after seeing his young friend off, are different from the worry that one’s parents might separate. It’s a juxtaposition that puts the latter, of all the misfortunes beyond a child’s control that a child’s soul shines through, into a certain wide-angle perspective, showing young viewers that kids face many kinds of struggles, and normalizing them.
Discounting a bizarre 1941 “Looney Toons” episode in which Daffy Duck’s wife takes him to court, no American children’s show had taken on divorce before this; Rogers was way ahead of the curve here. More than a decade later, in 1992, “Sesame Street” shot a story line about the divorce of Mr. Snuffleupagus’s parents, but after a test screening upset some preschoolers, producers pulled the episode. Its writer, Norman Stiles, who also wrote the “Farewell, Mr. Hooper” episode, later remarked that the team “felt safer” dealing with death than with divorce.
It would take “Sesame Street” twenty more years to address divorce in any substantive way, and even then it did so not on the show proper but in a 2012 DVD special produced by Sesame Workshop’s “Outreach” program. (“Sesame Street” also lagged in depicting other kinds of non-traditional family structures, not showing an openly gay couple until 2021.) In creating the 2012 divorce special, the writer Christine Ferraro tried to learn from the 1992 episode’s treatment of time. Where Stiles had shown the trauma of divorce in Snuffy’s present frame, Ferraro set it in the past, flashing back to the separation of the fairy puppet Abby Cadabby’s parents from a present in which she has adjusted to it. Abby used to have “a lot of big feelings” about her parents’ divorce, she tells us, but now she can confidently assure kids that everything will turn out O.K. This rendering of separation as an established premise to which a kid has at least begun acclimating is, I have noticed, a common approach.
One notable exception is the 2024 Netflix flop “Spellbound,” which takes a presently unfolding divorce as its main subject. The film is about a princess whose parents have been transformed into monsters (“like, actual monsters”), a shameful secret she must keep from her kingdom as she tries to figure out how to magic them back to their former, happily married human selves. The film’s standout song, “The Way It Was Before,” is no ice-castle power ballad but a poignant expression of the desire to go back in time. But there is no going back. The solution, in the end, is for the princess’s parents, voiced by Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, to admit that they’re unhappy together and move forward into a new normal: separation is the spell that releases them from monstrosity.
It’s an apt metaphor, in a movie that tries to allow some of the real anguish of marital breakdown to seep through the candy-colored sheen of its animation. The princess’s monster parents are enormous, violent, and non-verbal, and only interested in their daughter when she brings them cake. They have no memory of who she is or of their former selves, and their gradual recovery of language has a nightmarish quality; at first, they babble like helpless babies, literalizing a toxic relationship’s loss of communication as well as a child’s feeling of being responsible for her parents’ coherence as a couple. The princess’s initial anger when the monsters finally transform back into humans and tell her they need to split up is rawer and more explosive than one generally sees in kids’ films.
The problem with “Spellbound”—which is the same problem I have encountered in my search for kids’ shows about divorce—is that, despite cameos from greats like Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess, it’s not very good; the songs are middling, the plot sputters. Beggars can’t be choosers, so we watch it anyway. I appreciate, at least, the opportunity to reflect aloud on a rough analogy of my family’s circumstances. My daughter appreciates John Lithgow as a purple hamster.
Thinking about Norman Stiles’s comment that it felt “safer” to depict death than divorce, I was reminded of an episode from “Bluey” ’s first season: Bluey and Bandit are walking near their house when they come upon a badly wounded bird. Nestling it gently into a shoebox, they carry it to the vet, and learn, after a short wait, that the bird has died. Flummoxed, Bluey continues to check with her father about the meaning of this event. Is he sure the bird is gone? It’s definitely not coming back? Arriving home, she enlists her mother to pretend to be the vet in a reënactment of the experience. Chilli, who assumes that her daughter wants to play out a happier ending, announces that the bird has survived. No, Bluey wants the bird to die again in the game.
Divorce, to a child, is a kind of death, especially if she is old enough to have memories of parental togetherness. Where is the family unit that existed before? It is nowhere. Two roads have diverged in a wood, and she must find a way to take them both. Instead of the finality of bereavement, she faces—at least in cases of shared custody—a cryptic renewal. In a way, she meets her parents as though for the first time; they may have two distinct styles of homemaking, enforce different rules, serve her different kinds of food. She meets herself anew as well, noticing that with Dad she becomes, however subtly, a different child than she was with Mom, and vice versa. She may deploy different strains of her humor to make each laugh, press different buttons to make each angry. Transitions between the two parents (and selves, and lives) are widely considered one of the toughest aspects of divorce for a child—sites of recurrent loss and awkward morphing.
My co-parent and I remained close friends after separating, and so the family continued to spend time as a trio. I had thought this together time would comfort our daughter, showing her that although her parents lived apart, we would always be a family. But this was not her reaction. Her father and I would be hanging out in his kitchen, catching up on each other’s news, and our daughter would come in and begin, while giddily laughing, to separate our bodies, pulling one this way and the other that way. Or she would command us to go to separate rooms, or order one of us to leave the house. She seemed to be seeking some kind of mastery over her new circumstances not only by reënacting separation in various small ways but by enforcing it absolutely. The peas must not touch the potatoes. When she was with Dad, she seemed to delight in hiding from Mom’s face on the phone; when she was with Mom, she hid from Dad.
Clouded as I was by guilt and alarm, it took me some time to recognize that my daughter was processing the death of her parents’ marriage through a kind of play, testing its nature and meaning, experimenting with repeated exposure and outcome control. I was so used to regarding play as light and fun, it hadn’t occurred to me to think about how intuitively kids—and all of us—“play” with pain.
After talking with my daughter, I ended up revising my disappointment in “Bluey” ’s treatment of separation. As we were watching the second season again on my laptop in bed, I asked her whether she thought the show should include more about divorce, and she surprised me by saying that she considered Winton, Bluey’s classmate whose parents are separated, to be one of the show’s main characters, and a lovable one at that. We arrived at a scene in which Bluey is pretending to pilot a helicopter, flying her classmates wherever they want to go. Winton wants to go to his dad’s house, but he doesn’t know where it is. “I know he doesn’t live with my mum,” he says. The two kids search for his dad’s pool, and Bluey drops Winton from the sky into the deep end. It’s a quick exchange, easy to overlook, but it’s part of a larger sequence about the adaptive nature of good play; almost any circumstance that arises might be incorporated, including—and perhaps especially—a painful or confusing one.
“Things pop up that you can’t control,” Chilli says to Bluey in this same episode. “You just have to go with it.”
As a busy parent who stands weekly (O.K., more like daily) at the “What to Watch” crossroads, I continue to hope for children’s shows and movies as brilliant as “Bluey” which more closely reflect my daughter’s reality to her. In the meantime, I did find one that helped reflect it to me. The short film “Split: The Early Years” splices together candid interviews with twelve children of divorce, offering a glimpse into their various modes of processing the event. One child describes trashing his mother’s room when she first told him about the separation. Another says she has learned to meditate when anxious, yet another that she found it helpful to write down difficult feelings and then decide whether to keep the paper or rip it up.
After watching “Split” by myself, I went back and forth about whether to show it to my daughter. This was a “mother as medium” conundrum; what should I protect her from, and what could I let in? The children in “Split” express sadness, confusion, feelings of powerlessness, but also warmth, humor, and breathtaking wisdom. “Nobody’s perfect,” a floppy-haired boy who looks about eight years old rasps to the camera, “Nothing is perfect. Even if they make the most roundest circle in the world, it’s never perfect.” In the end, I decided to show my daughter the film. She was riveted, and I had the thought, while we heard from these children, many of whom were around her age, that when it comes to playing with pain, kids may have more to teach her than grownups do.
Of course, if you don’t have time to sit down and watch with your kid, and if darkness is coming on and dinner needs making and e-mail needs answering and nerves are wearing thin, you could also just say “Screw it” and press Play on what my daughter, sitting beside me on the couch as I write this, is watching, even if the story is, to paraphrase the literary critic Harold Bloom’s assessment, cliché-ridden, character-less, and depressingly dumbed down. “Harry Potter” may or may not be all those things, but, either way, at least here the perfect mother to whom we might be tempted to compare ourselves is, as writers of classic children’s tales have always known she should be, safely dead. ♦