IF IT AIN'T BROKE... :

Children's TV Catches Up With How Kids Watch (JULIE SALAMON, June 9, 2002, NY Times)

Parents who read to their children have always known that they could sit still for long stretches if a story interested them. But the realization didn't sink in with television programmers until the advent of the VCR, which showed that preschoolers could watch movies they liked over (and over) again. Newer shows like PBS's "Arthur" and "Clifford" and Nickelodeon's "Rugrats" and "SpongeBob SquarePants" became hugely popular, even with very young children, by relying on continuous stories.

Now "Sesame Street" has changed, too, in a recasting that is both subtle and radical. Big Bird, Elmo, the Count and Cookie Monster haven't had personality transformations, nor have they stopped counting, teaching the alphabet, singing and goofing around with famous guests. But since February, the start of the show's 33rd season, they are appearing in a much smaller number of longer and more comprehensive segments, usually 10 an hour.

Instead of dispersing one story throughout the hour, broken up by numerous unrelated sequences (the way commercials break into shows), stories are kept intact with an uninterrupted beginning, middle and end. The rest of the show resembles a kindergarten class schedule, with distinct subjects appearing at predictable times in a familiar way.

In the old format, a story about Telly's tuba getting broken might be 10 to 12 minutes long, but it would take 45 minutes to tell, with breaks for skits about the letter "M" or the number 3. Now the entire tuba tale is told in the designated "storytime" slot.

Less fun for parents, perhaps, but more appealing to preschoolers. "Children are able to understand a well-structured story a lot better than we believed they could in the late 1960's," said Daniel Anderson, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts, who has been a consultant to both "Sesame Street" and "Blue's Clues." In fact, he said, "having many short segments reduced interest in the show." So the charming but peripatetic skits on "Sesame Street," designed to keep children watching - and to entertain their parents - actually confused and ultimately annoyed preschoolers.

Another thing became apparent to researchers at "Sesame Street": many children don't mind watching alone - or at least they have grown accustomed to doing so. This undercuts another founding notion of "Sesame Street," that parents and children would be watching together. In the video age, parents have fewer qualms about popping in a tape to divert their children while they jump in the shower (or watch another show on the family's second or third television).

"Kids today are born into a media-saturated environment, so they're starting young with screen time," said Rosemary Truglio, the vice president of research and education for "Sesame Street." "Working moms have increased, so kids are watching while parents are getting ready for work or while they're already in day care. It's hard to imagine lots of co-viewing."

In his book The Tipping Point (which Ms Salamon mentions later in the piece), Malcom Gladwell has some (perhaps mildly unintentionally) hilarious stuff about childrens' television. Here's part of my review of his book :

He says that one of the things that makes a fad take hold is the "stickiness" of the idea behind it. He discusses this stickiness factor in the context of children's television. He starts with Sesame Street, which was apparently developed to conform to every single inane child rearing and educational theory that had been dreamed up at the time of its creation. The show was then rigorously test marketed to kids to see of the theories worked. It will come as no surprise that they turned out to be mostly wrong. For instance, in the initial versions they segregated humans from the Muppets, having been told that children could not separate fantasy from reality. This would surely have been news to Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, and Stan Lee. So then they showed the program to kids and found that they only paid attention when the Muppets were on screen and completely ignored the segments with live actors. Duh? Or take the creators of Blue's Clues, who had the revolutionary insight that they could just take one episode of the show and then broadcast it every day for a week, because--are you ready for this ?--kids don't mind repetition. In fact, they like it and learn better from it. Have any of these people ever had a kid ? Do you know a kid who doesn't want to read the same book over and over and over again? Here again, this cutting edge, revolutionary, radical, whatever you care to call it, social science merely proves that the traditional intuition of conservatives is right : we've done things the same way for thousands of years because they work, and no half-baked theories dreamed up by a bunch of pointy headed intellectuals in a lab are likely to improve upon them.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 10, 2002 5:59 PM