> "I see so much of these kinds of articles. All I can do is despair as my generation begins to make the exact same mistake as our outrageous parents who had ve

> "I see so much of these kinds of articles. All I can do is despair as my generation begins to make the exact same mistake as our outrageous parents who had very similar things to say about childhood programming which we all wax nostalgically on now." Thank you so much for this insightful post. As the parent of a two and four-year-old, reading this article all I could think was, "But Sesame Street is not for you!!! Who cares if your adult-self doesn't like Elmo?" People don't seem to understand that Sesame Street was established on and heavily influenced by hard scientific research [1], and that research has found letting your children watch the show gives them a head-start on learning before they enter public school. When the show changes, science informs those changes. And I can see it with my boys. Elmo youtube videos taught my two-year-old the alphabet, his shapes, and counting to 10, which blows his daycare teachers away. My four-year-old got the same jump on these concepts from Elmo. Funny enough, he seems to have outgrown the character and has moved onto Team Umizoomi [2] where he enjoys problem-based learning for math and patterns. It's best to watch these shows with the kids, engage the learning with them as they watch, and also make references to the characters and events to reinforce the learning away from the television. I also find all the "get off my lawn" comments in this thread and in these kinds of articles disheartening. I agree that it seems like my generation is just adopting the cycle of knee-jerk cynicism to change to which our elders subjected us. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sesame_Street_research [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Umizoomi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_Umizoomi