The producers of “Cocomelon” have heard your concerns. But Moonbug, the studio behind the popular preschool series, doesn’t buy into the common critique that its programming is overstimulating or addictive.
As such, Moonbug recently announced a partnership with UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers, a nonprofit research center focused on children’s entertainment. As exclusively reported by Variety, the center analyzed the company’s slate and practices alongside peer-reviewed research on early childhood learning before developing a set of four core learning principles to be applied across “Cocomelon,” “Blippi,” “Little Angel” and more. Mooonbug published those principles on its website on Tuesday, hoping to prove a commitment to healthy and educational content.
“Once you dig into the work that we do — which you’re welcome to do — you’ll see our writers care deeply about children’s entertainment,” Rich Hickey, Moonbug’s chief creative officer, tells Variety. “A lot of them are caregivers and parents with tiny kids themselves. We can’t do much if there are other opinions that are a little bit noisy, but we think we’re super diligent throughout our process.”
The four principles — navigating real-life moments, modeling positive relationships, promoting learning through play and telling authentically inclusive stories — are explained in detail in the new publication on Moonbug’s site alongside explanations of their importance to child development and guidelines for their implementation.
For example, in the section about navigating real-life moments, the site notes that depicting children brushing their own teeth or choosing their own clothes can help young viewers “establish routines” and “gain more independence.” Beneath that is a suggestion from CSS to “minimize distractions and tangential songs or storylines when characters are navigating real-life moments” because “research shows that preschool children are prone to distraction and tangential elements may interfere with their ability to learn lessons.”
Hickey says that “it was always important to find the child development insight that would create the hook or takeaway” for each piece of content Moonbug created, but that those considerations previously happened on an episode-by-episode basis instead of being standardized at the company level. “We hadn’t really had consistency across all of our episodes. This partnership allowed us to create an umbrella so we could go, ‘Hey, at Moonbug, everything we make is adhering to these principles.'”
But Hickey and his team are confident about what they’re producing, especially after working with CSS. “One of our most pleasant revelations from working with this group of experts is that they looked and said, ‘That’s that’s not a thing.’ They were very impressed with the level of detail and and the work that we put in. That wasn’t something that worried them.”
CSS founder and CEO Dr. Yalda T. Uhls, a developmental psychology who was previously a studio executive at MGM and Sony, backs up Hickey’s claim — but she understands where Moonbug’s critics are coming from. Before working with the studio, she said she had her own concerns about “Cocomelon.”
“When you read mass media, you’re like, ‘Gosh, this may not be great.’ And we built an advisory council of some of the best experts in the world in developmental psychology and communications, and they had the same impression,” she says. “We were all surprised that it wasn’t as bad as mass media suggested. We did a review of academic literature to see if, indeed, there is research demonstrating that this kind of children’s media could be addictive, or rapid cuts have a negative impact on young people, and there really isn’t. The data is fairly inconclusive.”
According to Uhls, the CSS team evaluated several pieces of Moonbug’s content on a scale of zero to two points against a rubric of research-based metrics. “There was certainly room for improvement and more systematically thinking about development, but most of the content was a one. It could get to a two, but it was not a zero, by and large — and this is before we started working with them.”
Making sense of the discourse around “Cocomelon,” Uhls’ position is that parents are reacting based on their own tastes without a technical understanding of how children’s braids respond to what they watch. Addressing that discrepancy is part of the aim of publicizing the new learning principles.
Recalling her own experience as a parent — before she began studying child psychology — Uhls says, “When my kids were growing up, ‘Barney’ got on my nerves. But re-watching as somebody with a PhD in developmental psychology, it actually had so many good things. As a parent, if you don’t understand what’s developmentally appropriate for a child, you’ll rely on your own instincts. They watch these shows and cringe; they seem a little over-the-top, and the songs may seem annoying. You start to feel like, ‘This can’t be good for my child.’ But the research actually shows it’s not harmful. It can have positive outcomes.”
“We’re very conscious that kids are spending time with our songs and stories,” Hickey says. “We take that responsibility really seriously, and we want to be more and more intentional and as transparent as we can to help caregivers understand the experience any kid has watching our content. I would love caregivers to spend some time with the content themselves, really have a look at how much learning we pack into each episode, and how judge for yourselves from there.”
Read about Moonbug and CSS’ learning principles, including academic citations, here.