Two small children jump into a bubble bath with expressions of dazed, perpetual pleasure. The taller one has hair like molded chocolate, the other’s is like a yellow ice-cream swirl. Everything—the walls, the children’s skin—looks bouncy, as though it would squeak to the touch. The bubbles are white and opaque, like globs of shaving cream. Music plays, a mixture of giggles and xylophone, with a tune you remember and words you don’t. It keeps repeating. White bubble balls appear all over the hands of the children, on their feet, on their arms. The children, once clean, materialize outside the bathtub and do a happy dance.
This is “Bath Song,” a two-minute-and-fifty-two-second video produced by the children’s-animation juggernaut CoComelon. In the world of babies and toddlers who watch a lot of YouTube, “Bath Song” is “Star Wars,” the moon landing, the white Bronco hurtling across a California freeway. It was uploaded in 2018 and is now the fourth most viewed video on the entire platform. It has been watched nearly seven billion times.
Very young children are crazy for CoComelon—a supercharged, brightly colored, Plasticine utopia. The swirly-haired baby is called JJ. He has two older siblings, smiling parents who are endlessly available to make rainbow Popsicles, and a diverse group of friends who attend Melon Patch Academy under the tutelage of the youthful Ms. Appleberry. The scenes are depicted from toddler height; shots typically change every one to three seconds. All shapes are rounded at the corners: by company dictum, there are no sharp edges anywhere, so that nothing in CoComelon can hurt.
What’s heaven to babies—plugging one’s mouth with silicone, sleeping with one’s limbs bound, CoComelon—is the stuff of padded rooms to parents. “Sitting through even a second of CoComelon as an adult is roughly equivalent to spending a thousand years being tortured with red hot pokers in an echo chamber that has been filled with vomit and malfunctioning smoke detectors,” a columnist for the Guardian wrote recently. The candy-store music, the ultra-synthetic animation, the mixture of slow, bobbing movement and relentless editing—watch it for more than a few minutes, and you feel like you’re hallucinating. Where are we? Who are these children? JJ has only two teeth, but he knows the alphabet and plays soccer. What sort of baby is this?
In small children, screen time tends to induce a cycle of fervor, placidity, and withdrawal. Parents on social media refer to “CoComelon zombies” and “Cocainemelon,” and a small number of them have fearfully speculated that CoComelon is a direct cause of developmental differences and delays. There is no evidence of this. In fact, many parents of neurodivergent kids use CoComelon fixation as a way of engaging their children with simple social scripts: here’s what happens at the doctor, here’s how we get into our car seat. The first time I took my daughter to the dentist, at eighteen months old, she was apoplectic. I turned on CoComelon, and she instantly relaxed, happy to lie back in my arms in the big chair.
Television has long played babysitter. In 1948, when WABD, in New York, became the first American station to regularly offer full daytime programming, it issued a press release. “The schedule has been designed to coincide with the average housewife’s routine,” the station announced. “When the housewife has to wash the breakfast dishes or fix luncheon, for instance, there will be programs designed to keep preschool children occupied and out of her way.” Now such programs are available at all hours, which is how often we need them.
These days, each of us watches a personal screen that presents the things an algorithm has decided will best hold our attention. Kids are inducted into this life style as toddlers, if not before: by 2020, nearly half of two-to-four-year-olds in the United States had their own electronic devices. On YouTube, the attention of small children became a seam of glittering gold for content creators to mine. Some of what has resulted—Ms. Rachel, for instance, a streaming personality whose videos are like FaceTimes with a magical preschool teacher—is thoughtful and playful. Some of it is hypnotic: two-hour streams from the point of view of a train conductor chugging through the lush Welsh countryside, or the ubiquitous videos of disembodied hands opening toy eggs. And some of it is sinister: knockoff “PAW Patrol” face-swap videos, or awful cartoons in which a pregnant, off-brand Minnie Mouse might have a baby who steps on nails and cries.
Then, there is the endless array of programs that seem troublingly habit-forming but otherwise basically harmless: five-year-old influencers who chat about toys, videos that feature inane playacting with popular dolls, and the various animated nursery-rhyme channels of which CoComelon is king. Many parents end up settling on this last option when handing iPads to their toddlers, sometimes with a nagging thought or two in the back of their minds. Who actually makes this stuff, and with what degree of care? Is it all generated by computers following the dictates of some algorithm? Would it matter if it were?
CoComelon releases its videos in twenty-five languages, including American Sign Language, and they are distributed on dozens of streaming services around the world. “CoComelon Lane,” a Netflix spinoff that ages the CoComelon babies up to inquisitive talking toddlers, is on its second season. There are CoComelon live events, CoComelon merchandise, and a CoComelon podcast; a feature-length film is in the works. According to Nielsen, CoComelon has been streamed on Netflix for more than thirty billion minutes each year for the past three years. Even as it remains basically unknown to most people who have not semi-recently changed a diaper, it has become one of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time.
What is now the main CoComelon YouTube channel was created, in 2006, by a Korean immigrant couple in Los Angeles: Jay Jeon, a commercial director, and his wife. For years, even after the channel became hugely popular, their identities were a mystery. In 2020, shortly before selling CoComelon to a company called Moonbug, Jeon gave an interview to Bloomberg. He said that his wife had worked as a children’s-book author but asked that her name not be published. (He has since retreated into privacy again, and did not respond to requests for an interview.)
Jeon and his wife started out by making animated shorts—ninety seconds long, colorful and clumsy—to amuse their kids: Beethoven’s Fifth playing over a ladybug landing on a lion’s nose, say, in a video about the letter “L.” The YouTube channel soon generated enough ad revenue for the couple to quit their day jobs and hire a small team of employees. In 2015, the videos began featuring children; then the animation switched from a hand-drawn look to slick 3-D, and JJ appeared. YouTube’s algorithm buoyed the channel with unprecedented force: during two months in 2017, monthly views doubled, to two hundred and thirty-eight million. A year later, CoComelon was getting two billion monthly views; two years after that, the channel was averaging more than a hundred million viewers every day. Most of these viewers, presumably, could not yet form clear sentences.
Moonbug was founded in London, in 2018, with the aim of acquiring and expanding viral YouTube children’s channels. It rapidly grew the CoComelon franchise, hiring writers and getting sixty-minute song compilations on Netflix. Soon, CoComelon was the second most streamed program on that platform and its most popular show among Black, Asian, and Hispanic audiences in the U.S. In 2021, two longtime Disney executives, Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs, created a “next-generation media company” called Candle Media, with backing from the private-equity firm Blackstone. Among its first purchases was Moonbug, which it acquired for a reported three billion dollars.
Moonbug has nearly five hundred employees and twenty-nine children’s-media properties, which originated all over the globe and are produced in many different countries. CoComelon, by far its most successful, is headquartered in the company’s Los Angeles office, which is situated among a row of upscale chain storefronts near the Grove. I visited in February. At the entrance, a chalk sign proclaimed “Welcome to Moonbug” above the slogan “Learn. Laugh. Grow.” Inside, there was a rack of CoComelon toys in the reception area and, on the wall, collages of adorable fan art, mailed to the company by kids. Otherwise, the place looked like any creative-class content factory: an open-plan maze of people with monitors and headphones, radiating efficiency and a desire to go to lunch.
I was ushered into a conference room, where I spent the next five hours being pleasantly precision-targeted by a choreographed series of presentations and interviews. The chief creative officer at Moonbug, Richard Hickey, previously worked as a director in both children’s television and advertising. He and Andy Yeatman, the company’s managing director for the Americas and a former Netflix Kids executive, spoke like pitch decks. Moonbug’s mission, they said, was to “empower kids all over the world with essential life skills.” The company did this by acquiring I.P. with “reach and audience” which displayed core values of “compassion, empathy, and resilience.” CoComelon’s “creative value was very high,” they said, because its creators “love this I.P., love the characters, love the world, and are very intentional with everything we create about it.”
We were joined by two creative executives, Meghan Sheridan and Jasmine Johnson, and I peppered them with questions. How old is JJ supposed to be? The kids’ ages “stretch” to reflect both the reality and the aspiration of their audience’s lives, they said. I asked about JJ’s parents, his teacher, the town where CoComelon is set. There were answers to many of my questions in the roughly hundred-page show bible—a guide, for the staff, to CoComelon lore—but the information was mostly proprietary.
I wondered aloud about how the company handled the nuances of being in the business of children’s attention. For a profit-driven enterprise in the streaming era, all-day binges were probably the ideal mode of consumption. “We want kids to watch it for a little while, but the rest of the day should be filled up with exercise and interaction,” Hickey said. It was up to caregivers and parents to regulate screen time, he added; Moonbug’s job was to create a safe place on that screen. “If your kid is watching our content for half an hour, or fifteen minutes, or however long it might be, you know that nothing bad is going to happen—that they’ll be exposed to a very warm world,” he said.
I’d read an article in the Times in which researchers at Moonbug observed a young child who’d been placed in front of two screens. One screen played a Moonbug show and the other, called the Distractatron, played footage of everyday adult life. Each time the child looked away from the Moonbug screen toward the Distractatron, the researcher made a note—time to tweak the episode. Did the company really design its shows so that kids would never look away? Hickey and Yeatman said that the Distractatron was the work of a third-party research company, and that neither of them had even heard that word before the article was published. Such attentional calculations were not part of their process, Hickey told me, adding, “We use data in creative retrospectively.”
The conception of a CoComelon episode, as Hickey described it, involved joyful brainstorming sessions with a “story trust” that includes animation directors, creative executives, and writers. People would bring in their favorite childhood stuffed animals or stories about how hard it is to zip up a child’s p.j.’s in the middle of the night. Then, Sheridan told me, they’d identify a “learning takeaway,” such as recognizing letters, cultivating empathy, or brushing your teeth. Johnson mentioned an episode called “Hair Wash Day,” in which a Black mother washes and styles her son’s hair. She said it was particularly meaningful to her that an episode authentically depicted bath-time routines for a Black family. Later, Natascha Crandall, an educational consultant, told me that she and others reviewed early versions of episodes and suggested careful improvements. If a scene showed a kid juggling apples, she’d scratch that—it might impart the accidental takeaway that food was meant to be played with. Also, it wouldn’t be appropriate, she said, given that some in the show’s audience might be food-insecure.
After lunch, a few members of the music team arrived. An appealingly earnest crew of Berklee graduates, they were led by Eric Kalver, a thirtysomething who comes from a family of children’s entertainers. (“My father’s a magician, and my mother was a clown,” he said.) Someone put an electronic keyboard on the marimba setting and played the CoComelon theme song; I let out an involuntary squeal. The team workshopped a new song, about kids playing with pots and pans, in front of me, adjusting chord structures on the fly, adding flourishes on the ukulele and on the drums. Kalver said that they would probably sample forks and knives as percussion, and add them to the usual xylophones, marimbas, glockenspiels, woodwinds, and laughter. The learning takeaway of this episode was clear: Moonbug was a spontaneous, creative place, telling stories with passion and love.
A few months before my visit, the company had laid off about thirty people, including most of the CoComelon writers and much of its in-house animation team. Bloomberg reported that Moonbug planned to experiment with artificial intelligence. I asked Hickey about this. He told me that Moonbug would continue to “look at what the technology is and where the benefit is, for raising the bar creatively,” but that there was “zero” A.I. at work in CoComelon currently. “As you’ll see, it’s very much flesh and bones all the way through the process,” he said. “It’s human.”
Some of the fears regarding CoComelon and its ilk are not new. Socrates, in Plato’s Republic, asks, “Shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?” Mass media made exposure to tales seem less controllable than ever; in 1935, one parenting expert lamented the radio, saying, “No locks will keep this intruder out, nor can parents shut their children in away from it.” “Sesame Street” arrived at the end of the sixties, and though it was hailed as a benchmark in quality programming, some observers speculated that its fast pace would leave kids overstimulated and malcontent. (The version of the show that they saw is Tarkovsky compared with what’s on YouTube.) By the end of the eighties, preschool-age children were already watching TV about as much as they currently watch screens, around thirty hours per week.
But CoComelon’s core viewership is not preschool-age—it’s pre-preschool-age. “I’ve been in kids’ TV for a super, super long time,” Susan Kim, a writer in the industry, told me. “It used to be that there were certain things you couldn’t say, or you’d be rebuked in the room.” Kim, who’s written for “CoComelon Lane,” worked on “Square One,” in the nineteen-eighties; “Thomas & Friends,” in the nineties; and “Arthur,” in the two-thousands, among many other programs. “For one, you weren’t allowed to say that anything was for one-to-two-year-olds,” she said. “I think everyone had the sense, whether or not they’d actually read the white papers on it, that children that young should not be planted in front of video and left alone.”
Cartoon by Michael Maslin
That began to change in the late nineties. “Teletubbies,” the psychedelic British kids’ show featuring colorful alien-baby creatures, began airing in 1997; PBS imported it and marketed it toward children as young as one. Around the same time, the company Baby Einstein started producing videos of puppets and patterns set to classical music. (Disney bought the company in 2001, for a reported twenty-five million dollars.) A few years later, HBO produced “Classical Baby,” a soothing, Peabody-winning anthology series featuring a cartoon baby who conducts an all-animal orchestra that plays Aaron Copland and Erik Satie; it has been a staple of my life with young children. These shows inspired controversy in their time, but they were gentle and calm, with the vibes of a peaceful, edifying, possibly stoned afternoon. Even so, when the American Academy of Pediatrics issued its first screen-time guidelines, in 1999, it recommended that kids under two avoid TV altogether.
These guidelines were revised in 2016. The A.A.P. now holds that children under eighteen months can benefit from video chatting, and that kids aged two to four can learn from high-quality educational shows; it suggests that they avoid nursery-rhyme channels, fast-paced shows, and YouTube on Autoplay. Research has repeatedly documented connections between early prolonged exposure to television and worse outcomes later in life—language delays, problems with attention and self-regulation. But many of these relationships are likely to be correlational or interactive, not causal. Parents who have less money and fewer enrichment opportunities, or who are racially marginalized, or who struggle with their mental health—frequently overlapping factors—tend to have kids who watch more television. If you can’t afford child care or a lot of toys, screen time is always available as a babysitter and a treat. (Although programs such as “Sesame Street” are associated with improvements in children’s language and executive functioning, it’s hard to know whether this is because of the content or because of the sorts of parents who choose to put it on.)
Jenny Radesky, a developmental behavioral pediatrician, helped author the A.A.P. guidelines. She has been watching and evaluating children’s TV shows for years, scoring their educational effectiveness on a scale of zero to two. Ms.Rachel and the PBS program “Daniel Tiger” consistently received twos, she said. CoComelon and Blippi, another Moonbug property, were always ones—neither awful nor excellent. Zero, she said, was for the dregs of YouTube. Another leading researcher, Rachel Barr, who teaches at Georgetown, told me that the YouTube era had produced a lot of shows that were “frenetic, sort of bedazzling, high on the cognitive load.” This style drives us to pay attention: our visual systems, Barr said, are geared to reflexively orient toward rapid changes. But it can overwhelm a child’s ability to “encode the content,” as she put it—that is, to actually learn anything.
The people who create CoComelon might value education, Barr went on, but the metric that would determine Moonbug’s profitability was time onscreen. Radesky suggested that the company’s priorities were apparent in the way it presented its content. “Just the fact that the compilations are marked thirty minutes, sixty minutes: they know these products are filling a gap created by parents being overworked, not having family leave—who are so stressed that they need to occupy their children for a certain amount of time,” she said. Overwork and the absence of child care, she noted, are “systemic issues that keep us from parenting the way we want to.” These systemic issues may help explain why, on Netflix in the U.S., CoComelon is particularly popular with nonwhite viewers. In 2020, according to an annual survey by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, white children aged eight and under used mobile devices for an average of thirty-seven minutes a day. That year, Black children of the same age used mobile devices for more than a hundred minutes a day.
Jepha Krieg worked in Moonbug’s London office in 2021 and 2022. She was part of a team of about thirty people who repackaged the company’s videos into compilations in order to generate more views and more ad revenue. Previously, Krieg had worked as a preschool teacher, and she’d got the impression that kids who watched hours of CoComelon every day had a hard time regulating their emotions. But she wanted to get into online media—she’s now a channel manager for a digital-content studio—and Moonbug had a mission of creating educational resources, which sounded great. Her point of view changed once she started working there. “I think they have an excellent P.R. team who know all the buzzwords to make it feel like they’re making excellent, culturally relevant, educational content,” she told me. “And then they’ve got thirty-seven people in the back room making fifteen different combinations of the same ten songs over and over.”
As part of her job, Krieg would keep an eye on traffic: if a video with a thumbnail image of a certain dog got a lot of views, she’d make a bunch of thumbnails featuring that dog. At first, she said, the compilations were mostly fifteen or thirty minutes long. “Then we were, like, ‘Oh, the thirty-minute ones are doing really well—let’s try sixty minutes!’ ‘Those are doing really well—let’s try ninety!’ ‘Let’s now have everyone posting two-hour-long compilations on every single channel every single week, hooray.’” Looking through CoComelon’s YouTube channels to find the outer length limit, the only channel I found with five-hour compilations of different songs was the one dedicated to Cody, a Black character on the show.
After I visited the Moonbug office in Los Angeles, I looked up some of the company’s ex-employees on LinkedIn. I found a post from CoCoMelon’s former head writer, written last fall, announcing the good news that he and his wife had welcomed their second child and the bad news that he’d been laid off four days before the birth. Below the post were comments expressing both support and confusion. “All new parents owe it to u as ur work has made those early years of our babies engaging and entertaining,” one person wrote. Someone else commented, “But... isn’t that show like taking over the world?”
I ended up speaking to ten people who had worked on CoComelon or associated properties at various points between 2020 and 2023. Most of them requested anonymity—some had signed nondisclosure agreements, others feared professional reprisal. Those who had worked in the L.A. office described it as a chaotic, micromanaged, and morale-depleting place. More broadly, they voiced complaints that echoed what Krieg, the former London employee, had suggested: that the company’s stated commitments to education and cultural relevance, including diversity, primarily existed as a rationalization for harnessing the maximum amount of attention from young children around the world. Usually, in children’s television, “the audience comes first,” one ex-employee, who’d also worked at multiple major networks, told me. “At Moonbug, revenue and analytics is first, audience second.”
Multiple people asked if I’d heard about the spreadsheets. CoComelon episodes, they said, were put together with the aid of spreadsheets showing the most popular search terms on YouTube. “Ideally, you want to come up with an engaging idea that has a bunch of those search terms in it,” another former employee told me. A lot of parents, harangued by a toddler, will open YouTube and search the word “train.” To fulfill this content need, a twenty-one-year-old assistant had co-written a song called “Train Song,” which eventually featured in an episode that now has more than a quarter of a billion views. (The assistant told me that she regularly worked ten-hour days and was also tasked with writing scripts. Her starting salary was thirty-six thousand dollars.)
Moonbug said that the spreadsheets do not dictate creative decisions. And one might characterize the executives’ approach as basic market research: figuring out what customers want and providing it. Children’s television has always been a commercial proposition; even the ad-free “Sesame Street” has produced landfills’ worth of trademarked merchandise. But CoComelon’s level of top-down engineering—creativity by way of search-engine optimization—is atypical in children’s TV, the former employees said. There was a CoComelon master-planning matrix that dictated the year’s priorities: episode themes, the number of episodes starring each character. “So it gets to this weird place where you’re, like, ‘O.K., this week what we need is a Christmas episode set to a classic nursery rhyme, starring Cody, that teaches colors,’” a former employee whom I’ll call Quinn said. Another person described writing television for kids as a matter of balancing the reality principle (curricular points, story beats), the superego (notes from the network), and the id—“the juice of the story, the things kids fear and love, the things that make them laugh.” Writing for Moonbug, this person added, was ninety per cent superego and maybe eight per cent reality principle, with hardly any room for the id: “Sometimes you start thinking, Gee, if I were ChatGPT, perhaps that would be better for what you want.”
CoComelon touts the diversity of its world: of the six main child characters, one is Black, one is Korean, and one is Mexican. Recently, the company took some culture-war heat for an episode of “CoComelon Lane” in which Nico, one of the toddlers, puts on a tutu and dances around with his two dads. Susan Kim, who was hired to write an episode of “CoComelon Lane” about Cece, the Korean character, said that it was to Moonbug’s credit that they’d sought out a Korean American writer. But others described the company as an uncomfortable place for racial minorities and queer people, in part because issues of personal identity were often reduced to marketing opportunities and liabilities. “If we were trying to do a Korean New Year episode, they’d go, ‘I think we need to see more data on this,’ as a way of tabling the discussion,” Quinn said. (Moonbug disputed this.) Nico’s two dads had never been cleared to appear on the main CoComelon YouTube channel. “We just wanted to have his parents pick him up from school, and he has two dads, and that’s it—they just exist,” Quinn said. “But it was always just, like, ‘Well, if we do this, we really need to do it right, maybe we’ll want to bring in a consultant.’” (Moonbug disputed this as well.) Nina, the Mexican character, had initially been written as Puerto Rican, but two people told me that her ethnicity had been changed because higher-ups believed, and said outright, that a Mexican character would reach a bigger audience. (Moonbug said that changing a character’s identity was a normal part of the creative process, and that in this case it had been done with Mexican American and Spanish-language cultural consultants.)
Several people also brought up an incident from 2022, in which a white executive allegedly told a Black executive, who was wearing her hair in locs, “If I’d have known you’d wear your hair like this, I wouldn’t have hired you.” Soon afterward, the Black executive left the company with a settlement. Public records confirm a worker’s-compensation case in California filed by this former executive, citing psychiatric damages. (Moonbug said that it had investigated the incident and concluded that the allegation was false.)
Public financial reports filed in the U.K. show Moonbug bringing in thirty-five million dollars in gross profit in 2020, a hundred million in 2021, and a hundred and sixty-five million in 2022, the first year it turned a net profit. That year, as the show expanded, contracts were extended to animation teams in India and Costa Rica; a group of in-house animators helped train these new teams, then got laid off early last year. CoComelon’s streaming numbers are almost unfathomable—an internal e-mail from the first quarter of 2023 shows that its quarterly YouTube streams were at more than sixty billion minutes. Still, according to Bloomberg, Moonbug came in under its earnings targets last year.
A few months before the October layoffs, employees noticed an atypical slowdown in production. Around that time, the writers were instructed to come up with an episode set in a Target store, which would be posted as sponsored content. At a team-building workshop held one floor above the L.A. office, leadership tried to boost morale, soliciting honest feedback about people’s frustrations. Some employees cried, overwhelmed.
Moonbug is the first major kids’ studio to use YouTube as a primary distribution platform, and most of its shows—unlike those which originate on Disney or Amazon or Netflix or Apple—are not unionized. Several people told me that the writer responsible for the five highest-performing episodes of 2022 was making seventy-five thousand dollars a year when he got laid off, in October. (Moonbug denied this.) In December, Bloomberg reported that Candle was seeking to restructure its Blackstone debt, which ran to more than a billion dollars. Moonbug, one former employee told me, was regarded as “a cautionary tale by a lot of people in the animation industry, a sign of where the entire industry could go if left unchecked, without protections.”
What the former employees described as micromanagement struck me as an attempt to fine-tune the formula behind the show’s extraordinary success and render it replicable, scalable, and defensible in perpetuity—a way to add billions of viewing minutes every year, cheaply, and for this to be considered a positive, educational thing. But it’s possible that the je ne sais CoComelon is largely a matter of fortunate timing. The show came around just as YouTube was invented, and right before Apple released the iPad. The major animation studios were not producing shows for kids under two. When those children were handed personal electronic devices, the pristine land of their attention was wide open for amateurs to farm. CoComelon found something that kids loved, caught the algorithm’s favor, and instigated a feedback loop. The more kids saw it, the more they liked it; the more they liked it, the more they saw it. And so on.
This is not to say that Moonbug has not stewarded CoComelon’s success carefully. I asked everyone I talked to if there were any funny internal guidelines for the CoComelon universe. There were, they said—for example, shots in which a kid was on a parent’s shoulders were to be avoided, because they would make it glaringly obvious how disproportionately large the kids’ heads were. Three people also brought up an executive’s dictum about endings: even if an episode was soundtracked by a lullaby, the characters should not go to sleep at the end of it. If they did, kids at home might be encouraged to press Pause, and put the screen away.
In April, I took my daughter, who will soon turn four, to a live CoComelon event in a hotel ballroom in Philadelphia. It featured a disco-dance section, themed photo ops, crafts, and meet and greets with adults dressed as giant, mascot-like versions of the show’s characters. When we arrived, at ten in the morning, it was packed. The children, many of them in CoComelon clothing, screamed with elation; expressionless parents held up phones to capture their joy. The CoComelon version of “The Wheels on the Bus” played over loudspeakers, and I had the uncanny feeling that something from deep inside my computer had breached the realm of the real.
Even if Moonbug was not currently using A.I. to replace creative labor, some former employees told me, the writing seems to be on the wall. Wired recently analyzed several YouTube channels that closely mimic CoComelon and found evidence of generative A.I. in the music and the writing. Jeffrey Katzenberg, a co-founder of DreamWorks—which is reportedly developing the CoComelon movie—has suggested that ninety per cent of animation work will someday be done by A.I. There have been two more rounds of layoffs at Moonbug this year. Two people speculated that Candle Media was hoping to sell Moonbug to Disney—Staggs and Mayer have rejoined the Disney board, as advisers—and that the company, having exhausted its growth-mode options, was trying to engineer an attractive balance sheet for a sale.
There is not much that one individual—a parent, a person working at an animation company—can do to change the stark financial incentives of the attention economy, or the constraints on family life that make screen time so attractive. I have found myself wondering if we’d be better off thinking less about educational value in children’s media and more about real pleasure, both for us and for our kids. “The best kids’ TV feels very bespoke,” Susan Kim told me. “If you’re a child, it feels like it was made for you. It feels intense and absorbing, imaginative and free and wonderful and scary and funny.” It can feel like this even on the days that you cling to screen time like a raft in a thrashing ocean. Recently, all four people in my household got the stomach flu simultaneously. We lay on the floor of the living room and watched “Classical Baby” on repeat—all six episodes, three times in a row. I felt delight, even then, and dimly recalled one of the conclusions about screen time which is most strongly backed by research: the TV that is best for kids is whatever a parent will sit down and watch with them.
I often feel that the anxiety I have about my kids’ screen time comes mainly from sublimated disappointment in myself. The most frightening studies I’ve seen found that parents, when using smartphones, respond to their children’s needs less, play with them less, and show decreased sensitivity and warmth. Parental device usage correlates strongly with children’s device usage; the average adult spends some four and a half hours each day looking at her phone. When it comes to the shows we allow our children to watch, we are afraid of—what, exactly? That our kids’ capacity for deep thought will be blunted by compulsive screen use? That they’ll lose their ability to sit with the plain fact of existence, to pay attention to the world as it is, to conceive of new possibilities? That they’ll grow up to be just like us, only worse?
At the ballroom in Philadelphia, after a bubbly pigtailed performer led the kids through a round of the Chicken Dance, the enormous mascot versions of JJ and Cody came out, their heads bigger than beach balls. Everyone ran toward them as if Taylor Swift and Beyoncé had just emerged in our midst. My daughter, suddenly self-conscious, shrank into herself—most of the children, unlike her, were still wearing diapers and clutching pacifiers. Still, when it was time to leave, she was inconsolable. We had to get on a bus to a train to a subway to another subway, and it was becoming a whole scene, us in the hotel lobby. I pulled out her tablet and her headphones and turned on “Finding Nemo,” a movie made by an enormous corporation about a parent who tries, unsuccessfully, to protect his son from the beautiful, overwhelming, treacherous world.♦
