It was winter in upstate New York, and the house was drafty. There were three of us at home: me, my mother, and my two-year-old daughter. Before my child—let’s call her Stella—was born, I scoffed at screens, at parents who gave their children iPads in restaurants and smartphones in their strollers. I was soon chastened. It had been sleeting for days, and there’s only so much peekaboo one woman, or even two, can play every hour. I had sung “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” until I’d gone hoarse.
That fateful afternoon, I put on a show recommended by a friend with a child slightly older than Stella. I was still a novice in the field of children’s streaming content. Free on YouTube, the program was called Songs for Littles; many refer to it simply by its creator’s name, Ms. Rachel.
I lay on the couch, trying to gather the strength to do yet another load of laundry, and watched Stella watch the screen. This was relaxing: I was close to my beloved child, but for once, she was asking nothing of me. What was not relaxing was Ms. Rachel, whose affect struck me as enthusiastic bordering on deranged.
“Hi FRIENDS! I’m SO excited to LEARN with you toDAY!”
About forty years old, Ms. Rachel was dressed like a giant toddler, with a bubble-gum-pink headband, matching baby tee and Converse, and denim overalls. She smiled relentlessly as she sang nursery rhymes, counted, and pronounced simple words with an exaggerated intonation. She dipped out of sight, popped back, and said “peekaboo.” Unlike me, Ms. Rachel never got tired of playing. Ms. Rachel was never in a bad mood or distracted. Stella could watch her play peekaboo a million times if she wanted to. YouTube is the perfect parent: its energy never flags. How could I ever match Ms. Rachel’s enthusiasm? When she performed “Wheels on the Bus,” she was as jubilant as Julie Andrews in a field of wildflowers on an Austrian mountaintop.
Something about Ms. Rachel got under my skin. The sexualization of young children is a staple of media anxiety; Ms. Rachel, a middle-aged woman stripped of the markers of adulthood, represents the opposite swing of the pendulum. She is often compared to Mister Rogers, the secular saint of American children’s media, but Mister Rogers was a grown-up man in a tie, with a default tone of gentle seriousness. That was part of his authority. Ms. Rachel’s megatoddler costume seemed to me to embody the American assumption that the adult woman disappears with the birth of her child, when she is transformed into a caring appendage, desexed and infantilized, addressed as “Mom” even by strangers, and starts spending holidays with her children in matching pajamas.
On a more basic level, I found Ms. Rachel annoying. She is perhaps most famous for her singsong, high-pitched voice. When I googled her, I found that I was not alone in finding this voice deeply irritating, along with her slow, exaggerated delivery and relentless good cheer. But Stella loved Ms. Rachel. Stella was giggling with joy.
“Should we go DOOOOOOOWN the SLIIIIIIIDE?”
“THAT was FUUUUUUUN!”
“I WONder if we can COUNT even HIGHer than FIIIIIIIIIIVE!”
Ms. Rachel cast prompts into the digital nothingness and then paused as if waiting for a response: “Can you say ‘BALL’?” She cupped her hand over her ear with a dramatic gesture and then cried, “Good JOB! You DID it!” She is big on affirmation, the staple of the “gentle parenting” method that is the conventional wisdom for bourgeois millennials. But hearing “good job” lobbed into the void again and again drove me crazy: the final reduction to meaninglessness of American parental praise, lavished on a child simply for existing. Gentle parenting is, of course, preferable to abuse or rigid authoritarianism. But it raises the question of what will happen when the child enters the cruel, unfeeling real world and the praise tap is suddenly shut off. Are such children doomed to become adults who listen to self-help audiobooks and YouTube lectures of anonymous affirmation?
Stella never answered Ms. Rachel’s prompts that afternoon, perhaps because she knew Ms. Rachel couldn’t hear her. She just smiled adoringly and waited for Ms. Rachel to keep talking.
I turned off the TV and persuaded Stella to play with blocks. I was trying to be a good mother. “Good JOB! You DID it!” I cooed when she finished a tower. I said it without thinking. It was a reflex, not a choice.
“You sound just like Ms. Rachel,” my mother observed, chuckling with a hint of lighthearted malice. It was true. We agreed that Ms. Rachel was incredibly annoying, yet I had already memorized the gestures that accompanied her version of “Wheels on the Bus,” because Stella liked the song much better when we could act it out together. Before long, Stella and I would be hopping like little bunnies according to Ms. Rachel’s instructions. Did I hate Ms. Rachel’s show because it made me see how ridiculous I, a middle-aged intellectual, might look as I cooed and crowed to my child? As I crawled around on all fours pretending to be a dog for her entertainment? As I nibbled her chubby, adorable, delicious little arm? Long after I had turned off YouTube, Ms. Rachel haunted me, like a phantom pain or psychosomatic itch.
The Pleasure of the Text
Before I had Stella, I imagined that I would invent whole worlds for my child, that I would tell her stories for hours on end. After all, I had spent my own childhood and much of my adulthood in the world of fiction. As a child, I would sometimes read for seven or eight hours a day. I have no memory of learning to read, but I do recall teachers having to come and shake my shoulder to rouse me from a novel-induced trance. I remember arriving for the first day of middle school and joining the circle where we were asked to report how many books we had read over the summer. My response, forty, sealed my fate as a social pariah. Nobody invited me to a birthday party for a whole year. But what did I care? I was reading.
No one has ever accused Ms. Rachel of being an artist.
In my fantasies of parenthood, I had underestimated the enormous gap between what interests young children and what interests adults. (Finding this overlap is part of the genius of the greatest children’s books, because children depend on adults to read to them.) Nor had I seriously considered that when I was reading to an infant or toddler or preschooler, I would not be reading all the grown-up books I myself wanted to read or doing any of the other less seductive grown-up tasks required of me. I now realize that I had imagined Stella learning to read almost spontaneously, without having been taught. One day she would sit down and read, just as one day she would stand up and walk.
I knew, of course, that reading to your child was paramount, almost synonymous with good parenting. Since Stella’s birth, I had been admonished to read to her; the hospital sent us home with a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But when I followed the doctor’s instructions, I learned that infants do not wish to compete with a story for their parent’s attention. They would rather chew on the book or throw it on the ground and hear it go thump. They prefer continuous eye contact, nursery rhymes, cheerful narration of tasks, and brightly colored dangling objects. But by two, Stella began to show a genuine interest in picture books, even if this often involved ripping them to pieces. The key to success was minimal text. She was far more interested in the pictures than the words, and she loved turning the pages.
I grew up in a family of book hoarders, so Stella inherited many books from my own childhood. I waited impatiently for her to develop the attention span to hear and enjoy the picture books I remembered and loved best: Frog and Toad, Owl at Home, Tales of Oliver Pig, The Runaway Bunny, George and Martha, Caps for Sale, Where the Wild Things Are. I was ecstatic the first time Stella let me read a Frog and Toad story straight through. This series, by Arnold Lobel, is among the most beautiful and existential of modern children’s stories. The tales in Frog and Toad embrace love and frailty; they are unmarred by didacticism or sentimentality. As an adult, I realized that the two heroes are a loving same-sex couple struggling with Toad’s chronic depression, which made me like the books even more.
Stella’s favorite story from Frog and Toad was “Dragons and Giants.” In it, Frog and Toad read a book about brave people who fight dragons and giants. This makes them wonder if they are brave too. They decide to test themselves by climbing a mountain. After fleeing from many dangers—a snake, an avalanche, a hawk—they run home and hide, “just feeling very brave together.” Consolation comes from the shared experience of fear and imagination rather than the literal surmounting of fears and obstacles, as might happen in a more stereotypical children’s story. As a beleaguered adult, my favorite Frog and Toad story was “A List,” in which Toad sits up in bed and writes down his list of things to do today, starting with “Wake up.” When the wind blows away the list, Toad can’t chase it because “running after my list is not one of the things that I wrote on my list of things to do!” Without the list, Toad sits and does nothing. Frog keeps him company.
Stella and I were discovering literature, but the bright lights of TV and phones were always lurking in the background, if not in the palms of our hands. It is terribly hard for books to compete with video on demand, for children as for adults. Between streaming services, TikTok, audiobooks, iPads, video games, and voice-operated systems like Siri, anything more than basic literacy seems poised for irrelevancy. Perhaps your child is playing Montessori letter-matching games on your phone—but will she ever bother to read a novel? A trip to Stella’s day care’s book fair only reinforced my pessimism. Many of the books sold were just spin-offs of TV shows and movies. Why buy a book about Moana when you could watch the real thing? Reading to your child is promoted as an inherently educational act. But could I, a professional book critic, get behind the idea that reading anything at all was good? Don’t children, even small ones, have a right to high-quality art?
Wire Mothers
No one has ever accused Ms. Rachel of being an artist. But if her show isn’t art, and isn’t quite entertainment, what is it, exactly?
Rachel Griffin Accurso, as Ms. Rachel is known in civilian life, has worked with disabled children and considered joining the ministry before becoming a music teacher. She made her first videos as a low-cost way of sharing music education for young children; later she started making videos inspired by speech therapy to help her son, who had speech delays.
The earliest video available on Accurso’s channel, from 2019, features her looking directly at the camera, singing the song “Bubble, Bubble Pop!” in front of a digital background of the seabed. At this early date she had not yet perfected her Ms. Rachel persona. Her long-sleeved shirt is red, she has no ponytail or overalls, and her smile is relatively unforced. Her microphone isn’t very good. But the video includes all the other elements for which she became famous. As of September, it has more than eleven million views.
Covid hit a year after Accurso posted “Bubble, Bubble Pop!” Her husband, Aron Accurso, who worked as an associate music director on Broadway, was home and had plenty of time to help her with her show. Meanwhile, millions of American families also found themselves stuck indoors, with even less access to childcare than usual. This is when Ms. Rachel became a star—the rare early-childhood educator to strike it rich. She has more than sixteen million subscribers on YouTube; her videos can rack up as many as 1.5 billion views. Young children, with their nearly limitless thirst for repetition, are the ideal YouTube fans. Accurso now presides over her own media empire and is sometimes described as “Taylor Swift for toddlers.” Her 2025 Netflix show was a hit, preorders of her first picture book (another TV spin-off) set records, and the Ms. Rachel singing doll sold out, with counterfeits flooding the market. A few years ago, there was even a Ms. Rachel imitator online, complete with overalls and a headband. She couldn’t trick Ms. Rachel’s legion of fans. On TikTok, parents shared videos of children crying when they saw the imposter.
One of my friends explicitly credited Bluey with teaching her how to mother.
During the Covid pandemic, screens became both a primary means of education, which went online, and an indispensable source of childcare. Neither of these uses was new. Parents have depended on screens as babysitters ever since television sets first appeared in the home. When children can’t play outside unsupervised; when shrinking, isolated nuclear families find themselves home alone for long stretches; when one or two adults shoulder all the responsibility for supporting and maintaining a household; and when screens are ubiquitous, television and its descendants become an almost inevitable recourse. Many Americans have no guaranteed paid parental leave, and day care costs a fortune. (Commenters on videos featuring Ms. Rachel joke about owing her money for childcare.) Generations of American children have grown up in front of TV sets. A high school friend of mine once exclaimed, “Don’t talk bad about TV—TV raised me.” He is now a tenured media studies professor, living proof that massive doses of television in childhood are not incompatible with the writing of academic monographs.
In the late 1960s, awareness of the American dependence on screens spurred the development of publicly funded educational television programs like Sesame Street. If the kids were going to stare at screens for hours every day, they should learn their letters and numbers as they did so. And they should be edified artistically and emotionally. Professional musicians thronged to Sesame Street. Johnny Cash serenaded Oscar the Grouch with his song “Nasty Dan,” Smokey Robinson sang to the letter u (“‘U’ Really Got a Hold on Me”), and Little Richard performed “Rubber Duckie” while sitting in a bathtub. Fred Rogers testified in Congress about the need for funding for programs like his, which would attend to the “inner drama” of childhood rather than bombarding kids with cartoon violence. Untethered to the profit motive, PBS sponsored a golden age of children’s television. Episodes of Sesame Street were “brought to you by” a letter of the alphabet—an affirmation of its not-for-profit, ad-free ethos.
Ms. Rachel has often spoken in interviews about her childhood love for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and about revering Rogers as an adult. Part of the secret of her own success is her promise of a better kind of screen time, in the tradition of Mister Rogers or Sesame Street. Her videos are meant to be something virtuous rather than a mere source of parental relief—since the desire for relief is often seen as a form of parental failure. Rather than entertainment or “edutainment,” Ms. Rachel is marketed as an educational resource, even as speech therapy. Some of her top videos are titled “Baby Learning With Ms Rachel,” “Toddler Learning With Ms Rachel,” and even “Learn to Talk With Ms Rachel.” Accurso, who holds two advanced degrees in education, advertises the fact that she uses speech-therapy techniques in her videos. This explains some of the aspects of her show that are most off-putting for an adult viewer, or at least for me. All her videos are filmed straight on and close-up, so that you can see her tongue and lips clearly. The camera frequently zooms in on her mouth. (I know more than I would like about Ms. Rachel’s dentition.) Research has shown that high-pitched voices and drawn-out, exaggerated, overemphasized syllables of the Ms. Rachel variety can help babies learn to talk. The show is repetitive because repetition helps children learn. Ms. Rachel is evidence-based.
Parents have bought this pitch, as have some experts quoted in laudatory media coverage of Ms. Rachel. The comments on videos featuring Ms. Rachel are full of stories about children learning to talk or sign, learning new words, or learning English thanks to her. She is even credited with helping nonverbal children (for instance, children with autism) develop communication skills. In one YouTube comment, the mother of a child with Down syndrome wrote that her child said “mama” and “dada” for the first time right after watching the show. Fans look to Ms. Rachel as their savior—which may have something to do with the difficulties of getting speech therapy or any other kinds of social and medical services in the United States.
Of course, most children will start talking with or without Ms. Rachel. Unlike reading, talking is not a skill that needs to be explicitly taught; our brains are built for it. Much of the science on video learning, meanwhile, indicates that children under three—a large segment of Ms. Rachel’s target audience—do not learn well from screens, and that screen time without a parent present is least effective in helping children learn. What works best, as Ms. Rachel herself often reminds viewers, is face-to-face interaction, especially for children with speech delays and other problems that may require intervention. Rather than teaching children to speak, Ms. Rachel is mostly just giving their parents a rest and helping them not feel guilty about it. She is also initiating very young children into the flattened world of screens. Soon they will depart the adamantly tactile, three-dimensional world of babyhood, with its dangling toys that squeal when you squeeze them and eminently chewable objects. And with every hour spent in front of the TV or tablet, the world of books slips further away.
As I learned from my infectious initial encounter with Ms. Rachel, she is also initiating parents. Ms. Rachel is beloved not only for her effect on children but also because she models for inexperienced parents how to behave with an infant or toddler. An old-fashioned nanny whisks the children out of sight, accentuating the incompetence of the parents. A day care sequesters children outside the home. But Ms. Rachel is available to teach adults the songs and games that they may never have encountered as grown-ups, because American parents parent in solitude.
This is a common function of today’s children’s entertainment. Bluey, an Australian public-television cartoon about dog children and their exceptionally competent, infinitely patient, incredibly fun dog parents, is generally agreed to be the best show for young children on air today. I have often envied the imaginative resources of Bluey’s mum and dad; this is rather how I had envisioned that I would parent. The show has excellent writing, animation, and music. It is so sophisticated, in fact, that one sometimes suspects that its true target audience is not children but parents. Good children’s entertainment always caters to parents, but Bluey is an extreme example. On YouTube, many parents comment that they like to watch it even without their child. I know a father who listens to the Bluey soundtrack alone in his car. One of my friends explicitly credited the show with teaching her how to mother. This was when I started watching it with Stella. Screens become parents to us all.
On YouTube, the antithesis of Ms. Rachel is CoComelon (more than 195 million subscribers, almost twelve times Ms. Rachel’s following), an ungodly computer-generated cartoon that is the media equivalent of a liter of off-brand cola. In one of CoComelon’s versions of “Wheels on the Bus” (7.9 billion views), the eyes of the bus passengers are glazed and unseeing, and the people seem to communicate in wordless grunts. The song has an awkward, thumping, too-regular rhythm; listening feels like swallowing a metronome. Ms. Rachel, by contrast, sings the song with her husband. (She has several versions of the song; this one has more than 470 million views.) Their performance has the pleasant lilt of humanity. Many of her guest stars are talented singers and musicians, especially now that her budget and fame have skyrocketed. In comparison with CoComelon, Ms. Rachel’s simple aesthetic and patient, slow repetitions have a marked charm. Even her denim overalls start to look more appealing.
But both shows are aesthetically impoverished. This is true of most children’s television produced today and of many children’s books. Bluey is a celebrated exception that proves the rule. Even the most professional programs are sanitized, cutesy, and dead. Shows like Ms. Rachel’s, and their literary corollaries and spin-offs, access only the most superficial layer of feeling, casting away the doubt, mystery, and humor of the best children’s media. They evade the irresolvable nature of pain, danger, and loss. Doing away with all the trappings of art, they simply tell children what to do: be kind, go to bed when your parents tell you to, pee in the toilet and not in your underwear, don’t jump in the water without permission. In one episode of the popular PBS show Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, a pitiful spin-off of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the eponymous blank-faced child tiger sings tunelessly, “It’s okay to feel angry / It’s NOT, NOT, NOT okay to huuuuuuurt someone.”
Like Soviet socialist-realist novels, many children’s books and television shows advance a version of life as it ought to be, rather than as it is: all are equal, all are welcome, everyone is safe. This is mirrored by the idioms of American parenting. “We don’t hit people,” parents (including me) tell their children. But the truth is that “we” obviously do hit people sometimes—or worse.
Innocence, in a Sense
Missiles, bombed-out buildings, famine: these are subjects that most children’s media scrupulously avoid. Shows for very young children are criticized even for showing characters talking back to their parents or being mean to their siblings. But sometimes the outside world intrudes on the relentlessly cheery, sterile realm of American children’s media. Earlier this year, Ms. Rachel was tagged in an Instagram video of three young children watching her show on a tablet. Unlike most of her fans, these kids were Palestinian refugees, sitting in a tent amid the rubble in Gaza.
Accurso—whose sunny, kind persona as Ms. Rachel is much more than an act—was deeply moved. She had already worked with Save the Children and raised money to help children in conflict zones, including Gaza, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Ukraine. Now she began working with the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund. The director of that organization showed her a video of Rahaf, an exceptionally cute three-year-old with curly hair, chubby cheeks, and prosthetic legs. She had lost her limbs in an Israeli airstrike. In the video, Rahaf was trying to hop like a bunny to Ms. Rachel’s famous song.
Soon Accurso met Rahaf and her mother, a math teacher. They had made it to the United States to get medical care for Rahaf, but they’d had to leave Rahaf’s father and brothers behind. Amid the famine imposed by Israel’s blockade, Rahaf’s mother called her sons in Gaza on FaceTime and asked Accurso to talk to them. The boys were hungry. In a gruesome twist on the ascendance of the digital world, screen time remained even as the most basic means of subsistence disappeared. “Thank you for seeing our children as human,” the translator told Accurso. (A full episode featuring Rahaf is in the works for this fall, as of this writing.) The most important audience for the show will be adults: Accurso is hoping to persuade the millions of parents of her fans to see Gaza’s children as human too. One Palestinian father, meanwhile, wrote a moving essay about the comfort he and his three-year-old son felt as they watched Ms. Rachel together on a phone as bombs fell in the distance.
Accurso is now one of the most prominent American voices for the human rights of Palestinian children. “Silence wasn’t a choice for me,” she told the journalist Mehdi Hasan. In her interview with him, she wore a crucifix around her neck. As she puts it, she has “the peace of God.” Like Fred Rogers, an ordained minister who used his show to protest racism, she is a devout Christian of progressive inclinations. She says she doesn’t believe it is right to be a billionaire, and she faced intense criticism from some quarters when she included a nonbinary musician on her show. The backlash against her advocacy for Palestinian children has been much fiercer.
In April, the doxing site StopAntisemitism accused Accurso of being a mouthpiece for Hamas and demanded a government investigation. Fox News said she was “standing with Hamas.” Accurso posted a video of herself crying in the dark about the online bullying she’d suffered. But to her credit, she doubled down on her advocacy. This July, she announced that she wouldn’t work with anyone who hadn’t spoken out about Gaza. (It is unclear how this stance is compatible with her Netflix show, book series, or singing doll.) “I will always choose kindness, but I will never understand your silence,” she wrote on Instagram. “I especially can’t understand those with so much privilege—the uncancelable—who still remain in the shadows.”
Accurso’s visible sincerity and softheartedness (she often cries during interviews, whether she’s speaking about children in Gaza or remembering being bullied as a child for her high-pitched voice) and her status as a beloved children’s entertainer make her a powerful advocate for Palestine’s children. So do her simple language, her lack of rancor, and her gentle parenting–inspired method of political protest. Perhaps in an age when even adults are getting their education from children’s shows, hers is the kind of political communication that works best. And her white skin, her Christian faith, her American citizenship, her fame, and her wealth give her protections not afforded to, say, Mahmoud Khalil.
Accurso is the inverse of the world’s Célines or Hamsuns, of the brilliant artist who is also a fascist. A strong moral imagination is not equivalent to an artistic one. I deeply admire, appreciate, and respect Accurso’s activism, but I don’t like her show. (Stella still loves it.) To echo another cliché of American parenting, I want more for my child. I want art, not banal edutainment.
For me, the apotheosis of the picture book is Where the Wild Things Are, by the grouchy, ribald, childless Maurice Sendak, a man who was obsessed with William Blake and Emily Dickinson and named his dog after Herman Melville. When Where the Wild Things Are was first published in 1963, psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim denounced the book for showing a mother who loses her temper and sends her son to bed without dinner—as if mothers never lost their tempers, as if fear was not one of the most fundamental emotions for children as well as adults. Sendak brought the scary, thrilling, perverse world of fairy tales and folktales to modern picture books, adding his own sardonic, working-class-Jewish-Brooklyn twist. Rather than putting on a child’s costume, as Ms. Rachel does on her show, he drew from his own complicated and often painful childhood. He did not recognize any impassable boundary between adults and children. After all, every adult was a child once.
I love Sendak and children love him, even now, when he has to compete with YouTube. Reading Where the Wild Things Are, children sense that at last they are being told the whole truth. This excites them. And whether or not they know it (they probably don’t, but their parents might), they are at last in the presence of real literature:
And he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are.
I never tire of reading it.
Our family has a set of Sendak’s Nutshell Library books, four volumes that fit in the palm of a grown-up hand. Stella’s current favorite is Pierre: A Cautionary Tale, about a boy who shouts “I don’t care” in response to every question. Eventually he is approached by a lion:
He looked Pierre
right in the eye
and asked him
if he’d like to die.
Pierre said,
“I don’t care!”
When I first read Stella this book, I hesitated at “die.” It seemed too bald, too cruel. But death is not a secret that can be kept from children, even small ones. Sendak was haunted for his whole life by a newspaper he saw at age four. It showed a photo of the decayed corpse of the kidnapped Lindbergh baby.
Fortunately, story children are almost always immortal. This is part of the pleasure of children’s stories. When Sendak’s lion eats Pierre, he remains miraculously alive, like Jonah in the belly of the whale. A doctor shakes the lion upside down, Pierre falls out, and the family and the lion spend a happy weekend together. The moral of Pierre is, of course, “CARE!” Sendak showed how moral and artistic imagination can coexist with fierce honesty. “I refuse to lie to children,” Sendak said in a 2011 interview. “I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence.”