I don't think kids watch sesame street anymore as they used to, at least from what I have seen with my kids, it is just another tv show among many others and not that influential.
It just depends. If you dont have cable and can only receive one broadcast channel its probably PBS. If you keep the younger ones away from electronics they will watch PBS Kids and love it.
Once they get older and they get their hands on electronics they would much rather watch the seizure inducing fast cut shows on disney or nickelodeon because those shows are designed to appeal to kids instead of teaching them something.
The worst thing (IMO) though is youtube. They'll watch those horrible toy channels of parents pimping out their kids or the creepy ones where the adults pretend to be children playing with the toys. Hundreds of hours of toy commercials.
Then when they get a little older they start watching youtubers doing "challenges". And before you know it they are watching logan paul ching-chong-ping-pong his way around asia or watching fortnite on Twitch.
And at that point, your kid is ready to graduate to uninformed barely-literate ignorant citizen with no attention span and no ability to think critically.
I mean YouTube is bad but nothing can compete with the existential horror of Barney or the Teletubbies. Again again! three minute video loops to infinity
Plenty of my fave 80s cartoons were basically extended toy commercials. He-Man, Voltron...
It was interesting to watch those in eastern Europe. I knew he-man but never saw any commercial. They'd be wasted time as well, because you couldn't buy those toys anyway, so only the show itself remained.
I actually haven't learned about the toy part of those shows until my 20s.
That is fascinating. The lends of other people's experiences.
Although living in a rural area in the U.S. there were a lot of shows I was aware of but never really got to see all that much because they were on cable and having only a handful channels limited options. He-man being one of them. But it is interesting how much a kid picks up with those shows with just the most minimal amount of content.
PBS has new shows that seem pretty good, like Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood (cartoon spin-off of Mr. Rogers), Martha Speaks, Word Girl, Dinosaur Train. Others skew more toward the Nick Jr. school of shows, like Wild Krats, Curious George, etc.
Ironically it is kind of hard to find old school Sesame Street on PBS. It's not even really a PBS show anymore; its new episodes air first on HBO, which sends a shiver down my spine just to type.
We don't have cable, but basically never turn on the TV for the kids. All "TV time" for my kids starts with loading PBSKids.org or NickJr on the laptop. The content is all age-appropriate and the sites are navigable by a kid. (NickJr is way better in this regard.)
The only time my kids see YouTube is if I load up a specific video for them--then I close it. You're 100% right that it's not a safe place to let kids surf around.
YouTube is what you make of it. There is a huge amount of excellent content for kids. Two examples of channels I'll let my six year old daughter watch just about any time she asks are SciShow Kids and Cosmic Kids Yoga. There are plenty of others, but those are her current favorites.
It's definitely important to curate what kids are watching, but that's true of any medium.
This. I was born the year that the Sesame Street premiered and it was part of my morning toddler routine in the early 1970s. Watching the show with my daughter in the 1990s, I noticed Elmo's presence transmogrify from just another Muppet character to having his own segment. As his airtime expanded, that scratchy, helium-stricken voice could no longer be borne by my sensitive ears. To me, that was the death knell for Sesame Street. Kudos to Mr. Rogers for not giving Henrietta Pussycat her own segment ("Meow meow I'm da meow meow bomb meow meow").
Elmo is an interesting study in the evolution of Sesame Street for many reasons. Big Bird was created to be the avatar of the children watching, and there is an interesting generational shift around the show as Big Bird become such a symbol of the establishment that children stopped seeing themselves in Big Bird and a new "child advocate" niche opened up for Elmo to fill. For Mr. Spinney, getting a puppet into that role was an intentional design choice, and for Mr. Clash getting a puppet into that role was a lightning-in-a-bottle lucky moment in the zeitgeist shift and creative renewal of the show. Arguably the show would not have survived if it didn't showcase Elmo as it did, given whatever that generation shift was that happened.
I would hope that there are entire Anthropology and Sociology graduate theses devoted to that shift, because it is fascinating to this lay observer.
